NY Food Truck Lunch: The Texan Burger From Frites 'N' Meats
Perry, the voice behind New York Street Food, brings you his latest review on New York City food trucks. This week is "Burger Week" on CBS New York. We're featuring a new street food burger each day.
So far this week for Burger Week, we've had a Peruvian "poor man's" burger from Morocho, and a healthy turkey burger from Molly's Milk Truck.
For the 3rd installment of Burger Week, we decided to go with an All-American burger: The Texan from Frites 'N' Meats.
The Texan is an outgrowth of their work with Maker's Mark bourbon. Frites 'N' Meats created a BBQ sauce that uses Maker's Mark bourbon to flavor it, and they came up with a tasty combination burger in the process.
More: NYC's 8 Best BBQ Restaurants
The Texan from Frites 'N' Meats costs $9.50, which isn't cheap for a burger - but once you see the list of ingredients, you understand the price tag. The Texan is made with an Angus beef patty with provolone cheese, lightly battered onions, applewood smoked bacon and their Maker's Mark bourbon BBQ sauce.
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One of the things we love about Frites 'N' Meats is how they locally source all the main ingredients. The meat comes from DeBragga, the bread comes from Balthazar Bakery and the cheese comes from Murray's. Can't get much better - or local - than that.
Taking the first bite, the bourbon in the BBQ sauce was apparent right away. It wasn't too strong to overpower the sauce or burger, but it did add a little bit of a kick.
More: NYC's 5 Best BBQ Lunches
The burger was cooked to medium rare, with a little pink in the middle. The flame-grilled flavor of the burger came through great. A burger cooked on flat-top grills just can't compete with a flame-grilled burger.
There were two large pieces of bacon on the burger, plus plenty of onions. The batter came off some of the onions, but it didn't matter because the batter was still on the burger. Either way I got the crunchiness and the onion taste.
More: NYC's 4 Best Bacon Cocktails
Moving on to the bun, it was excellent. You get a choice of three different types of buns - brioche, potato-onion or sesame seed. I forgot to specify, but was very happy with the sesame seed bun. It was soft and eggy, and stood up to all the fixings inside.
The only thing I wasn't crazy about on The Texan was the cheese selection. It's not that I don't like provolone, but with all these other strong flavors, you need a stronger cheese. I would have preferred a sharp cheddar, but if they want to stick with a southwestern theme, pepper jack cheese would have been a good option too.
The other thing I like about Frites 'N' Meats is they give you a Dum Dum lollipop in each order as a little thank you gift. Sometimes it's the little things that make a difference.
Frites 'N' Meats hits different neighborhoods for lunch, and sometimes they serve dinner in Tribeca. You can find Frites 'N' Meats on Twitter here or on our Mobile Munchies Twitter feed.
By the way, their double-fried Belgian frites are delicious too - nice and hot and crispy, just how I like them.
