A love letter to Houston’s burger

As a restaurant critic, I have eaten a lot of great burgers around the world, but the Houston’s burger is something special

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A love letter to Houston's burger
In a world of never-ending change, the sky-high Houston’s cheeseburger has stayed comfortingly the same.

Photograph courtesy of Houston’s

My mother was never very into food. “I eat to live; I don’t live to eat,” she’d say, with a flip of her long blond hair. Cooking wasn’t her thing, but she always took us to the best restaurants. One of our mainstays was Houston’s, primarily the location off West Paces Ferry Road, but sometimes the one on Lenox, which closed in 2018. I always ordered a cheeseburger, one of my favorite burgers in Atlanta.

Houston’s opened shortly after we moved to Atlanta for my dad’s job at Coca-Cola. My mom quickly added it to our rotation, along with PoFolks and Umezono Japanese Restaurant on Cobb Parkway, folding in the restaurants on Buford Highway as that culinary nirvana grew and grew. But Houston’s was closest to our house, and our ballet class was in the same shopping center, so we ended up there a lot. Back then, the prices were much lower, and the restaurant looked subtly different. It was also first come, first served—another thing of the past. My sister ordered the chicken tenders, or sometimes the loaded baked potato soup. But I rarely deviated from my order of a cheeseburger.

Andrew Knowlton, the former deputy editor of Bon Appétit, who was raised in Atlanta, called it “one of the best cheeseburgers on the planet” in his 2016 ode to the Hillstone Restaurant Group. As a restaurant critic, I have eaten a lot of great burgers around the world, but the Houston’s burger is something special.

This burger is a proper restaurant burger. What do I mean by that? It is a thick, juicy single patty in a burger landscape cluttered with skinny doubles. The burger is towering, and so enormous that they slice it in half for you in the kitchen to make it easier to eat and spear both halves with picks to keep them in place. The patty is made from chuck and brisket, ground in-house daily, and the sesame-crusted buns are baked fresh every morning. They gently swipe the restaurant’s hickory barbecue sauce on the toasted bun’s base, adding sweetness. It’s countered by bright mustard, an abundance of shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped raw white onion, melted cheddar cheese, a slice of tomato, and thick pickle slices. Houston’s shoestring fries, which have gone through many incarnations and portion sizes over the years, accompany each burger and never fail to satisfy. They’re dry, crisp, and even better with the proprietary seasoning salt they bring to the table in a shaker.
People complain Houston’s is expensive, and it is. The burger, at $20, is no exception.

There are other unpleasantries: Getting a table to eat the burger is a pain unless you make a reservation on the website, and now that there is a strict dress code, I can’t just stop by with my kid in their soccer uniform, as my mom did with us. In 2017, the rapper T.I. led a boycott of Houston’s Lenox Road location after diners accused the restaurant of racially biased enforcement of its seating policies; it closed soon after, though T.I. had already called off the boycott, citing “tough but productive discussions.” As with any love story that lasts a few decades, I don’t see my beloved through rose-colored glasses.

Still, I go back because it is my comfort food place, a restaurant where I celebrate small wins or steal away for lunch at the bar with my husband or a friend. The burger is always there for me. I often joke to friends that it is my emotional support burger, but I’ll be damned if I don’t feel the dark clouds lift at first bite.

This article appears in our October 2024 issue.

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