Ricky Craig bursts out of the swinging kitchen door at the Hubcap Grill with his hair standing straight up on his head, as if he has slept on it wrong. The lanky owner of the peerless downtown hamburger joint looks a little wild-eyed, and he’s talking a mile a minute, a man obsessed.
“Four hours of sleep,” he confides breathlessly to a customer. He sounds both rueful and proud.
It has been like this ever since Craig launched his new burger truck a couple of weeks ago. Shiny and red, the burger-mobile parks at Liberty Station Bar, 2101 Washington, a block east of Catalina Coffee. After it closes around 9 p.m., the truck must be cleaned and taken to the city’s central commissary and back for more cleaning still. Then it’s grab a few winks before showing up at Craig’s little slot of a shop on Prairie Street for another day of making the best burgers in town.
Make that the best burgers in the state — which, given our glorious Texas burger traditions, means some of the best burgers in the land.
Don’t believe me? Shoehorn yourself into Hubcap for one of Craig’s Philly Cheesesteak Burgers, a baroque specialty involving 1⁄3 of a pound of fresh ground chuck on a springy house-baked bun, piled to the rafters with onions and green peppers caramelized to a bronzy shine and crowned with an oozy cap of ribeye shards and Swiss cheese.
It sounds a mess and tastes improbably wonderful, thanks in no small part to the loose, juicy quality of the never-frozen beef in its thick hand-formed patty. A forceful sear on the meat holds the drippage in until you bite — and then it’s watch out and pass the paper towels, rolls of which are stationed on each tabletop.
I’m a burger purist, who under most circumstances looks down her nose at embellishments, especially of the meat-upon-meat variety. To my mind they muck up the beauties of a well-made basic burger, which in Texas comes with optional cheese and the regulation lettuce, tomato, onion, mustard and pickles. Mayonnaise goes on mine, sometimes a jolt of Tabasco, but your mileage may vary. So much do I crave the flavor profile of the classic Texas burger that I don’t even go the bacon route.
But Hubcap’s theme burgers make me park my rules at the burglar-proof door. Perhaps it’s Craig’s pinkish mayo-based secret sauce, frisking with oregano, that binds the disparate edges of the Philly Cheesesteak burger; or the way the house-made bun, its distinctive spongy texture like a smoother-grained ciabatta, that smooths out all the bits and pieces, containing the sandwich without dominating it.
Whatever the engine, the kaleidoscopic details click into a dazzling whole. That’s obsession for you. As much as I love Craig’s basic cheeseburger, I find myself craving his more outrageous sallies. The Greek Burger, for instance, with its briny hit of feta cheese and kalamata olive setting off fresh green pepper, raw onion and red tomato. It’s like eating a Greek salad married to a burger, and it’s genius.
Craig is a gifted enough chef to bring off these notions. Until he set off on his exacting burger quest, he ran downtown’s homespun Italian red-sauce lunch spot, Craiganale’s, where the tomato gravy and olive salad were righteous indeed. Now he’s transferred his muffaletta-making skills to a burger equivalent that’s pure garlicky Gulf Coast fun, sandwiched in a bun New Orleanians could love.
And his fresh-cut french fries: Well don’t even get Craig started talking about them, because they’ll lose their hot-from-the-fryer magic while he details the vicissitudes of potato sourcing, bemoans the quality of summer potatoes and waxes eloquent about his double-frying technique.
This double process is what makes the fries here so good, with their natural earthy potato slickness set off by exteriors that are crisp and well browned, with a few glazed or softer surfaces to vary the eating. I like these fries so much I seldom bother with ketchup – although I have been known to sop up beef drippage and stray kalamata juices with them, which may be their highest and best use.
Hubcap serves sweet-potato fries, too, and they are fine ones, their surfaces slightly blistered where the natural sugars hit the fat. But it’s hard for me to tear myself away from the regular fries. There are so many mediocre ones under the sun that I take advantage of the all-too-rare exceptions.
Being a Hubcap fan requires some dedication. The four hours of operation are all too brief and crowded, so I’ve learned to show up at 11 a.m. or 1:30 p.m., when the line clears out and seats open up. It’s really too hot in August to dine in the adjacent breezeway with its whirring fans, although in nicer weather that doubles the seating.
The new truck on Washington Avenue? It’s an option for basic burgers and terrific little sliders, all oozy with cheese sauce and deeply caramelized onion. No fries, alas, and none of the old-fashioned bottled sodas (including Stewart’s and A&W root beers) that add charm to the downtown bill of fare.
Craig says he’ll start serving one specialty burger per week from the truck, but for now you’ll have to hit Prairie Street for his latest burger tangents. I missed the brief window when he was serving a pimento cheese burger, to my sorrow; but recently I got a taste of the so-called Sticky Burger, and I must admit it tasted better than a burger melded together with chunky peanut butter and American cheese has any right to.
Lately Craig has taken off on a snack-food-chip jag, offering a Frito Pie Burger and a cheese-sauced Cheeto Burger that have occasioned much chirping in the Houston Twitterverse. (Craig uses the microblogging site very effectively to promote his daily specials and ideas of the moment.) I have no desire to encounter Fritos and Cheetos on my burgers – not even a perverse one – but I’m betting if anyone could carry it off, it’s this guy.
Craig’s road to burger glory has not been smooth. A more ambitious version of his former Craiganale’s deli foundered in an ill-starred Midtown location in recent years. So did a satellite branch of Hubcap on an obscure stretch of South Main. He’s had a string of break-ins downtown, including a handful of petty thefts, one professional job in which an ATM was unbolted from the floor and hauled away, and a mysterious incident in which persons unknown trashed the place, stuffing paper towels up the plumbing, turning his grill sky-high, and leaving it to blast away.
But with the Hubcap Burger Truck up and running, the food better than ever downtown, and Craig’s inventive brain going full tilt, I’m betting on a happy ending.
The first time I sank my teeth into a Hubcap cheeseburger, back in the dark days immediately following Hurricane Ike, when the scent of grilling beef and fat made life seem worth living again, I found myself thinking that maybe this was what Ricky Craig was born to do.
I’m so sure of it I’m giving Hubcap Grill three stars. It’s the first time I’ve put a workaday place — some might even call it a dive — in a category reserved for the very best restaurants in the city. I’m hoping it won’t be the last.
dine.features@chron.com
