A serious change has come to certainly one of Houston’s most well-regarded burger eating places, however the homeowners guarantee followers that the restaurant they love will keep (principally) the identical.
Burger Chan homeowners Diane and Willet Feng inform CultureMap that they’ve partnered with chef Ryan Stewart and his Silver Linings Hospitality firm to take over day-to-day operations of the restaurant. Stewart, a local of South Africa who beforehand served as a chef and companion of shuttered South African restaurant Peli Peli, has spent 5 months studying the restaurant’s operations to arrange for the switchover.
First opened as Kuma Burger in 2016, Burger Chan opened its present location close to the Galleria in 2022. Chef Willet Feng brings his effective eating background to the restaurant’s burgers, which get an umami enhance from a tare glaze on the patties. The build-your-own format permits diners to create their good combo from two patty sizes, 4 buns, three cheese, and greater than a dozen greens and sauces, together with favorites like charred jalapenos, sambal mayo, and scallion aioli. In a 2023 clip that’s been seen greater than 300,000 instances, YouTube meals vacationer Mike Chen created a burger topped with 17 substances.
Burger Chan gives a variety of toppings.
Picture by Terence Tang
However all the acclaim has include a draw back. Willet Feng explains that the restaurant has struggled to discover a roster of staff who can carry out to his admittedly excessive requirements.
“It’s by no means been extra tiring. You’re profitable, then you will have individuals name out,” he says. “That’s much more stress and work for everybody who reveals up. Because the homeowners, a lot of the additional work will get dumped on us.”
Feng thinks that Stewart, who has expertise working a number of areas, will be capable to implement methods that permit Burger Chan to take care of its prime quality whereas using staff who would possibly wrestle to duplicate the chef’s actual methodology for completely slicing tomatoes by hand.
“What makes this partnership is that I’ve labored perpetually in kitchens like Oxheart the place a whole lot of issues are completed manually. It doesn’t matter how lengthy it takes or how painful it’s. That’s not scalable,” Feng says.
“What Ryan and his workforce can do is that they have methods. They’ve methods of coaching those who I can’t do trigger I get actually f—ing mad, or they supply instruments so individuals f— up much less,” he provides.
The place Feng sees frustration, Stewart sees alternative. He says he took a couple of 12 months away from the restaurant enterprise after Peli Peli (then working as Mozambik) closed. A number of visits to Burger Chan sparked his curiosity in returning to restaurant life.
“I got here to Burger Chan and fell in love with the flavors. I believed it was an incredible alternative to assist broaden it,” he says.
Stewart plans to start out small by including Monday lunch service and Burger Chan’s first dinner hours on Fridays and Saturdays. Subsequent up is including weeknight dinner service. If all the pieces goes easily, Silver Linings would start in search of a second location.
“I’ve been right here for 5 months and seen who’s the following [person on the current staff] to step up and run their very own location,” Stewart says. “We by no means wish to lose that loving feeling, that high quality. The second we wish to open fairly shortly. It could be our prep kitchen to make issues simpler to manage.”
As Diane Feng notes, she and Willet aren’t strolling away from the restaurant. They’ll nonetheless be concerned however not the day by day presence they’ve been. Over the previous month, they’ve been much less current bodily to permit Stewart and his workforce the chance to learn to function the restaurant on their very own, however Feng guarantees diners will nonetheless see her on the restaurant.
“I get pleasure from my interactions with our clients. I wish to guarantee that everyone seems to be taken care of,” she says.
“We’ve been fairly hands-off for over a month now,” Willet provides. “I don’t assume individuals have observed from a top quality perspective. We go in to test and enhance issues.”
Taking a step again from day-to-day involvement in Burger Chan frees up the Fengs to commit extra time to Borrowed Items, the Singaporean-inspired pop-up sequence they launched in March. Subsequent up is dinner service on April 27 at Narwhal Jousting Membership, the ghost kitchen owned by Ninja Ramen’s Christopher Huang.
“It would most probably keep as a pop-up for a extremely very long time,” Willet Feng says. “Having simply gotten out of the duties of 1 brick and mortar, we’re not dying to leap into one other one. There isn’t a timeline. It may very well be years. We don’t know.”
