Hailing from Austin, Texas, The Point’s quirky burger bar offers fresh, grass-fed, hormone-free hamburgers and an array of craft beers
Some things make less sense when you explain them. This includes translations of colloquial expressions, most jokes, and the name of a restaurant in El Segundo that everybody thinks is a typo the first time they read it.
Like everybody else I know, I thought the new beer-and-burger place that opened in The Point was named Hopdaddy. When I arrived at the restaurant I found that it’s the word hop, as in the beer ingredient, combined with “doddy,” an archaic term for a hornless cow. It makes you wonder if the founder of the company was one of those people who likes to learn arcane words so they can use them in scrabble, or worse, in everyday conversation.
Odd though it may be, Hopdoddy made a name for themselves as a burger bar in Austin, Texas, and has branched out with nine other locations. This doesn’t mean they serve the stereotypes of Texas food, giant portions of meat and tex-mex chow – the featured items here are sophisticated, modern burgers using boutique meats. Austin is the most cosmopolitan place in Texas, with a self-consciously weird local culture, a factor that may explain the name too.
The ordering style here is unusual and seems to vary depending on how busy the place is – you may be given a “table ticket” as you arrive, which I assume is a mechanism to let the management keep track of service needs. At other times you are assigned a table at the register, and some people report wandering around to find their own. However that works, you stand in line to order and pay for your food and drinks, though you can apparently order additional drinks from your table without getting in line again. (This wasn’t explained, but I saw someone do it.) Inside and patio seating are available, and I recommend inside if there is even a moderate breeze, because the architecture of this development intensifies the wind down this corridor. A manager told me this will be fixed soon, and when it is this area will be pleasant.
Hopdoddy only serves four things: variations on burgers, salads, fries, and bowls of red or green chili. That understates the choices, because the burgers can be made with bison, chicken, lamb, turkey, tuna, veggie, or three kinds of beef, all of which are ground in-house. The menu doesn’t do anything to make your choice easier, since there is no flavor guide to the difference between grass-fed, angus, or akaushi beef. It’s a fair bet you don’t know what akaushi beef is – I didn’t, and I write about food for a living. Beef obsessives will find kindred souls here, because one of Hopdoddy’s selling points are that their meat is fresh, hormone and antibiotic free, and ground daily. It’s an attitude that extends to other ingredients like the fresh-baked buns, and makes them stand out among burger joints.
The menu also lists some things as “extras” without saying how much you’re charged for them, so even if you read carefully you’re not likely to know what you want or how much it will cost when you get to the counter. A little more information at the beginning of the process would speed up ordering a lot.
On my first visit I ordered a “K-Town Belly Burger” made with grass-fed beef, pork belly, kimchi, gochujang sauce, mayonnaise, and basil leaves. Grass-fed beef has a more pronounced, meatier flavor but can be tougher – it’s more naturally raised, hence less predictable. Making it into burgers gets rid of the texture problem while maintaining the flavor, so that’s a win. It needs lots of flavor to compete with the pork belly braised in a mildly spicy sauce, kimchi and the red pepper bean paste, and in general the idea was sound. If I ordered this again I’d ask them to drop the mayo or leave it on the side, as it added nothing but rich moisture to an already sloppy burger.
My companion selected the Terlingua burger, which has a name that promises great things. Terlingua is famous for a chili cookoff, and if a Texas restaurant names a burger after that town they’re making a bold claim. There is just a dab of chili on this burger, and it’s pretty good though unexpectedly mild – we both expected more red pepper heat. In fact we could have happily ditched the bun and gotten this angus beef patty topped with a bowl of that red chili, but they don’t offer chili size here. The Terlingua burger comes with Tillamook cheddar and Fritos inside, which makes it into a Texas Frito pie reimagined as a sandwich. If you haven’t had a Frito pie, the list of ingredients tells you what to expect – a high-carb orgy of rich flavors with funky crunchy corn bits. (Someone should market a snack called Funky Crunchy Corn Bits, or perhaps rename Fritos.) If you’ve had a Frito pie and liked it you’ll love this, and if you haven’t this will tell you whether to try one.
On that visit we ordered a side of fries, and they arrived at our table well before the burgers they were supposed to accompany. This often happens with this style of ordering – since you don’t have a server who knows your order and is watching to see that it comes up at once, kitchen timing can be erratic. The fries here are fresh cut and first rate, though slightly oversalted, and they arrived with the burger on our next visit. They serve truffle fries here too, and while I didn’t get them the people at the table next to me thought they were marvelous and wolfed them down.
On my next visit I decided to start with a Caesar salad, and made sure the person at the counter knew that I wanted it to arrive before the burger and fries. It was an oddity among Caesars because seasoned deep-fried garbanzo beans are used instead of croutons, which is a pretty brilliant idea. (It also has carrot shavings, tomato, and potato crisps, which any purist would say don’t belong in a Caesar, but the purists stopped reading when I mentioned the garbanzo beans.) The salad was very good, the plating wasn’t – like the burgers, it was served on a baking pan covered with paper. The paper became soggy from the dressing and tore when pricked by the fork while I was chasing garbanzo beans around a flat surface, so I almost ate some of it. Perhaps serving everything on a tray is part of the branding here, but it should be rethought in this case.
I ordered the “Primetime” burger on this trip because I wanted to try their “akaushi” beef, which is another word for the red wagyu cow that also produces Kobe beef. Wagyu beef is healthier than normal beef and is tender and rich, sometimes too much so – in the hands of an inept chef it can be like eating a stick of butter. They know what they’re doing here – the patty had an intense umami unlike any burger I’ve had before, but it wasn’t overwhelming. The Primetime burger comes with brie cheese, arugula, caramelized onions, truffle aioli, and steak sauce, and like the other items I had here it was more complex than it needed to be – when you have a patty that tastes that good and is that rich you don’t need brie on it. I’d definitely order this again and ask for the aioli and brie on the side so I could have some bites with, some without.
Hopdoddy has a wide drink selection including handmade milkshakes, cocktails and boutique beers, wines, and some craft soft drinks along with the usual ones. The adults and kids all can wash down their meals with something worth drinking, and I applaud the effort.
My final thoughts on Hopdoddy? Their slogan is “The Most Overthought Burgers In The World,” and they may have been more accurate then they realized. There are excellent and interesting flavors in their burgers, but you may be happier if you get some ingredients on the side and experiment with combinations. Be patient with the odd service system – they’re a new place and may be tinkering with it – and you can have a fine time and an interesting meal.
Hopdoddy is at 830 South Sepulveda Boulevard in the Point development. Open daily at 11 a.m., close 10 P.M. Sun-Thu, 11 p.m. Fr-Sa. Some vegetarian items, wheelchair access good, patio dining, full bar. Partial menu at hopdoddy.com, phone 310-414-2337. ER
