Holding Out ‘til Midnight at Fred’s Texas Cafe

Fred’s Texas Café
915 Currie St.
Fort Worth, TX




Did you ever notice how much better food tastes when you are starving?

That’s all I could think of as I devoured my Diablo Burger at Fred’s Texas Cafe.

It was a half hour before midnight on a Tuesday night. I had been in meetings, standing in TSA lines and crammed into metal tubes all day and night. Other than the shrink-wrapped donuts at the Newark Airport Best Western continental breakfast bar at 8am, I hadn’t had time for a meal all day.

Of course it could have been worse.

Thanks to the alignment of the stars and the kindness of the gods, I somehow scored a First Class upgrade on my flight from Newark to DFW.

Great. All you can drink Beck’s Beer on an empty stomach.

In case you haven’t been upgraded in the last century or so, I’ll let you in on a little secret.

You don’t get fed in First Class any more. Potato chips, peanuts, pretzels. Basically the crap the airlines USED to give you in coach.

By the time I got in my rental car and drove to Fort Worth, I desperately needed two things.

First, the get out of the suit I had been wearing for 16 straight hours. And, second, to put something in my stomach that had been growling for the same amount of time.

Unfortunately, those two objectives were in conflict.

With time rapidly approaching the witching hour, I figured I better not press my luck.

No time for checking into my hotel and changing out of my suit.

Fred’s Texas Café is a cool retro bar and burger joint in the hip up-and-coming section of “Cow Town”. But even late night hangouts like Fred’s eventually shut down the burger grill.

A tiny little dining room decorated in mounted animals and long horns, the locals downing fish bowls of beer and monstrous burgers didn’t bat an eye as I grabbed a yellow plastic booth.

When I walk into places like this in a suit, I’ve been confused as a politician, health inspector and even a preacher.

This night, I suppose I just looked like exactly what I was – a hungry, tired business traveler looking for a slab of dead cow.

Like most places in Texas, Fred’s doesn’t offer up much creativity with its beer selection. Texans like their suds pale, big and cold.

Fred’s fits the bill. Variations of the same old yellow mass produced light colored brew is poured into frosty glass fishbowls from taps under a sign that reads, “Coldass Beer”.

My waiter said they do have a local brew on tap from Rahr & Sons Brewery, but it was their summer seasonal wheat beer.

Blah. Wheat beers are for girls.

So I ordered a Lone Star draft.

When in Rome.

Lone Star is a local beer. But it’s no microbrew.

It’s the kind of beer Texans make fun of. While haughtily sipping a Coors Light long neck.

But my theory is I’ll take a bad local beer over a bad mass produced beer. Any day.

It’s the ubiquity of the Coors/Miller/Bud triumvirate that irritates me. Not the taste. I mean, they all taste about the same anyway.

At least when I’m downing a Lone Star I’m engaging in an activity I can’t do at home.

Hey, when you spend your life on the road, you’ve got to appreciate the little things.

Not that I needed any more beer on my empty stomach. But I think it is required at Fred’s.

Coldass beer. And big burgers.

That’s why folks flock to the divvy Texas charms of Fred’s Texas Café.

By the time I sunk my teeth into my drippy, juicy Diablo Burger, I was near a state of nirvana. Beer munchies combined with legitimate starvation made this one of the greatest burger eating experiences of my life.

Dripping in melted Swiss cheese, sautéed onions and pink grease, these boys in Cow Town really know how to make a great burger.

But it was the smoky, spicy chipotle peppers slathered all over the top of the meat that elevated this burger to shirt-buying levels.

The tingling of my lips from the spicy burn did nothing to slow my feeding frenzy. I must have paused occasionally to douse the flames with Lone Star because I ended up downing two fish bowls before last call.

As I polished off my final few skin-on crispy French fries and polished off the tail end of my Lone Star, I just sat there for a moment trying to appreciate the sheer joy of the occasion.

When you haven’t eaten anything in 16 hours, a midnight beer and burger binge like this is a virtual life-altering experience. It’s what makes being a Suit in Strange Places so much fun.

I feel sorry for some of the folks I know who have to be constantly eating. One friend told me he doesn’t even know what it feels like to be hungry.

That’s sad.

Thanks to my Suit757 schedule, I don’t enjoy that option. I eat when I can. That means long stretches of stomach growling.

And I’m okay with that. There’s nothing wrong with a little self-deprivation.

Especially when the reward at the end of the day is a big juicy Diablo Burger and fish bowl of Lone Star.

Yeah. I can hold out all day for that.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!

Brisket…Deep in the Heart of Texas

Angelo’s
2533 White Settlement Rd.
Fort Worth, TX





One of my many Suit757 services I like to provide is letting you know which cool cities are worth visiting and which congestion-choked sprawling hellholes to avoid.

It’s one of the benefits of having been everywhere.

There is no better dichotomy of the two options than the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex.

Dallas is typical 20th Century suburban hell devoid of character, charm or attractions of any sort. It has no soul. No sense of place.

Deep in the heart of Texas? Think again.

If you were blindfolded and dropped into the middle of I-635 congestion near the Galleria, you could easily think you were in Atlanta, Houston or Cleveland.

Other than a few smoking hot Texas beauties prancing around with $75 worth of make-up on, you’d have no way of knowing you were even in the great nation of Texas.

I mean, Atlanta’s got plenty of them too.

(Cleveland? Not so much.)

Bottom line: Dallas is just another big modern city of cul-de-sacs, strip malls and 14 lanes of idling SUVs on the interstate.

Once you’ve hit the Texas School Book Depository (the scene of Lyndon Johnson’s crime) and Sonny Bryan’s, you’ve pretty much seen it all.

Fort Worth, on the other hand, is everything Dallas isn’t.

Real. Laid back. Accessible. Historic.

And Texas to the core.

When you cruise into old “Cow Town” you can’t help but notice the freight trains hauling cargo, grain elevators rivaling the gleaming downtown skyscrapers and cowboys with genuine Texas red dirt on their boots.

No question, Fort Worth was -- and is -- a Texas city full of Texans doing Texas-type stuff.

And I think that’s cool.

Way cooler than watching minivan-driving relocated Yankee soccer moms jockeying for parking spots in the Galleria garage.

And no place personifies Fort Worth’s genuine “Cow Town” heritage better than Angelo’s, by far the best barbeque joint in the entire sprawling Metroplex.

At lunch time the parking lot is packed with pick ups and the line snakes right out the door, well past the Angelo’s T-shirt-wearing bear that has greeted Angelo’s customers for years.

But the bear is just the beginning of the dead animal displays. The dining room is lined with a rouges’ gallery of every conceivable form of game high above the hordes of happy customers.

Happy that is unless you happen to be a very, very lost vegetarian.

The aroma of slowly melting cow fat over mesquite wood permeates the sprawling dining complex.

When you finally get to the front of the line, tell the rough-looking Texan with the large knife what kind of dead smoked animal you want on your plate. No small talk.

Folks don’t come here for friendly customer service. If you want that, go to Chick-fil-a.

After all, barbeque is serious business here in Texas.

And when in “Cow Town”, the dead animal you want is, well, cow. As in brisket and beefy Texas hot links.

The deadly serious knife wielding guy slapped a charred hunk of beef on the butcher table and slid his gleaming weapon through the meat like butter.

That’s because the brisket IS like butter.

Chop. Chop. Chop. The thin slices of beef just slump off the carcass before being scooped up onto my serving plate.

Smoky, beefy, fatty slices of the some of the best brisket Texas has to offer. Utensils are completely superfluous. Deodorant in a tent full of “Wall Street occupiers” would get more use.

The hot links are just a bit firmer with a nice spice kick.

In many parts of Texas, sauce is as frowned upon as forks. With meat this smoky, moist and tender, why bother?

But if you skip sauce at Angelo’s you will be missing out on some of the best in Texas.

Thin, but sweet with a touch of tangy zip, the sauce compliments the meat because it doesn’t coat, cover or cling to it. It just kind of flows right over it, leaving behind just the right flavor to bring out the smoky goodness in the slow cooked beef.

I’m a big believer in “when in Rome” dining, but I just couldn’t resist the temptation to deviate a bit from dead cow to sample one of Angelo’s pork ribs.

I’m damn glad I did.

Forget all that mass marketing hogwash about “fall off the bone” meat you see in the national chain advertisements. True slow cooked, barbequed ribs are tooth-tender. But not “fall off the bone”.

“Fall off the bone” means boiled ribs.

Folks, no Texan worth his Justin Boots would be caught dead boiling ribs. Certainly not at Angelo’s.

Nosiree.

These ribs are slow cooked over hard wood and infused with a salty, earthy dry rub that permeates the tender meat. So tender your teeth sink right in.

If you want your meat (and flavor) boiled off the bone, there are dozens of Chili’s and Golden Corals on the other end of the Metroplex to choose from. You can stand in line, beeper in hand, waiting with the other relocated Yankee suburban dwellers.

Me? I’ll take the real deal.

Ice cold Shiner Bock long neck in hand, you’ll find Suit757 in old “Cow Town”, deep in the heart of REAL Texas.

Rating: Bought the Shirt!

Chowing Down In Cowtown

H3 Ranch
109 East Exchange Ave.
Fort Worth, TX



If you were ever going to find a place that has a good way with a slab of meat, you’ve got to figure it would be in the old Fort Worth stockyards.

Where rough and tumble authentic cowboys under the blazing Texas sun would drive cattle up from the Rio Grande Valley along the Chisholm Trail. No showers, no beds, no booze, no, um, entertainment, for weeks at a time. These boys rode into old “Cowtown” dirty, hot, sweaty, thirsty – and hungry.

Among other things.

That’s why in addition to acres of cattle pens, the streets of the stockyards were lined with good places to sit a spell and down cold beer, strong whiskey and giant slabs of beef.

And as one tourist guide politely calls it, “find felicitous companionship.”

It gets lonely out there on that dusty trail, you know.

Of course thanks to refrigerated rail cars, Conagra and nitrates, the old stockyards and sweaty cowboys who prowled “Hell’s Half Acre” are long gone. After all, everyone knows ground beef doesn’t come from cows any more.

It comes from Wal-Mart.

It’s mostly tourists now who roam East Exchange Street in the 102 degree noonday sun in search of a good juicy burger and ice cold long necks.

A century old building like Pearl’s Brothel is now “Pearl’s Dancehall.”

The biggest cattle pen in the stockyards is now “Billy Bob’s Texas”, the “World’s Largest Honkytonk,” scene of one of the greatest nights of Suit757’s life (a story for another blog). Dozens of bars, multiple concert stages, a live bull riding ring, all under one roof, Billy Bob’s is like Disney World for rednecks – 6,000 of them at a time.

There’s even a fake “cattle drive” staged twice a day as “cowboys” parade a small herd of longhorns around the Stockyards in a big circle while the tourists drink beer and snap pictures.

Sure, the Fort Worth Stockyards are touristy, but a good time can definitely be had here if you know where to look.

Somewhat paradoxically, the best place to eat in the Stockyards is located in the most prominent building in the district, the old Stockyards Hotel right in the middle of the action at the corner of East Exchange Street and North Main Street.

The H3 Ranch and Booger Red’s Saloon just off the hotel lobby serve up a good selection of local longnecks and great fire-grilled meat to city slickers precariously perched on the saddle-shaped bar stools.

My excellent waitress recommended the Fort Worth-brewed Rahr and Sons Stormcloud, a local IPA. She said she knows the Rahr family whose brewing roots stretch back generations to barley growers in Germany.

Good microbrews can be hard to find in Texas, so I appreciated the excellent suggestion.

The most prominent feature of H3 is the giant grill on which all the meat is cooked in full view of the main dining room. These boys know how to marry flame and meat to create a match made in heaven.

Any doubts about this place being a tourist trap disappeared after my first bite of my rib appetizer. Juicy, tender, smoky and just kissed with a touch of sweet sauce seared onto the outside of the meat, you will never have better ribs anywhere. Ever.

They were so good I immediately regretted my decision to order a burger for lunch. I know I’m in the stockyards, but forget the beef. Next time I’m just ordering the ribs!

Don’t get me wrong, the burger wasn’t bad. Maybe not as thick and juicy as I had hoped, but definitely above average. It was piled high with top notch, extra thick bacon, a pile of shredded unmelted cheddar cheese and generous slathering of Thousand Island dressing.

The bacon, cheese, Thousand Island portion of the burger was thicker than the beef itself, somewhat overwhelming the flavor of the burger.

But hey, if you’ve been paying attention to this blog, you know I’m never going to complain about too much bacon. The ratio was just a little off.

The beans on the side were four star, loaded with even more – you guessed it – bacon!

As a sausage connoisseur, I just couldn’t resist the urge to try H3’s smoked sausage link on the side. It came in a black iron skillet sizzling off the fire. This sausage was juicy and peppery – top notch.

As I pushed back from the sturdy wooden table to give my expanded stomach an extra couple inches of digesting room, I couldn’t help but think back to those wild and wooly cowboy days and feel just a little sorry for those good old boys pulling into the Stockyards after hundreds of miles of hard riding.

I know that first splash of an ice cold Lone Star on the back of a parched throat is heaven-sent. And I’m sure Pearl and her gals up the hill made them feel right at home (for the right price).

But there is no way you are going to get me to believe they could find a meal this good.

Come to think of it, sometimes being a tourist isn’t so bad after all.

Rating: Seriously Thought About Buying Shirt.