Happy Grillmore is a restaurant out of a daydream. A marvelous daydream, one fully realized by Darren McGill, a DJ-turned-restaurateur, and his wife Kryse. The restaurant looks like something dreamed up after watching a music video, dense with allusions to hip-hop culture. Arty chandeliers, mod décor, walls and chairs painted graffiti-blue. Hip-hop music pulses through the speakers. Those touches create a relaxed haven for diners, who sit beneath the thoughtful gazes of rappers Kendrick Lamar and ASAP Rocky—not the men but shimmering portraits of them, which adorn the walls.
More tricked out than the shop is the food. You have no doubt tasted burgers and fries but not burgers and fries like these. Here’s one outrageous example: Kalua pork fries. Perfectly crisp thick-cut fries, crunchy, light as air, salted perfectly. This is smothered in kalua pork, carrying an air of smoke. Then comes warm oozy cheese and snips of chives, just because. Happy Grillmore also makes a burger brushed with teriyaki glaze and smothered with the same salty, luscious pulled pork.
If you’re a native to the Pacific Northwest, you know that Happy Grillmore makes one of Seattle’s (and formerly Portland’s) most celebrated burgers. People keep stumbling over themselves to eat there. The restaurant has twice won Eater’s reader’s choice awards—first in Portland, then in Seattle a few years later.
While the flavors alone might be enough to draw our attention, there’s something excitingly punk about the restaurant’s story. Because let’s clear the air first. That Happy Grillmore exists at all is improbable. The McGills started the operation in 2010, with no experience, no business plan, and in Portland of all places, a food mecca.
Long before Happy Grillmore was a restaurant concept, Darren McGill was working at the AT&T. He had been doing that for about a decade and grew tired of sleepwalking through a corporate gig he disliked. He wished to change that. His instinct was to cook.
In those days he often walked to Portland’s downtown block of food carts for lunch. There he noticed the offerings were lean and not always tasty. “There were some good ones,” he told me. “But most of them weren’t that good.” There were certain flavors that he loved—that he and his wife cooked at home. Superfans of food, the couple often huddled over the stove before supper. If they were hankering for a little something, they fried up some burgers, maybe heaped a tangled mess of kalua pork on top.
“In Portland we had access to really good bread and meat,” Darren said of that time. “I would just make a lot of burgers at home. We would just have burgers for dinner. The kids liked burgers, my wife liked burgers, and so I would just think about all of that stuff at home.”
The glowing dishes concocted in their kitchen represented flavors that Darren and Kryse McGill loved but could not find elsewhere in Portland. It was this observation that led Darren to convince his wife to start a business together. They settled on opening a food cart.
They created their menu based on their own cravings: chicken adobo and kalua pork, a burger made legendary by roasted red-pepper aioli. “For the most part we just put out what we want to put out,” Darren McGill said about the Happy Grillmore menu. “And people seem to like it. We don’t do a whole lot of research. We just make food that we want to eat. And I think it just translates to everyone else [liking it].”
Nearly a decade after Happy Grillmore’s humble beginnings, the husband and wife team have two brick-and-mortar restaurants and an ice cream parlor in Seattle. Their restaurant Happy Grillmore has attracted big clients, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Their kitchen caters for these giants like it’s no biggie. The Top Chef film crew had apparently heard about Happy Grillmore’s burgers through word of mouth and ordered catering while shooting Season 10 in Seattle, the season that declared a grinning Kristen Kish the winner.
A large measure of Happy Grillmore’s success is probably derived not from one particular dish but many. Both their “Chubs” and “Happy” burgers—made with premium angus beef and toasted ciabatta—have a following. The burger called “Longsilog” is big, unpretentious, and flavorful. The burger squeezes in rich Filipino breakfast sausage that’ll punch you with garlic and vinegar. For dessert, the dark chocolate sea-salt pie is one that stands out. It’s a flaky, rectangular, deep-fried hand pie—so delicate from bathing in the fryer—so warm and chocolaty and good—that you’ll forgive yourself for the mess.
Hungry for Chubs burger?
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