BLUFF DALE, Texas — Smack dap between Stephenville and Granbury sits this grandiose grill on a small hill and it’s a place to get your fill.
In Bluff Dale on top of the bluff at a burger joint with some fancy burgers. We’re at Jaspers Café. John Lenz got the home fires burning on the hillside after a serendipitous trip with his horses to a local ranch.
“While we were at the clinic just two and a half miles from here, we had to drive back-and-forth to the hotel and here’s this little place perched on this hill here and we’re looking at and looking at it and it had been empty for two years,” John said. “Kinda run-down, you know. Then we took a look at it and thought ‘This is it, it’s a great opportunity, this is beautiful.’”
So John and his wife took a chance and moved from Medford, Oregon to see if they could repeat the success they had at their burger boutique in the great northwest.
“We love what Texas is, we love where it’s headed,” John said. “The culture, a church on every corner. It’s good stuff so we made a run at it, we got it.”
They’ve got some berserk burgers but here it’s all about the meat and that doesn’t necessarily mean beef.
“With the exotic meats and stuff that’s available, I think that’s where people are like, ‘Hey, I gotta go check this out,’” Mike said.
While you can always get a beefy burger here, you can always opt for something different.
“We have the New Zealand Axis deer,” John said. “We have a free range Bison, the free range Elk. We have Wild Boar, Kobe. We bring in that beautiful heartland beef. It’s a Kobe Wagyu, Texas Wagyu, we use that as well. And those are unique meats.”
John’s step son Joe prepared us for wild meat roulette. A thick patty of beautiful bison hits the burner. Next comes the blue part of the burger and it starts with parmesan. This is the Wild Blue Yonder.
“The tricky part of this burger is going to be the grill fried cheese crisp that you’re throwing on the top,” Joe said. So the way I do it is I need to get the parmesan down first. I gotta get a nice crisp on there because if I try putting blue cheese on the grill it just mushes right out.”
A separate patty made of hash browns, jalapenos, and corn known as a tumbleweed gets fried up while blue cheese hits the top of the parmesan. The toasted bun gets layered with siracha cream cheese. Green leaf lettuce, tomatoes and huckleberry onions, and we’re ready for takeoff. With untamed flavors running wild along the plains of my palate it is perfect.
Well the first thing that stands out is the flavor. As soon as you bite into it you get a little but of the spice from the sriracha, but then you get into the blue cheese which obviously overpowers a lot of things and then the more you chew, the more everything starts mixing in together, making an incredible flavor.
“First time I got one I just had a half because I’m thinking, ‘Just in case I really don’t like it,’ Teresa said. “But I just scarfed it all down.”
Well if you’re looking to take a sky high flight into the wild blue yonder right here in the Lone Star State, Jaspers in Bluff Dale is well worth a stop on the Texas Bucket List.
“These are epicurean burgers, I mean they don’t get any better than this kind of burger right here,” Mike said.