Burger Friday: Narwhal Jousting Club

Sorry, Cantina Barba.

You'd slipped the last time I ordered your cheeseburger, and now I've got a new Houston fave in the affordable category. It's the gutsy number at the Narwhal Jousting Club, a marine-blue cottage in Rice Military.

The aesthetic at this puckishly named establishment may be barebones—little aluminum trays littered with paper napkins and ketchup packets is the entire condiments setup—but the burger is not.

Narwhal started life as a sandwich pop-up run by Christopher Huang, who owns the nearby Ninja Ramen on Washington Avenue. He and partner David Ramos originally opened the brick-and-mortar Narwhal Jousting Club as a sandwich and coffee shop with a revolving menu.

Huang and Ramos are of a generation that glamorized narwhals on social media in the Aughts. Since then, the spiral-tusked Arctic whale species has swum into popular culture, much as unicorns once galloped onto the stage.

Narwhals have inspired a graphic novel series that's a staple of kiddie lit, and these days you can buy narwhal facsimiles in the form of huggies, plushies, squishables, mircrowavable "warms," finger puppets and even a full-body narwhal puppet.

Narwhals even prompted a famous reddit meme 16 yrs ago, when the platform was more niche. "The narwhals bacon at midnight," became a code phrase that any redditor could use to confirm whether another person was a redditor.

This spring, Huang and Ramos pared back their sandwich operation to a burgers-and-fries menu, opening the space to an occasional pop-up by their chef friends. (A recent Sunday takeover by Burger Chan's Willet Feng sold out of its Singaporean menu in the pre-order phase.)

The Narwhal burger does radiate a certain pop-up swagger. It's eccentric and elemental. It dares ya. Come along with me to check it out.

PRICE: $6 for the single quarter-pound cheeseburger. Ten bucks to make it a combo with fries and a canned drink.

ORDERING: Totally automated. You step up to the counter in the narrow dining room, and from then on it's just you and the easy-to-use touchscreen, where you order, customize and pay. (Forget about a printed receipt, though; that function didn't work.) Then find a seat indoors, out on the porch, or at the handful of picnic tables. They'll find you when your burger's up.

ARCHITECTURE: No salad stuff. This is a burger that gets right to the point: griddle-toasted potato bun smeared with the orangey house Awesome Sauce, then a scattering of dill pickle slices. That's followed by grilled onions, beef patty, cheese, and still more grilled onions if you order extra, and you should. Final touch: more Awesome Sauce. I ordered extra of that, too. Good move.

QUALITY: This cheeseburger radiates umami squared. Not just because of the clear, beefy flavor of the patty, but because of the idiosyncratic Awesome Sauce, a mayo blend which involves gochujang heat, fish sauce depth and a bright, clear note of garlic. (The inspo comes from Huang.)

The ground beef itself is treated as a semi-smash burger, pressed down on the griddle but not squashed. The edges crackle but the interior remains moist. Okay, I could have gone for a patty cooked maybe 30 seconds less, but everything from the melty American cheese slice to the beautifully caramelized onions contributed to the burger's magic. Just when the umami threatens to make you swoon in your seat, the sharply salty and sour pickle note jumps in to revive you.

My custom order of extra onions and extra Awesome Sauce provided the right squoosh and slide and savor. The sun-yellow bun compressed down as I ate, so that it stayed intact while never compromising the meat-to-bread ratio.

I felt like I was eating a backyard burger some obsessed and talented friend had cooked for me.

OOZE RATING: Fair. The patty is reasonably juicy without drippage.

LETTER GRADE: A plus. The more I ate, the higher it crept. Overnight, it changed again. In other words, this is a burger that got its hooks into me.

BONUS POINTS: The absurd splendor of a floor-to-ceiling heraldic drapery depicting a narwhal ridden by a maniacal cat appealed mightily to the imp in me. I am still trying to imagine where Huang and Ramos got the thing.

MINUS POINTS: Okay, the skinny, nicely crisp fries had that cottony interior that suggests they started out in a freezer box. Still, they were good of their kind. I kept puzzling over their advertised "magic" seasoning, which looked like dark and dusty patches, but it didn't make enough of an impression to really register. Compared to the burger, and the gripping Awesome Sauce, the fries were just sort of...there.

I do want to put in a plea for a root beer option in the iced-down drinks tub, though. It's been forever since I've drunk a Dr. Pepper, and now I remember why.

LOCAL COLOR: I came at an off hour, when the sole customer was a guy from the bicycle shop across the street. I bet he eats here a lot.

I took my burger and soda out to the old-fashioned front porch, where I dined in breezy, solitary splendor (a fall front was creeping in) with a view of the Rose Street and Durham intersection. The neighborhood's a puro Houston combo of plucky little 20th-century cottages, light industry and commercial structures, with ranks of looming townhouses crowding in from the west.

If I craned my neck, I could see the motto painted on the fence outside the nearby Casa Juan Diego. "There is only one unhappiness," it reads. "And that is not to be one of the saints."

Amen. With a slight exception: another would be to miss out on one of Narwhal Jousting Club's cheeseburgers.

"#1 BEST BURGER for the price in America!" brags the spot's online menu. I snorted when I saw that. Now I can see why the Narwhal gang might believe it.