The alarm rang at 3 a.m. in a room at the Hotel Roanoke, rousing hamburger impresario George Motz. He walked over the railroad tracks and on to Church Avenue for a Texas Tavern appointment with a triple Cheesy Western, chile added.
“I couldn’t believe that there was no one on the street, but the place was packed,” Motz said in a Tuesday phone call. “Every stool was taken. I had to wait for a stool at 3 o’clock in the morning, and it was real. It actually was high-functioning.”
That stress test a few years ago was part of a two-decade relationship that the author, filmmaker and restaurateur has had with Texas Tavern and its fourth-generation owner, Matt Bullington. On Thursday, customers at Motz’s Hamburger America restaurant, in New York City, can get the Roanoke eatery’s signature sandwich.
Bullington and his wife, Molly, joined Motz on Wednesday at the Lower Manhattan restaurant for a news conference to celebrate the cheesy and an article Motz wrote for Southern Living that touts four of his favorite burger joints, including Texas Tavern.
Motz will serve the Cheesy Western with two fresh beef patties, a lightly scrambled egg, onions, pickles and the tavern’s proprietary recipe relish. Bullington and Motz met in West Virginia, midway between Roanoke and Manhattan, for the relish handoff.
Bullington prepared 27 gallons of the mustardy, vinegary stuff for Motz to refrigerate and serve as Hamburger America’s monthly burger special, and the pair played it up like a top secret handoff on Instagram. The joint will even be serving another Texas Tavern staple, chile (that’s the way the Bullingtons have spelled it since 1930), but it only has enough to last Wednesday and Thursday, Motz said.
Bullington said he is thankful for and humbled by the recognition, which includes Motz’s popular 2008 book, “Hamburger America: A State-by-State Guide to 100 Great Burger Joints.” Through four editions — the latest was published in April — Motz has added 120 more restaurants to the list.
“I’ve always said the tavern is a cultural mooring,” Bullington said. “There’s an authenticity to it that a lot of people crave, those places where there’s kind of a real connection. That’s our story. The tavern, you go in there, it looks the same. The food, it’s kind of quirky. We do our own things. We make fun of you if you order ketchup on a burger, and that’s kind of the core of who we are.
“People like to see things with staying power, because our world changes fast, and every year it changes faster and faster. It’s a cultural institution that’s timeless, and we try to keep it timeless. And I think that there’s value in that.”
Eating an experience
Motz, a onetime director of photography in film and television, was equally inspired by author Jack Kerouac, of “On The Road” fame, and documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, who made “The Thin Blue Line,” “The Fog of War” and “Vernon, Florida,” among others. He teamed his wanderlust with his day job to helm the 2004 documentary titled, of course, “Hamburger America.”
Texas Tavern’s secret menu
Many Texas Tavern diners order a double-beef Cheesy Western. Burger maven George Motz feels he has settled on his favorite, with three fresh beef discs and chile. It tastes from this perspective like one patty too many, though. Two burgers give substantial beef flavor to the bite but don’t overwhelm the rest of the ingredients.
And to be sure, Motz is right about chile atop the egg. That has long been the way to go for the best possible version.
None of these are on the menu. Longtime Texas Tavern customers know about the joint’s secret menu. Owner Matt Bullington, whose great-grandfather Nick Bullington opened the place in 1930 and brought both the relish and the chile onto the menu, let Cardinal News in on some of those items.
The Travis is named for a bartender who used to stop in after a late-night shift to find longtime TT employee Cecil Spradlin waiting to take his order. “He started getting the Cheesy Western with grilled ham on it, and then he liked to get hot dog chile on it, so we started calling it the Dirty Travis,” Bullington said.
The Diesel Dog is a hot dog wrapped in an egg and a slice of cheese, then all the toppings. “See, that one you need to serve on a plate,” he said. “We normally sell hot dogs on wax paper. That’s definitely a plate one. That’s a pretty popular one.”
The Jumbo Jumbo is two double-meat cheesies stacked one atop the other, “kind of like Big Mac-style,” he said. “I don’t have too many people order that one anymore. I named it after a guy who used to work at the VA who would come in and get one of those, plus a pint of chile and two hot dogs with a large buttermilk for lunch.”
That doc spawned a book deal that took him to eateries across the United States. Motz said that his friend John Anderson, a Roanoker living in New York, told him about the Texas Tavern. Motz, trusting Anderson’s opinion, headed for the Star City in 2006.
“I remember the day he came in,” Bullington said. “And he was just, you know, planning on getting a burger. I was like, ‘Well, you need to get the Cheesy Western.’ He’s like, ‘Cheesy Western, what’s that?’”
Motz, deep in his research by the time he got to Roanoke, had partaken of many griddled beef varieties.
“In all of my travels, I had never tasted a burger like this,” Motz said. “It was completely unique, and I think it was the combination of the cheese, the relish, and the egg.”
As the years passed, he has amended his cheesy order. Nowadays, he opts for three of the 1.4-ounce patties, with chile on top.
“That seems to be the platonic ideal, right there,” he said.
But it’s not simply the unique flavor he craves.
“That burger tastes so much better because of where you’re eating it,” he said. “Location really can define how your experience is going to taste, and without a doubt, if you sit at that dimpled, beat-up counter, beautifully aged patina on that counter, and you can hear, you could smell, you could see it all being done right in front of you. It makes it actually taste just a little bit better.
“I would like to say it’s like if you get a great pina colada and you’re on the beach in the Caribbean, it tastes so good. There’s something about the sights and the sounds and the smells and the salt air, but then when you go back and make the same exact pina colada in your kitchen at home, it never tastes the same. And so part of the flavor of the burger actually exists in the experience you can have when you’re at Texas Tavern.”
The Long Island, New York, native opened his own place in late 2023 to honor the vibes created in the joints he’s chronicled. The restaurant, with a lunch counter that features a photo of the Texas Tavern and other spots, features his all-time favorite — the Oklahoma-style fried onion burger — a smash burger and a green chile cheeseburger, along with other luncheonette favorites.
The menu has a spot for a rotating lineup of burgers from around the globe — singles or doubles of fresh ground chuck. Replication is a culinary science, he said.
“We get deep into the forensics and the granular details of each one of these [monthly] burgers and make sure that we’re doing it correctly,” he said. “The correct bun, the correct beef, every single thing is designed to be intentionally the same.”
His version of the Cheesy Western will be slightly larger, he said, as he wants a flavor resembling the triple-meat version he prefers in Roanoke, but with two patties. His will cost $13, compared to $3.95 for the Texas Tavern version. But it’s New York City, where that’s a good price, Motz said.
The city’s median burger price was $21.21, the Bloomberg news service reported in late 2025.
On Wednesday, Bullington and Motz took turns slinging cheesies for a gathering of food reporters and others. Motz said he grew up cooking, learning from his mom and grandmother, so his early days as a hamburger maven held an easy learning curve when it came to preparing the sandwich for which the world knows him.
Did Motz’s version hit the mark? “Yes!” Molly Bullington replied via text message.
In a video she shared, Motz stood in reverie with one half of a cheesy, having taken his first bite right through the center.
“Mmm. Oh,” he said.
“Was it good?” Matt Bullington said.
“Yeah,” Motz replied. “I nailed it.”
