A major change has come to one of Houston’s most well-regarded burger restaurants, but the owners assure fans that the restaurant they love will stay (mostly) the same.
Burger Chan owners Diane and Willet Feng tell CultureMap that they’ve partnered with chef Ryan Stewart and his Silver Linings Hospitality company to take over day-to-day operations of the restaurant. Stewart, a native of South Africa who previously served as a chef and partner of shuttered South African restaurant Peli Peli, has spent five months learning the restaurant’s operations to prepare for the switchover.
First opened as Kuma Burger in 2016, Burger Chan opened its current location near the Galleria in 2022. Chef Willet Feng brings his fine dining background to the restaurant’s burgers, which get an umami boost from a tare glaze on the patties. The build-your-own format allows diners to create their perfect combo from two patty sizes, four buns, three cheese, and more than a dozen vegetables and sauces, including favorites like charred jalapenos, sambal mayo, and scallion aioli. In a 2023 clip that’s been viewed more than 300,000 times, YouTube food tourist Mike Chen created a burger topped with 17 ingredients.
Burger Chan offers a wide range of toppings.
Photo by Terence Tang
But all of the acclaim has come with a downside. Willet Feng explains that the restaurant has struggled to find a roster of employees who can perform to his admittedly high standards.
“It’s never been more tiring. You’re successful, then you have people call out,” he says. “That’s a lot more stress and work for everyone who shows up. As the owners, most of the extra work gets dumped on us.”
Feng thinks that Stewart, who has experience operating multiple locations, will be able to implement systems that allow Burger Chan to maintain its high quality while utilizing employees who might struggle to replicate the chef’s exact method for perfectly slicing tomatoes by hand.
“What makes this a good partnership is that I’ve worked perpetually in kitchens like Oxheart where a lot of things are done manually. It doesn’t matter how long it takes or how painful it is. That’s not scalable,” Feng says.
“What Ryan and his team can do is they have systems. They have ways of training people that I can’t do cause I get really f—ing mad, or they provide tools so people f— up less,” he adds.
Where Feng sees frustration, Stewart sees opportunity. He says he took about a year away from the restaurant business after Peli Peli (then operating as Mozambik) closed. A few visits to Burger Chan sparked his interest in returning to restaurant life.
“I came to Burger Chan and fell in love with the flavors. I thought it was a great opportunity to help expand it,” he says.
Stewart plans to start small by adding Monday lunch service and Burger Chan’s first dinner hours on Fridays and Saturdays. Next up is adding weeknight dinner service. If everything goes smoothly, Silver Linings would begin looking for a second location.
“I’ve been here for five months and seen who’s the next [person on the current staff] to step up and run their own location,” Stewart says. “We never want to lose that loving feeling, that quality. The second one we want to open quite quickly. It would be our prep kitchen to make things easier to control.”
As Diane Feng notes, she and Willet aren’t walking away from the restaurant. They’ll still be involved but not the daily presence they have been. Over the past month, they’ve been less present physically to allow Stewart and his team the opportunity to learn how to operate the restaurant on their own, but Feng promises diners will still see her at the restaurant.
“I enjoy my interactions with our customers. I want to make sure that everyone is taken care of,” she says.
“We’ve been pretty hands-off for over a month now,” Willet adds. “I don’t think people have noticed from a quality perspective. We go in to check and improve things.”
Taking a step back from day-to-day involvement in Burger Chan frees up the Fengs to devote more time to Borrowed Goods, the Singaporean-inspired pop-up series they launched in March. Next up is dinner service on April 27 at Narwhal Jousting Club, the ghost kitchen owned by Ninja Ramen’s Christopher Huang.
“It will most likely stay as a pop-up for a really long time,” Willet Feng says. “Having just gotten out of the responsibilities of one brick and mortar, we’re not dying to jump into another one. There is no timeline. It could be years. We don’t know.”
