XO Grill

Review

The Burger Has Landed

When is a burger a good burger? My opinion: When it tastes so good that it makes you forget the annoying burger hype, and when it has a really good story to tell. It all started when Benjamin Hofer - who was working at the top London hotel Claridge's at the time - discovered infinitely expensive beef with the interesting name Txogitxu in a delicatessen. A Basque butcher slaughtered ancient Simmental dairy cows for it. Hofer thought to himself, there are also ancient dairy cows in Austria, and Simmentaler anyway. So he contacted his school friend, the Upper Austrian food retailer Robert Weishuber, and they founded XO Beef: well-matured beef from dairy cows up to 20 years old from Upper Austria, Salzburg and Styria, which would normally end up in the rendering plant, although it actually tastes much better and more intense than the light pink meat from young cattle 18 months old.
That was five years ago, gourmet chefs loved this XO ("extra old") meat, but - as is the case in gastronomy - only the "prime cuts". So a year ago, Weishuber and Hofer launched their pop-up XO grill in Gumpendorfer Straße and sold the minced leftover cow there, to put it profanely. The crucial detail here is that Valentin Gruber-Kalteis, an absolute expert, was and is involved in the recipe development and its implementation. This combination of material and manpower probably led to people queuing up for XO burgers for a year, even though the XO Grill people can be said to have a certain penchant for chaos - four different pop-up locations in eleven months, vague opening hours and the certainty of getting what you order. Now they finally have a restaurant, it's pretty, Hofer's father built the furniture, so now you can not only queue but also sit down.
And the food is insanely good: Naan Tan, a small naan double-decker with crispy minced meat (€ 6.90); the exceptionally juicy and glorious Smash Burger; the really great XOh No Beef Burger with grilled portobello mushroom; or the outrageously good Reuben sandwich with plenty of juicy-rosy pastrami, hallowed be its name (€ 11.90 each).
But the "Dirty Fries" with alternating sauces are also a hit, and if you think that green salad can't be eaten with your hand - the salad wedges with nuts, coriander and a fine marinade can. It's all very good, but you have to reckon with riots. Summary: You wouldn't have believed that old cow tastes so good. But it does - one of the reasons for Vienna's best burgers.

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