An Inside Look at Perry's Pork Chop Friday

Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille offers the kind of meal you plan your week around. Then, for the next month or so, you find yourself telling everyone how good it was. And the chance to have a meal like that for lunch makes it even better. At Perry's, Pork Chop Friday lunch is a cultural event, a right of passage for carnivores of all shapes and sizes.

While sitting in the crowded dining room, have you ever wondered how this all comes together so effortlessly? We have. So we asked and were invited to go behind the scenes to see how Pork Chop Friday is pulled off.

Before we get into the process, let’s talk about the history of Perry's pork chop. This is a steakhouse, right? Why, then, is the signature dish not a steak? Owner Chris Perry wanted to offer something that couldn’t be found elsewhere. Drawing from the family butcher business, he created a pork chop that had never been seen before, a proprietary cut accentuating three types of pork in one gigantic seven-fingers-high hunk of meat. Diners can experience the lean, center-cut loin, the well-marbled “eyelash” (the top part above what is traditionally called the eye of the chop) and the flavorful rib meat, all carved tableside.
Friday is the only day Perry's is open for lunch, and the center of attention is the “smaller” five-finger-high lunch cut chop for an amazing price of $19. Chops are served from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at three North Texas locations (Uptown, Grapevine and Frisco). And the goal is to never run out. Yum.

Friday lunch at Perry’s starts before dawn. At some point in the wee hours of the morning, chefs and butchers show up to load the pecan wood into the smoker and get the fire going.

The chops are trimmed and seasoned, placed in the in-house smoker — which holds dozens of chops at a time — and left for four to six hours. As each chop is removed from the smoker, it is temperature checked and rested.
After resting, it’s off to the band saw, where each chop is sliced, trimmed and weighed. The sliced chop is then seasoned again and finished in the oven, which provides the signature flavor and caramelization on the outside. The final prep includes placing the pork chop on a cast iron skillet and covering it with Perry’s signature steak butter and a squeeze of lime. A cloud-soft scoop of mashed potatoes joins the chop along with a house-made applesauce.

As we were walked through the process by Perry's Vice President Howard Cortes and Corporate Chef Daniel DeLorensi, we learned that timing is the key to serving an average of 600 pork chops at each restaurant each Friday. Fresh chops are constantly being loaded into the smoker as others are prepped. Chefs and expeditors know exactly how many servings will be needed for each 30-minute window of time. It’s almost like they know what you are going to order before you get there.
During lunch, we got a peek in the kitchen to see the smoker and the band saw. The kitchen was a scene of precisely mechanized chaos.

Back in the full dining room, many tables were clearly headed into pork heaven. We saw golfing buddies, business lunches, family celebrations and quite a few tables we can only assume had already moved on to the weekend. As each table was seated, orders were placed without looking at the menu, and diners had their meals within 10 minutes.

Our meal was amazing, as always, and we definitely couldn’t finish it all. This, we were told, is by design. They want you to have leftovers and even provide a link to their website on the doggie bag for preparing your leftovers. Yet another meal to plan your week around.