Yes, there really is a Jim at Jim’s

Editor's note: Hasslocher died Nov. 18, 2015, days after working at the soon-to-open Frontier Burger.

For those who have lived in San Antonio a long time, this is the most important part of a story about Frontier Enterprises: The Frontier Burger, the actual charcoal-broiled version, is coming back, maybe as soon as next fall.

With the long-missed burger’s renaissance, the company, which owns the Jim’s chain and other restaurants, will come full circle. Founder G. “Jim” Hasslocher, now 92, and still chairman and CEO, got his start in food service with hamburgers in 1947. After serving in World War II, Hasslocher “hitchhiked to San Antonio with 37 cents in his pocket,” says his son Jimmy, president and chief operating officer of the family-held business.

Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the elder Hasslocher got his start by buying 50 Army surplus bicycles, which he rented from a stand at his home across from Brackenridge Park. There, he met Veva Ball, a Kentucky transplant, who became his wife and business partner until her death in 2009. To the bike-rental concession, which also sold slices of cold watermelon in season, the young couple added burgers cooked over charcoal. A family member tried his hand at burger-flipping and quit after six weeks, leaving the job to Hasslocher, who thrived on the stress and soon opened his first restaurant at 3715 Broadway, near the Witte Museum.

His son Jimmy, now 63, entered the business during Easter weekend in 1959, “standing on wooden Coke crates, selling raspas and cotton candy,” he says. “I was 8 years old, and I needed the crates to see over the counter.” The younger Hasslocher grew up with the company, which has included a string of drive-ins - Jim’s Hamburgers, later Frontier Drive-ins - Beef Baron restaurants, Magic Time Machine theme restaurants, the fine-dining restaurant atop the Tower of the Americas (operated since 2004 by Landry’s Inc.) and the flagship brand, formerly Jim’s Coffee Shops, now known as Jim’s Restaurants.

Working at HemisFair ’68, where the company had a Frontier Steakhouse and commissary to serve other “food clusters” at the downtown world’s fair, young Hasslocher delivered fresh stock at night and became “the first guy to get stuck in the elevator” of the fair’s tower theme structure. “It wasn’t that bad,” he says with a shrug. “Car No. 3 had a phone in it. I dialed out, and they told me, 'We’ve never had that happen before.’”

Hasslocher is reminiscing in his modest office, where only a memento wall of photographs taken with famous people — mayors and visiting presidents among them — gives a clue to how interconnected the company has been with the growth of this city. The corporate office of Frontier Enterprises at 8720 Crownhill Blvd. is only a few blocks away from Jim’s No. 1 at 8427 Broadway, built in 1963 just inside Loop 410 in an area that was barely developed at the time.. Frontier is now owner of 15 Jim’s in San Antonio, three in the Austin area, a Magic Time Machine here and another in Addison, and most recently the revived La Fonda Alamo Heights —

“1959 was the turning point out here,” says Hasslocher, who “got to know all parts of the city” as a city councilman from 1981 to 1991. Except for the neighboring Barn Door restaurant, the Petroleum Center and a few other one-story buildings, “It was all farmland.”

The company’s six drive-ins were an early core business, staffed first by carhops, then “electrohops” in a hybrid system where customers gave their orders into a speaker to employees who brought the food to their cars. Anyone who ate there at the time will remember the Frontier Burger, the Platonic ideal of the Big Mac, with two charcoal-grilled patties, lettuce, pickles, tomatoes and a proprietary special sauce.

To the everlasting regret of many, the drive-ins closed in the 1980s. “They had run their course,” said Hasslocher, who once managed them. “You had the McDonald’s of the world coming in. One opened next door to the Frontier on Austin Highway. The world was changing: They had a national marketing program and drive-through service. It was hard to compete.” People still ask him about those burgers “all the time. The comment is 'What happened to them?’ or 'I wish those were still here.’” There is a Frontier Burger on the menu at Jim’s, but it’s not quite the same, and there are plans in the works to replicate the burger of memory. The Jim’s Original Onion Rings, though, have stayed “exactly the same,” made with thinly sliced sweet onions and flash-cooked for crispness.

Over the years, Jim’s has kept up with the outward movement of the city limits, opening restaurants at strategic points around Loop 1604. The first Jim’s “was basically a California coffee shop,” with relatively limited choices, says Hasslocher. Now there are 120 menu items, adding more salads, grilled chicken and seafood to enduring favorites such as tortilla soup, chicken-fried steak, and steak or eggs with chili.

Jim’s sometimes tries out new dishes as limited-time offers (LTOs). That’s how Eggs Benedict, a recent hit LTO, won its spot on the permanent menu. “I said, 'Put it on the menu,’” Hasslocher says, “and everybody growled at me. I told them, 'Let’s … see what it does.’” He and other executives keep watch on the performance of every item in every restaurant. “We’re tweaking the menus twice a year, in May and October,” he says. “If something’s not selling, we’ll pull it off.”

One thing that doesn’t change is the company’s ownership. Frontier Enterprises is still a family business, co-owned by four of the children of Jim and Veva — Jimmy, Bobby (an Alamo Heights city councilman), Caryn (owner of Fresh Horizons catering) and Susan. Jimmy, known within the company as “Mr. Jimmy,” is the only one involved in day-to-day operations. His father, “Mr. Jim,” comes or calls in every day. “He still calls the shots,” says his son, reading blueprints, asking for the details of ongoing projects and making onsite inspections.

Carrying on the family’s “undercover boss” tradition, the elder Hasslocher — who “sports an iPhone and an iPad and knows how to use both” — often visits his restaurants incognito. “As soon as he walks in the door, he can tell you if a restaurant’s operating properly,” says Jimmy Hasslocher. “Are people getting greeted and seated? Are orders coming out of the kitchen? You look at service, timing.” There’s only one thing he has asked his father not to do, and that’s “climbing up on roofs to look at the equipment. I’ve told him I prefer that he not do that. He should let me do it.”

As of last summer, Frontier Enterprises brought in a new member of the restaurant family with traditions of its own — the revived La Fonda Alamo Heights that opened last July in a new location across the street from the company’s headquarters. “It happened in 103 days from start to finish,” says Hasslocher. When the venerable Tex-Mex restaurant closed in March 2014, “I made a call to the (then-) current owner, asking if they would sell us the name.” Normally, he says, “I would have staffed this out to somebody, but I decided to do it myself. We found out we didn’t have enough space, got some additional space and went in and finished it out.” The new La Fonda Alamo Heights uses the previous restaurant’s original recipes, Hasslocher says, “and I think it turned out pretty well.”

Not averse to getting his hands dirty, the owner pitched in one night at the new restaurant when “Things were not exactly where I wanted them to be.” Hasslocher went into the dish room, “saw the guy running it was struggling, took off my coat and washed dishes.” It took 30 or 40 minutes to get caught up, and when the boss turned around, amazed employees were taking cellphone pictures of him. “I’ve made a lot of strawberry pies and scrambled eggs and blueberry pancakes,” he says. “I’m not as fast at my advanced age as I used to be when I was a kid, but I can still chop lettuce without cutting myself.”

Still in the future is another venture announced last summer around the time of the La Fonda opening. “We’ve been experimenting with trying to cook Frontier charcoal-broiled hamburgers to sell through a drive-thru window.” To be called Frontier Drive-Thrus, the first such location is scheduled to open Oct. 1 in the Crownhill complex with the Magic Time Machine and La Fonda.

The unexpected death of Ron Gomez, a former Whataburger executive hired by Frontier to help plan the new project, has been a setback as well as a sad event. Without the benefit of his experience, Hasslocher is taking a hands-on approach to the details. Recently, business neighbor and “great friend” Randy Stokes put in a new ventilation system that Frontier also has been looking at. “We’ll be cooking hamburgers under pressure inside, and we wanted to know how much rollout smoke there would be,” says Hasslocher. “So one day last week, he invited me over, and there was Jim’s in the Barn Door’s kitchen, cooking.”

The test went well; Frontier also is trying out different types of charcoal that weren’t around in the earlier drive-ins’ day. “Importing the smoke from the cooking environment is going to make a difference in the (Frontier Burger’s) taste profile,” says Hasslocher, whose favorite Jim’s menu item is still the burger, even though he’s trying to eat more salads.

Further ahead are “hush-hush projects even top people here don’t know about yet,” says Hasslocher. Like his father, he plans to stay active with the company “as long as my health holds out.” He still looks at comment cards and listens to voicemail comments, good and bad, about his restaurants’ food and service: “If someone didn’t get croutons with their salad … we take that seriously.”

Nearing the end of the company’s seventh decade, “We try to get up every day and make sure we have good food and good service,” Hasslocher says. “We try to improve upon what’s been handed to us.”