The Flight Burger. (IBIC photo)
The co-owner of the central Iowa bar that’s home of this year’s “Best Burger” competition winner says their business has picked up dramatically since the announcement.
Marianne and Matt Pacha opened their “Flight Bar and Grill” in Huxley one year ago, and were hoping that milestone would help them plan.
“We said, as soon as we hit the year mark, we’ll be able to know, like, usually the season is like this or that. And then this kind of threw things out the window — its gonna be a whole new data we’ll have to figure out — but all for good reason. We are thrilled about this,” Pacha says.
She says they had been selling 200 to 300 burgers in a week, and the day after Monday’s announcement they sold 260. The couple didn’t have any background in running a restaurant, but she says her husband worked in grocery retail, and they knew there was a need for the establishment in the community.
“We were a young couple have built a house here. And after we moved in, we were like let’s go grab a drink. We’re tired from the day. And there wasn’t really a place to do that at the time,” she says. The name of the establishment comes from the Ballard school district, which mascot is the bombers, and then they have flights of beer too. They donate one dollar from every burger sold to the Ballard Education Foundation to help support the school district.
Pacha says their foundation is a double burger with several ingredients. “Lots of love and lots of fresh ingredients. We source our beef exclusively from Midwest farms. They’re also smash burgers. So cooked in their own fat, a crisp outside, but nice to see inside. We use a really high quality brioche bun and we also have in house aoli we use on all of our burgers,” she says.
The contest is held ever year by the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association and Iowa Beef Industry Council. Pacha says seeing all the extra people come in great because it puts more eyes on the community. “It’s exciting to get more people into Flight — but Huxley as a whole, it’s such a wonderful community we have so much to offer. We have new people come in, say ‘we didn’t even know this was here. We didn’t know there were so many new houses going up. We didn’t know you know, insert fact here.’,” Pacha says. “So it’s really exciting that people are learning that actually has more to offer than just you know, small town I am. Well we have a great school district.”
You can find Flight just off Highway 69 on the south side of Huxley. They are open Sunday-Thursday from 11 a.m. until 10 p.m., and Friday- Saturday from 11 a.m. until 11 p.m.
