It started with chef Andrew Weissman’s fever dream of selling chicken-fried steak from a drive-thru window. But in the game of “how it started/how it’s going,” the new restaurant spawned by that dream, the one he calls Max’s Sister, is the small-town girl who took the midnight train goin’ anywhere. And everywhere.
Because Weissman refuses to play by the rules. Even his own.
In 2019, he took a step back from the white-tablecloth world he helped to create in San Antonio with Le Rêve, Il Sogno and and Sandbar. That detour was Mr. Juicy, a burger stand with the city’s best burger under $10. Weissman couldn’t stop there. Mr. Juicy grew to two locations, added a chicken sandwich, then dessert, then the thing that gave Mr. Juicy its Harry-met-Sally moment: Chicken-fried steak au poivre. From a drive-thru.
Granted, selling chicken-fried steaks at Mr. Juicy was never a forever thing. But the electricity of the moment turned on a light bulb for Weissman. “I thought to myself, man, maybe I should open up a place that just did chicken-fried steak and old classics like that, right?”…