The Burger at Capital Grille

Capital Grille in Mexico City is one of many international franchise locations of the famous USA chain of high-end steakhouse restaurants.

Capital Grille’s trademark is a “private country club” atmosphere. The walls in the Mexico City restaurant are decorated with oil portraits of famous Mexican entrepreneurs. The Tiffany-shade chandeliers and “hunting club” type decorations, reinforce the “exclusive club” ambiance of the restaurant. That, and the extremely high prices by CDMX standards, make it clear, that Capital Grille is designed to cater to the affluent. It is the city’s most popular destination for entertaining business clients.

The service on this most recent visit was flawless, as it always is at Capital Grille.

All the steaks and the beef utilized in the dry-aged burger at Capital Grille in Mexico City are imported from Kansas. They are USDA Prime beef. You can read the full review for Capital Grille here.

But this review is specifically to give my take on the aged cheeseburger offered at Capital Grille. This critique evaluates the restaurant and the burger but we use a special rating system for our evaluation of burgers and the restaurants offering them on their menu.

The beef patty in the burger is given the greatest weight in our evaluation. But there is a value rating representing 10% of the total score. So a burger that is high-priced is at a slight disadvantage in the overall rating.

This burger is the most expensive burger we have evaluated in all of Latin America. At 350 pesos (about US$18). It’s roughly three times the cost of the Hamburguesa Mataleón in Roma Norte.

That said, it’s a very good burger. And you can let your significant other take a photo of you in that fancy restaurant with all the Mexican and Japanese businessmen talking high-finance in the background. Your friends will be very impressed. If you snap a picture at Hamburguesa Mataleón there might be a cockroach in the background making funny faces.

The burger is thick. It has a course grind. The texture is fine. The beef in the patty is dry-aged for 21-days. The problem is they use a sirloin cut that’s a bit too lean for a burger. That aging helps add a bit of flavor that the sirloin cut wouldn’t possess otherwise, but it’s just not quite the same as that juicy rendered fat in correctly constructed beef patty that has 25% or more fat. Bottom line. I don’t think this patty was any better than several we evaluated in Mexico City at half the cost of this one.

The cheese and other condiments were really high-quality. They were delicious. But again, so were the condiments on half a dozen burgers we evaluated in the city.

The fries had some white truffle shavings. But, honestly, the skin-on, irregularly cut fries at Mataleón, with that addictive ketchup, were better in my not so humble opinion.

Bottom line. This a great burger. One of the top five in the city. But there a handful of burgers just as good in Mexico City at half the price. Looking to impress your friends? Go to Capital Grille. Looking to eat three burgers for the price of that one at CG? Go to Hamburguesa Mataleón.