There’s a version of the Perry’s story that most diners never hear, and it starts with a meat counter, not a dining room. In 1979, Bob Perry opened a small butcher shop on the south side of Houston called Perry’s Butcher Shop and Deli. It was a neighborhood operation, the kind of place people walked into for a Friday roast or a pound of ground chuck, nothing more ambitious than that. What changed the trajectory of the business was Bob’s son, Chris, who by 1986 had talked his father into adding a few tables and chairs to the shop. Customers who came in for meat started staying to eat, and what began as a butcher counter with some seating grew into Perry & Sons Market & Grille.
Chris Perry took the idea further in 1993, opening the first Perry’s Steakhouse & Grille as its own concept, separate from the market. The instinct that guided the original butcher shop never really left the new restaurant. Perry’s built its reputation on prime beef, tableside carving, and an unmistakable focus on cuts of meat handled the old-fashioned way, the way a butcher shop would have handled them decades earlier. Four decades and more than twenty locations later, across Texas and seven other states, that instinct is still the identity of the brand.
But it isn’t the steak that made Perry’s a name people bring up in conversation. It’s the pork chop, and there’s a reason for that. When Chris Perry set out to build the menu for his new steakhouse, he wanted something unexpected sitting next to the prime cuts, a dish nobody would think to look for at a steakhouse. He landed on pork, and instead of treating it as a secondary option, he built it into something that could stand on its own as the signature. The result, still on the menu today, is what the restaurant calls its seven-finger-high pork chop, a name that comes from the old butcher shop practice of measuring cuts of meat by hand rather than by ruler.
The chop itself is not a quick preparation. Each one is rubbed with a proprietary blend of seasonings, cured, then roasted on a rotisserie over pecan wood for up to six hours before it’s finished in the oven, caramelized, and topped with Perry’s signature herb-garlic butter. The whole thing is then carved tableside during dinner service, which turns what could have been a plated afterthought into an actual moment of the meal.
It’s a recipe the restaurant says has been refined for more than four decades, and the scale of it backs that claim up. Perry’s reports serving something like 13,000 lunch-cut pork chops across its locations on a single Friday, which is not a small number for a dish that started as one restaurant’s way of standing out from every other steakhouse in Houston.
The dinner portion is the full show, the one carved at the table in front of you. There’s also a lunch-cut version, an eighteen-ounce chop served on a sizzling cast iron plate with whipped potatoes, applesauce, and bread, offered as a Friday special that’s become its own small tradition inside a restaurant already built on tradition. Perry’s has leaned into that history publicly too.
Dallas has three Perry’s locations now, in Frisco, Grapevine, and the flagship Park District spot at 2100 Olive Street, which relocated from its longtime Uptown address in 2019 into a two-story space with views of Klyde Warren Park and downtown. The Park District location is open Monday through Thursday from 4 to 9 p.m., Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. to accommodate that lunch-cut pork chop crowd, Saturday 4 to 10 p.m., and Sunday 4 to 9 p.m. The phone number is (214) 855-5151.
What makes the pork chop worth the drive isn’t novelty. Steakhouses built around a beef program don’t typically let a pork dish become the thing people remember, but Perry’s built the whole identity of the restaurant around the idea that the unexpected dish could be just as serious as the expected one, and forty years later that bet is still paying off.
