Good News York by Growth Mode Content - GNY EP.166 | feat. Randy Hon from Poundtown Burgers

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Inside Pound Town Burgers: Randy’s To-Go Model, Scratch Sauces, and Expansion Plans Host Noah Chrysler interviews Randall (“Randy”), founder of Pound Town Burgers in downtown Syracuse, about his to-go focused restaurant model launched in January last year, emphasizing fresh homemade food, cost-effective pricing through buying power, and efficient staffing systems. Randy discusses menu items the team samples—beer-battered onion rings, fried pickles, mac and cheese bites with sweet hot honey, hand-breaded chicken sandwiches, hand-cut fries, bacon cheese fries, tenders over mac and cheese with pound sauce, and scratch-made sauces and cheese sauce. He shares Pound Town’s origin, including early popups, a lawsuit over the name that he won, minimal marketing driven by word-of-mouth, and growth to 30,000–40,000 burgers sold last year. He’s bottling sauces, is top 10 in the New York State Best Burger competition, and is opening locations in Cicero and Auburn, with Auburn featuring rooftop/outdoor space and a shared bar concept. 00:00 Welcome to Pound Town 00:34 To Go Burger Concept 01:46 Appetizers and House Sauces 02:36 Tasting and Onion Allergy 03:31 Bottling Sauces Plans 04:03 Origin Story and Lawsuit 06:43 Recipe Development Process 08:06 What Sets Them Apart 08:59 Community Giving Back 09:52 Food Spread and Chicken Sandwich 11:04 Messy Sandwich Bite 11:37 Hand Cut Fries Secrets 12:57 Efficient Kitchen System 13:49 New Auburn Location Plans 14:44 Bacon Cheese Fries Breakdown 15:26 Top 10 Burger Contest 17:21 Tenders Bowl and Mac 18:45 Where to Find Them 20:00 Owner Leads by Example 20:33 Team Sign Off

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Just head to mood.com. That's M-O-O-O-D.com to get started. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Good News York. My name is Noah Chrysler. I am here today at Poundtown with Randy. Randy, how's it going? Thanks for being here. Absolutely. Introduce yourself. Yeah, my name is Randall. I'm the founder of Poundtown Burgers. Yeah, how long has Poundtown been around? January of last year.

So it's been a ride. Fantastic. I can tell you that. When I walk into this place, you guys seem to be doing things a little bit differently. Can you tell me about your approach and what Poundtown stands for? Yeah, so I took a different approach model, right? Like I didn't want to be, since COVID, a full-service restaurant. As you see a lot of places closing recently.

I adopted the model to everything based. basically is in to-go. And instead of people coming in and being fine dining, we're like a not a fast food model, but just a to-go-based, homemade, fresh, and also cost-effective. I think that's huge, right? Like, you know, with rising prices of everything,

me being having the ability to own multiple restaurants, I have a little bit of buying power with the food companies. So I'm able to keep my cost a little more effective than others. Absolutely. Yeah, you mentioned that you also are the owner Pavones, yeah? Yep. And so Pound Town is your second foray into the restaurant business, yeah? It is. It's something we started from scratch. I've never done that before. I've always worked in the restaurant industry back and forth between sales and restaurant and just decided it was time to try something

new that is actually there wasn't, there's not a lot of competition, right? Like, where can you go get a great burger for 15 bucks with fries? Yeah. No, yeah. And we, so this is our second time I'm having the food here, which is, by the way, it's amazing. Like, it's, like, really good. The smash burgers are really good. Can you tell us a little bit about, tell us about what we're trying right now? Yeah, so these are some of our items off our appetizer menu. These are our beer-batted onion rings.

A lot of our sauces here are made from scratch. We use a base with a certain company and then mix in our own ingredients. So this is our Pound Town Pub. We put this on a lot of things here. Our Mac bowls. It gives it, like, a zesty flavor and adds a bowl burst. all of our food. Here we have our fried good and mac and cheese bites with our in-house like sweet hot honey sauce but it's more sweet than it is hot. It just gives you a little

tang and then our fried pickles again with our house pub sauce because it pairs well well with a lot of things. Sweet. Yeah. All right can we try them together? Yeah. Take me through which one. All right. I'll do this first. I've had all of these and they're really really good. So funny story. I'm going to order to onions. Really? So I had to have other people try the onion and I had to have five people do it because I didn't trust just one person. Sure. Oh my goodness. Allergic to onions. That's wild. I am. I mean, I did try them earlier, but they are delicious and I don't know. I was a big, when I was a kid I used to love onion rings too and so these are really good. Everything tastes like light, you know?

It's not like it's not like greasy and gross and like, you know, I don't know. I think that's what you find here, right? You don't, you don't really leave here feeling heavy until you actually like devour like a whole pound our pound plate, which is, you know, a ton of half pound mac and cheese and then a burger or chicken however you're choosing no very cool um so you were talking about two you mentioned I don't know if there's public knowledge yet but you mentioned that your sauces are going into a store soon yeah so we're working on bottling our sauces right now we're working with the company out of Rochester and the food distributor it's pretty cool you know

it's a long process there's a lot a lot into it so we're probably anywhere from eight months to a year out we can kind of do it on our own and sell locally but But I don't want to mess with product distribution, and it tastes different than, you know, when you have it here in the restaurant. Yeah, cool. Tell me, tell me the story of Poundown Town, right? Tell me, tell me, you know, from its inception

to how many restaurants do you own now? A few. Yeah. So we'll start with the inception of Poundtown. Actually, the name wasn't created by me. I had a person who was doing my marketing, it approached me and was like, hey, really, really think burgers is a way to go, right? They had an envision of like a concept. And they had the

name, right? And I was intrigued by the name. Because if you just open up any type of burger place and call it Salt City Burger, it's not as intriguing, right? Poundtown brings a lot of commodity, a lot of jokes. You want it to draw the attention that I think it does. And so went down their road. And obviously I was approached because I know how to develop. I have the resources. and we got into it. And about six months in from doing pop-ups, basically putting a lot of my own money up. And I came to a head with the partner who created the name.

I had developed all the recipes, the menu, everything like that, obviously using the resources in the business. And it just came to a lawsuit. I ended up eventually winning in Poundtown I've just put my all into because I believe in myself, right? Whenever you want to do something, and you put your best foot forward, the first person you've got to believe in is yourself, and that's how I got to be where I'm at.

And I'm thankful because there was a lot of days in the beginning that I only sold probably between February, March, and April. I only ended up selling like maybe 500 burgers the entire month. So, you know, telling my best friend that I just brought here from Florida, hey, I need you to help me run this restaurant, and him saying like, hey, is this a mistake? Yeah, geez. And you're worried, right? And I didn't do any marketing.

And the reason I didn't do any of that is because. because I believe that every time I put food in somebody's hand, they would tell somebody else. And that spun just kept happening and happening. I kept seeing it. And obviously, I believed in what we were doing. And then I want to say by June or July, we were like, we were full off to the races, right?

We ended up selling like over 30,000 burgers last year, 30,000 or 40,000 burgers. Wow. So we really drove the business the last seven months of the year. And I've been really impressed. I'm opening two more locations in the next six to eight weeks. We have one going in Cicero, New York. And then in Auburn, you know, I've been approached by developers. I'm getting offers to open like multiple stores.

People want to invest. So I'm just taking things now at a slower pace because I don't want to mess where we started fundamentally. Yeah. No, that's wonderful. So you said you developed the recipes yourself. Yeah, a lot of them. Yeah. So I went to, I use a company with U.S. foods.

They're my preferred food vendor. And I went to them and I sat with their executive chef in Albany. And I gave them the vision of what I expected Poundtown to be. And when you ever walk into a test kitchen, there's tons of things. You give them ideas. They bring chefs and multiple partners in. And we really worked on recipes. I tried all sorts of different meats, all sorts of different appetizers.

It really came down to practicing with cheese sauce. You have the ingredients available to you in these test kitchens. So I went to Albany like three or four times and we developed everything over like a four-month period. to be where we're at today. Yeah. No, that's incredible. You were also talking about how you source each of your ingredients and how you source each of your things as well.

Like you're going to a variety of different... So we attend a bunch of different companies' food shows. We test and test kitchens. We spend a lot of time with executive chefs. And I ask a lot of questions from a lot of other restaurateurs, right? I never really talk to people about what makes them successful because everybody's paths of success is a little different. What I do is, though, I want to know where you failed

and what didn't work, right? Because then I avoid that roadblock in my growth. No, that's huge. What do you think is, like, the major difference between Pound Town and some of the other, you know, like, I mean, you know, if I'm going to go get a burger, right, I got what, I got McDonald's, I got Burger King, I got Wendy's, I got five guys,

if I want something a little bit nicer. Why should I go to Poundown instead? What sets you guys apart? So, one, the name. Yeah, yeah, I love it. I'm going down to pound town. It draws a lot of attention. Two, and I'll stick to this, is the quality of our food.

I mean, really, I mean, you've been here twice now. You can taste the difference. Yeah, no, it's incredible. And then third is really comes down to customer service and price. I'm at the price point where it's affordable for people. It's a really good burger, but all of our quality food is great. So I'm afforded the luxury of being able to stay in that price point because I want to be for everybody. You know, I don't want to circle myself just down to one set of people.

Yeah. Rainier, after, you know, talking to you a bit, too, it seems like you're very prone in the community, right? It seems like you care about the Syracuse community and stuff. Yeah. I don't know. Can you speak a little bit to that? Like, what are you trying to bring to the Syracuse community? Yeah, so over the years, I've done a lot of donating.

We have a non-for-profit in East Syracuse. We did a project with Ryan Benz. He converted, I think, 26 units of the old school into a place. apartments and they approached me about leaving the gym, right? It was going to get torn down and put into a parking lot. And I had the ability at the time to like get back to the community. Some people reached out to me. The director of youth sports over there.

Steve Graham, great guy, by the way. He's ran the basketball gym for me for the last three years. We do a lot of kids, youth programs and things like that. And it's a good way for me to feel like I, I'm doing my part. Beautiful. Cool. Well, the remainder of our food. just arrived and I don't know we've also got Matt here in the background Matt can I can I

hand you this mic and have you kind of like I don't know lead the food eating portion of this thing or not so much or yeah I guess so we got our food and Randy was nice enough to get us a sampling of a bunch of other things too yeah we got about 8,000 calories on the table in front of us it's awesome I'm very excited before I dive in Randy tell me what is what is this awesome thing I got in front of me here you know to add to the diversity of the burger, we added chicken sandwiches. This is actually our in-house breading. Okay.

We don't use buttermilk, and we actually make that cold saw from scratch every day. Dang. And we came up with different ways. It's poured with our sweet hot honey drizzle. And I came up with different variations of our sandwiches that I feel like people would enjoy instead of just being just a plain Jane chicken sandwich. So then obviously our hand-cut fries, that's what a lot of people love. We cut our fries daily.

Every morning. Look at this monster of a chicken. You got half a chicken here, dude. But what's crazy is that's not a breast. Oh, really? That's actually in a tenderloin. I'm going for it, guys. I'm going.

Man. Oh, you can hear the crunch. That's the messiest thing I've ever done on camera. Damn, is that good. I'm sorry, you said that's not buttermilk, Brad? That is not buttermilk. And I can't tell you what it is. Not like margarine milk?

No. It's a trade secret. Dude, that is incredible. We got these fries here. And I got to say, they're hand-cut fries, right? They're fresh. I don't want to give away any of your trade secrets, but I'm going to tell you, if you run a restaurant,

this is how you make French fries. Correct. It reminds me it back in the day locally. People remember Zebs. Yep. Zebs was famous for doing exactly this sort of thing, and I miss it. This reminds me of it.

It's just so much different than your average cookie cutter frozen fries that everywhere else has. Yeah, you know, people appreciate the quality, right? Like, you know, when you just order a basic frozen fry, it doesn't have the same taste. It's incredible. So is it, let me ask you this, is it the reason that nobody does it because it's a ton of work? Is it really challenging to make this kind of french fries? It's labor intensive. Yeah.

Right? Like, you have to have somebody come in. But we plan for that, right? Sure. The way we run our process is, you know, we have somebody come in the morning and prep. They're here for two or three hours. They knock everything out. And then they go work the line.

And I'm able to keep staff in control because the only things you can really control in the restaurant business is labor. Yeah. And food cost. So we're really good about our waste. And we're really good about how we process everything in the morning, how we operate. That's a big focus of ours. Now, some folks will see here in the episode a little bit of behind.

the scenes, but something that always impressed me when we first started learning about your operation here is how efficient you have it with the employees and the assembly line. And you run a massive, very busy restaurant with very few folks running around here. Yeah, we have two people prepping in the morning and then we run the line with three people during the day and then, you know, anywhere from three to six employees Friday and Saturday. but it's because we created the system that allows the free flow, that everything is easy, everybody knows their job, they communicate well, and I'll be honest with you,

I've had most of my employees that are here right now since I've started. That's awesome. That's awesome. We've started to add a little bit, obviously, because we're opening some new locations. Yeah. And they're just blending in, you know, when you fit in. People enjoy working with you.

So since you mentioned that, new locations, where are people going to be able to find you? So we'll be in Auburn, the old, citizen building. People in Auburn are very familiar with that building. It was a newspaper for a whole time. Kind of right in the middle of town. It is. It's right next to prison city. And the thing I'm most excited about, it's going to be very unique to that town. Yeah. We're going to have a rooftop. We're going to have an outdoor pergola. We're going to be able to host like 90 people outside. It seems like the city we're going to do like a black style party, kind of like Coleman's does here on

Thursdays. But we're going to be able to host a ban and about 200 people outside. And I'm really excited about that. I brought another restaurant partner out there. So we're more of like a community, not a community kitchen, but like multiple kitchens, like a food court. Yeah. Just on a nicer scale. So margaritas is going to be my neighbor. Cool. We're going to operate the bar together.

So we're really excited about that. That's really neat. That's really neat. Randy, I got to ask you, we've talked about my incredible chicken sandwich that I'll be honest. I want to stop talking and eat more of. But we'll continue the interview. It's all good. What is this bowl of awesome in front of you right here?

So this is our bacon cheese fries. This is fresh bacon. We cook it here. Handcuffed fries still. And then our cheese sauce, it's made from scratch every day. We still can only make it in a quarter pan because we haven't, or a half pan, excuse me, because we haven't figured out the recipe to keep the consistency the same. I see.

To make it past that. So whenever you step into our cooler, you're going to see like four or five half pans. That's incredible. Wow. What would you say out of all the dishes? And of course we got the burgers and the bowl, and we'll even look at those again in a minute. But out of everything that you have here, what is the most popular item that? It's our Pound Town Pub Burger. We actually are top 10 right now in New York State in the best burger competition.

And that burger is actually the one registered into the competition. Wow. What's the criteria? Is it just people just vote for what they feel is the best? Do they give you any standards to go by? It's like a three-step process. The first process is you have to be nominated by somebody or a bunch of people. The second process is votes because you're going against a bunch of people in New York State. I don't know how they determine that or how you know people are voting for you. Yeah.

So you just basically put it on social media. You market to your customers. And then the third and final step is the actual beef committee comes out. The beef committee? Yeah, the New York State Beef Council. Wow. They come out and they... I thought I was a part.

Yeah, right. They come out and test the food, and then they give you a rating based on presentation, taste, and quality. So we're excited. I wonder if they wear suits that are like cow print,

how cool. I actually think they hide. We're here from the beef committee. But that's why we're on the lookout, right? We're like, anytime anybody orders a Poundtown pub, we're like, it's got to look perfect. Hey, that'll keep you in line, right?

Yeah, it does. So that's over, that portion of it. That portion of it, that portion, over on the 10th. We passed that so we finished top 10 and now we're just waiting on the Beef Council we'll find out by the 5th or the 10th of next month. So we're excited. Wow. So you think so what you're saying is they might even like secret shop you. That's what they do. Yeah, got you. They don't tell you. They come in and they secret shop you. They try your food and could be anybody. They give you a rating. Yeah. Could be you. I'm with the Beef Council,

guys. I know it. He infiltrated. He's undercover. Now I have to kill you both. Yeah. Nobody's supposed to know that. Randy, real quick, and then we'll just dig in here. We've got a couple other dishes. We've got this incredible, looks like a bowl of chicken and sauce, and what's all in that one? Yeah, so that's our handbred at tenders. We cut up two tenderloin tenders that we bred. We make our homemade mac and cheese, and then we pour our pound sauce across the top to give it that bold flavor.

Dude, and speaking of mac and cheese, I keep hearing things about this mac and cheese at this place, that it's like the most wonderful and unique mac and cheese in town. What's that all about? Yeah, so we spent a lot of time in the test kitchen messing with different types of mac and cheese. And I didn't want it to taste like anybody else's. I didn't want it to look like anybody else's. I wanted to be very different.

And actually, what's funny is Larry is lactose intolerant. I was my best friend that runs the shop here of 20 years, almost 20 years. He actually was like researching different things. And when we were working with a chef, they're like, why don't you try it? a couple different variations. So we did in bowls to get it on a small scale. And then he added a certain ingredient. And we were like, whoa, how did the guy

that's lactose intolerant, able to figure this out? That's awesome. He had to take a pill every time he tried something. So it's hilarious. He's like deathly cannot do milk. That's crazy. That's crazy. But yeah, man, what a result.

It's awesome. Awesome food. Randy, the basics of this place we should give everybody. Like, where do they find you? What are your hours? All that fun stuff. Yeah, so we're right here downtown. We're at 208 Water Street.

We are in the old board and bar space. We share the space with big fellas. And, you know, I really like the two restaurant concept. It gives people the opportunity to come in here and try different things. And as we were both starting, right? We were both brand new to the area as far as, like, what we were bringing to the table. And it gave us an opportunity to kind of grow together. And, you know, I'm excited.

because they're going to come to Cicero with me. And we're going to do the two restaurant deal again because I think people sometimes, you may come in and want a burger, and maybe the person you're with wants pasta. And we were able to give those variation of options to people, and I love that. That's pretty cool.

Yeah. And I think that's what makes us unique, right? We're a destination. And you can have a different type of food. They're very southern comfort, steak, pasta. Their Cajun pasta, by the way, is phenomenal. And then maybe next time we can get them to, you guys can sit with them and kind of get to know a little bit about them. But their story is pretty unique too.

Cool. That's awesome, man. This is all wonderful. I'd love to see the success of this. I'd love to see some good quality food. Somebody really takes pride in it. I appreciate that. And you can see it, man.

I mean, we were talking recently. I think Amanda came and visited one of your other locations. And there you are behind the counter working. And your hands deep in all of it. on top of it. Yeah, I try to work at least one or two days everywhere. You know, I think it garners their respect to your employees. Sure. See you. But then they work harder, right? They work hard for me because they know that I'll go in, I'll clean the bathroom, I'm off the floors, I'll make burgers, I'll jump in where it need be. That's awesome, man.

I love hearing that. Randy Poundtown Burgers, this is the place to be in Syracuse. Best burger, best chicken sandwich you can find anywhere in Central New York. Come on down. You'll see the secret counsel, they'll release their report soon, but I'm confident you're going to be pretty high in the list. That's meet on the street. That's it. That's it, guys. All right, I'm Matt. Noah's over there.

Danny's behind the camera. Amanda's also behind another camera. We brought the whole team to Poundown, guys. It's awesome. This has been good news, York. Peace out.