Tramontes Meat and Seafood

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Saturday: Smoked Baby Back Ribs

Possibly Baton Rouge’s best burger and so much more than a meat market

In 2002, brothers Mike and Brad Tramonte, along with their father David, opened a specialty meat store with a small lunch counter on Jefferson Highway. “I had worked as a meat cutter and the whole family cooked,” said Mike. “So it just made sense.”

Twelve years later, the South Baton Rouge natives have one of the largest meat markets in town. Their small deli has grown to a fifty-seat restaurant with an expansive catering operation as well as a mobile kitchen that serves their famous Tramonte’s hamburgers all over town. Mike attributes their success to the demand for high-quality, locally made products. His love for all things local doesn’t stop with the offerings in the meat counter. “Not only do I serve locally grown food in the restaurant, I use all local distributors or businesses for everything from plumbing to paper towels,” he said. Tramonte’s sources its fresh seafood straight from the Gulf, and all of their meat is cut on the premises daily. Tramonte’s grinds all its own sausages. “Our chicken sausage, alligator sausage, and our jalapeño sausage are the real hidden gems of our store. Not enough people look in our freezer. It amazes me,” said Mike. “We also sell smoked sausage. As far as I know, no one else in Baton Rouge makes smoked sausage as well as andouille.”

At lunchtime the restaurant packs in business people and locals. Many come from across town to enjoy what might very well be the best hamburger in Baton Rouge. The one-pound patty is perfectly seasoned with Tramonte’s house blend of spices. Small flecks of onions are also mixed into the meat. Every patty is hand pressed and cooked to order on the grill. Each week between the lunch counter, retail sales, and the catering business, Tramonte’s employees will make between 1,500 and 2,000 patties—all by hand. A menu item and a catering menu favorite is Tramonte’s thin-cut rib eye poboy paired with beer-battered onion rings. Other offerings include fried seafood baskets, boudin balls, and roast beef poboys; but a lunch counter would not be complete without a rotating list of daily specials. Customers flock to the store on Wednesdays for the homemade lasagna, but Mike believes that the jambalaya special on Thursday is their best.

“We just do a great jambalaya,” he said, “There is no real way to describe it until you have had it.”

Recently, the city’s love for Tramonte’s burgers and poboys caused the family to take its business on the road. They invested in a custom mobile kitchen and set up shop all over the city. Thursdays they post up in Bon Carré Business Center on Florida Boulevard. Most Fridays they can be found on the corner of North Street and 5th Street downtown, serving their fare to hungry state office workers. The business also has multiple rigs for off-site crawfish boils. A few years back, Tramonte’s got into the wild game processing business. Hunters can drop off their field-dressed deer in ice chests and Tramonte’s will finish butchering their meat as well as grinding cuts into sausages. All game is deboned, vacuum-packed, and labeled before it is returned to the hunter. November and December are the busiest months of the year for the market, what with dressing game, catering holiday parties, and frying turkeys for customers to take home. “Its crazy at Christmas because it is also the heart of deer season,” said Mike, “But we get it all done.” Patrons can also order smoked turkeys and baked hams. Mike is most proud of his prime rib roast that will feed an entire family. In addition to the meat market, restaurant, deli counter, and mobile kitchen operations, Tramonte’s also serves as a retail store carrying Kamado Joe Ceramic Grills and Icey-Tek Coolers. It also boasts an above-average beer and wine selection and will order customers specialty kegs. When asked about his favorite part of his multi-faceted business, Mike shrugged and said, “I just like the fact that we are able to successfully juggle it all. I mean, we are really six businesses that all work together.”