- Jordan McCarty has owned Bender’s Brat House in Aurora since 2001. The walls are decorated with sports and music memorabilia. (Marla R. Keown/Aurora Sentinel)
Jordan McCarty didn’t want to mess with a tried and true formula when she took over Bender’s Braut Haus in 2001.
She had faith in the restaurant’s food, a wide-ranging menu that included lean pork bratwurst, carefully crafted side dishes like warm German potato salad and coleslaw and the restaurant’s signature “krautburger,” a sandwich made of a sweet roll dough with ground beef, cabbage, salt, pepper and onion baked into the middle.
“The original owner had such a great thing, and I just did not want to mess with it,” McCarty said. “There’s a very, very loyal fan base. We added a couple of things to the menu – an Italian sausage and a couple of little side dishes. But I did not want to touch the menu that much at all.”
As a new owner, McCarty wasn’t a stranger to the restaurant’s items – she’d learned the menu well when she worked as a server at the old location on 6th and Chambers as a Denver Academy high school student. Along with getting a sense of the food, McCarty had met the corps of loyal customers who’d been coming to dine on brats, krautburgers and homemade chili since 1976.
That success, staff says, has always been rooted in the recipes and preparation.
“It’s more German/Russian style. In a nutshell, we do not use any filler, or mystery meat, or fillings,” said Rick Johnson, a manager who’s been with the restaurant for 12 years. “We only use pork butt. It’s coarse ground instead of emulsified like a hot dog, and it’s only 8 grams of fat. Most others are 17 and up, so we’re way lean. It’s been like that forever.”
More than a decade since McCarty took over at Bender’s, the restaurant has remained a standout choice for traditional German food. But the owners have worked to incorporate a wider variety to stand out and expand their business model. Fare like Sheboygan bratwurst and German potato salad shares the menu with American staples like hamburgers, hot dogs and hot ham and cheese sandwiches. What’s more, the restaurant sells a wide variety of to-go items, including pork sausage links and mild Italian sausage at $5.75 a pound, sauerkraut, horseradish and fresh baked kaiser rolls.
“I think our main thing is that we make everything here on site, fresh every morning, using only the freshest ingredients. I think that’s our biggest edge that makes us stand out,” McCarty said. “The sausage is healthy, a leaner cut. It’s quite the process to do it, but I think it’s what makes us different.”
Keeping the sausage lean means processing about 100 pounds of meat every day. Meat purchased from suppliers is trimmed of fat and gristle by Bender’s staff of eight before it’s processed in the restaurant’s massive grinder. After it’s seasoned, the processed pork is then prepared in casings and hand-tied.
“The brats are really fun for all of us to do, the whole process of grinding the meat and stuffing it in casings,” McCarty said, adding that she learned her preparation and cooking skills after she bought the restaurant in 2001. “I really like how fast-paced it is.”
Apart from learning the art of cooking sausage, burgers and other items on the grill during a lunch rush, McCarty said the biggest challenge she’s faced since stepping into the management role at Bender’s has been tied to geography. Before moving to their current home on South Buckley Road, the restaurant had been on 6th and Chambers for more than 30 years. Picking up and moving across town meant keeping the loyalties of regulars who had come to the restaurant for decades, a feat that wasn’t simple for the Bender’s crew.
“Being somewhere that long, it was a big challenge I faced with this business. I still get phone calls every day asking if we’ve closed.” McCarty said.
The new location’s proximity to Buckley Air Force Base has drawn a regular crowd of servicemembers, McCarty said. On a recent afternoon, a customer from Buckley who didn’t want to be identified dined on a single bratwurst with cheese and said she visited the restaurant at least once a week, adding, “I like everything here.”
Selecting a favorite dish isn’t easy for Johnson, who’s had a hand in crafting and preparing Bender’s menu for 12 years. Still, he was quick to point to the restaurant’s signature krautburger, as well as its “Three-Pig” sandwich.
“If I don’t have a brat, I always have a cheese krautburger,” he said. “But I don’t know, that ‘Three Pigs’ is getting close to being my favorite, too. It’s a slice of ham, a slice of cheese, another slice of ham on top of that, a split brat on top of that with cheese and bacon bits on top. There are your three pigs.”
How to cook a goof fresh brat
Rick Johnson, manager at Bender’s Brat Haus, offers tips for cooking their fresh bratwurst:
“Our brats are so lean, that it’s best at 15 to 22 minutes, high heat on a gas grill. If you need to be sure, it has to have a core temperature of 140 degrees. We don’t use any out-of-country pork, we only use USA pork. If you had a pound, you’d just stick it on the grill and use one burner. “It’s lean because we trim out all the fat. We buy real lean and then we make it leaner. We cut out the glands and all the gristle. We really trim it lean, we’ve never changed a thing about the preparation.”