Mac Daddie’s
This menu was designed by a madman, and I cannot wait to eat it all up. We are on South Main Street in Haverhill, Massachusetts, at a one of a kind restaurant named Mac Daddie's. And when I say one of a kind, I mean truly unique. Every item on this menu is eccentric and eclectic and quirky and delicious, and as they say, it's a little bit extra. This place is owned and operated by David Jackson, along with his fiance Jessica. You will always see David and Jessica here. They're working, they're cooking, they're greeting customers. They're coming up with even crazier comfort food combinations every day. So their customers are Mac Daddie's aficionados. David is usually pretty easy to spot. I mean, after all, the guy is the logo. It opened up about a year ago, and they called it Mac Daddie's because he is obsessed with macaroni and cheese. But over the past year, the menu has expanded way beyond macaroni and cheese, and now everything here is ‘gotta get it territory’.
Since the beginning, Mac Daddie's has always been about macaroni and cheese, and these guys take their mac and cheese extremely seriously. The cheese sauce base is made fresh every single day. The shells are big enough that every single piece of pasta is loaded up with that cheese sauce. They have 10 different signature flavors of mac and cheese. The number one mac and cheese I would recommend is the Nashville hot chicken mac and cheese. And let me tell you something, this chicken is hot. Super crispy and tender chicken cutlets that are chopped up fine and they are smothered and covered in this signature Nashville hot spice rub, and then it's all drizzled with some of their homemade cool ranch dressing. This has everything you want in a big old bowl of comfort food, hot, steamy, creamy, comforting and plenty of spice. They ain’t kidding, Nashville hot indeed.
This menu wants to stand out from the competition, but there are some items you can get at most of your local houses of pizza. You can get your wings. You can get your pizza, but they do, of course, everything differently. The Mac Daddie's chicken wings are outstanding. They are fresh, never frozen. Jumbo wings. They fry them to order, and they come in all kinds of sauces. My favorite is the maple Bulleit bourbon barbecue. This is made with real Vermont maple syrup, some actual Bulleit bourbon. So there's a little liquor in there, and that's combined with their own homemade bacon jam. You have the sweetness, the smokiness, that maple flavor coming through. It's just a perfectly intoxicating chicken wing.
And if you're not afraid to just load up. You gotta get baked. Yes, they do some of the biggest and best baked potatoes I have found. I like to get my potato packed and stacked with pulled pork, cheddar cheese, Mexican street corn, a little crema, little cotija cheese and a sprinkle of hickory barbecue sauce. And since it's a baked potato, you can almost pretend like this is a healthy meal. It's probably one of the healthiest meals in the whole place. Figure that out.
Underrated item alert: the quesadillas. Or, as they call them here at Mac Daddie's, the quesadillas, or just ‘dillas’. Shout out to all the Napoleon Dynamite fans out there.
They come in a few different styles. My favorite is LaBeouf. And the word LaBeouf actually means ‘the beef’ in French. So yes, this is all about the beef. This is a real Mexican style barbacoa. So it is slow cooked, slow simmered, ultra juicy, ultra tender. Basically, it's quesa-delicious.
Burgers are the number one selling item here at Mac Daddie's. And these aren't just regular burgers. These are smash burgers. They actually do their smash burgers a little bit differently. First, they take the patty and they put it onto the grill, and they let that sizzle up a little bit. Then once you get a little bit of color on that beef, then they start to smash. Give that beef a flip, then right on top of the patties, some caramelized onions, throw on a couple nice slices of cheddar cheese. It all gets slathered in their house, made daddy sauce, sort of like a gourmet scratch, made burger sauce. So the burger ends up being crispy and gooey, cheesy and juicy. That, my friends is a smashing success.
The smash burger might be the number one seller, but the steak and cheese is not far behind. It starts with fresh shaved ribeye steak that goes right onto the griddle, then it's just sliced up with a spatula as it's cooking, you have some onions in there. For cheese, they're using Cooper sharp and this is the kind of stuff you get in Philly delicious. Gooey melts perfectly, and the teriyaki sauce almost makes its own broth. And like any great sandwich, the bread is key. It's a mess to eat. It's a lot of food, but I ain't complaining. I could get this every day.
At the end of the day, this is what I like to call a ‘cheat day restaurant’. You don't come here to count calories, you come here to indulge and no regrets. Just come to Mac Daddie's in Haverhill.
