Chef Eliott Azoulay trained at the École Ducasse in Paris, worked at La Fontaine de Mars on the Left Bank, and spent time at Le Petit Nice in Marseille — a three-Michelin-star restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean where the cooking is as serious as anything in France. He relocated to Dallas specifically to open Le Bistrot Bar Sardine for Vandelay Hospitality, a candlelit room with checkerboard tiles and flickering tapers at 6805 Snider Plaza in University Park that opened in December 2024. The menu is exactly what it should be: escargot in butter, oysters, salmon tartare, scallops, croque monsieur, salade niçoise. The food is genuine and unhurried and the room feels correctly like Paris.
The most popular item on the menu is a burger.
Azoulay grinds his own beef daily from a proprietary blend of cuts he keeps to himself, which is the first signal that this is not a casual addition. The patty goes on the flat top — but here’s where the technique diverges from every other smash burger in Dallas: Azoulay doesn’t smash the patty. He smashes the buns. Both halves of the brioche go face-down on the hot griddle until they compress and develop a crust on the inside, trapping the butter in the bread rather than letting it run off. The result is a bun that has texture on its face and gives the burger a structural integrity that holds through the last bite.
Two slices of rye bread go on the grill alongside, topped with Swiss and provolone and a garlic aioli so loaded with fresh garlic it qualifies as a commitment. One slice gets a pile of jammy caramelized onions that have been cooked long enough to lose any sharpness. The other gets sautéed mushrooms in butter. The charred beef patty finds the middle, and the whole assembly gets pressed onto the flat top until the cheeses melt into the meat and the bread crackles when you bite through it.
The restaurant sells roughly 50 of them a day. On a menu that includes escargot and scallops, that number is either an embarrassment or a vindication depending on how you feel about French chefs who understand that a burger made with discipline is as serious as anything else coming out of a kitchen. Azoulay appears to feel the latter. The fries come alongside, shoestring-thin, perfectly fried, the kind that disappear off the plate before you’ve finished the burger and you don’t notice until they’re gone.
The room is small — a handful of tables, bar seating, a patio outside when the weather is right. Reservations are recommended for dinner. The all-day menu runs 11 a.m. to closing for walk-ins. The burger is available any time the kitchen is open, which given the volume they’re doing is the right call. Open daily 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Thursday through Saturday until midnight. Reservations at thebarsardine.com or on OpenTable. Phone: (214) 838-5040.
Next time someone tells you the best burger in the Park Cities is at a burger restaurant, take them to a French bistro and let the evidence speak for itself.
