Charles Kincaid opened a grocery store on Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth in 1946. Nobody involved that year had any reason to think they were starting a hamburger institution. It was a neighborhood market, the first in the area to run separate specialty departments, and its full-service meat counter was the part of the business that would eventually swallow everything else.
O.R. Gentry came home from World War II in 1947 and took the job of butcher and market manager. For almost two decades he cut meat and ran the counter the way any good grocer’s butcher would. Then in 1964, using the store’s own beef and produce, he started cooking hamburgers on a small griddle for customers who wandered by. There was no grand plan behind it. It was a guy with a griddle, feeding people who were already in the building to buy something else.
The burgers did not stay a side project for long. Word moved through the neighborhood the way it always does in Fort Worth, one satisfied customer at a time, and demand for O.R.’s hamburgers started outpacing demand for canned goods. The store added griddles. Shelves got sawed down to counter height so people had somewhere to eat standing up. None of it was designed. It was a grocery store getting quietly overtaken by what people actually wanted, which turned out to be a hamburger, not a can of soup.
In 1967, O.R. Gentry bought the store outright. A decade later, in 1977, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram named Kincaid’s the best burger in the city, and that same year a national food critics’ panel judging 400 hamburger restaurants across the country called it the best burger in America. That is not a local puff title. That is a national panel picking a converted grocery store on Camp Bowie over every drive-in and diner they tested.
O.R. retired in 1982 and handed the business to his son Ronald, the second generation. Ronald had grown up working the counter, so the transition wasn’t a stranger learning a business, it was a son taking over something he’d already had his hands in for years. Under Ronald, the last of the grocery inventory disappeared. By 1992 Kincaid’s was fully a hamburger restaurant, and the Gentry family hand-built picnic tables so there would finally be real seating instead of standing room at cut-down shelves. Ronald’s father-in-law, Morris Gardner, ran the original Camp Bowie location for thirteen years and became one of those figures regulars just knew by name, the guy behind the counter who made a fast-food transaction feel like a conversation with someone from the neighborhood.
Kincaid’s took cash and checks only for sixty years. Credit cards didn’t show up until 2006, which tells you something about how little the place felt the need to keep up with anybody else’s idea of modern.
Ronald’s sons, Christian and Jonathan, joined the business in 2007 and helped open the third location, off Hulen in south Fort Worth. A second location had already opened in Southlake in 2005, and Arlington followed in 2008, with Alliance added not long after. Christian and Jonathan took full ownership in 2019, making them the third generation to run the place, and today they operate all five locations, including the original storefront where their great-grandfather’s business partner first hung a sign.
The menu has grown some since O.R.’s single griddle. The Cowtown Deluxe, built with bacon, pimento cheese, grilled onions, and jalapenos, became the first signature burger in 2009. The Texas Firecracker Burger won fan-favorite honors at the Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival, one of three festival wins for the restaurant over the years, and eventually landed on the permanent menu. The onion rings, a recipe the Gentry family developed in 2011, now get mentioned almost as often as the burgers themselves. All of it is still ground in-house from Black Angus beef that never sees a freezer, a detail the family has never stopped repeating because it has never stopped being true.
The menu goes well beyond the burger case. The chili cheese dogs have their own following, built on Nathan’s franks and a Texas-style chili with no beans. The fried okra shows up on more tables than almost any other side. And the Blue Bell milkshakes, hand-dipped and offered in chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, and a rotating seasonal flavor, are the reason some regulars order dessert before they’ve finished their burger. Texas Monthly and Texas Highways have both put Kincaid’s on a cover or in a feature in the past several years, and in 2025 the restaurant marked eighty years since Charles Kincaid first opened his doors. A book, The Perfect Hamburger by Glenn Dromgoole, was written about the place back in 1994, built entirely from the stories and memories of longtime patrons, which tells you people were already treating it as a piece of Fort Worth history three decades ago.
What holds all of this together isn’t nostalgia marketing. It’s that the same family has been making the calls since 1967, through three generations, without selling out to a chain or losing the building that started it. The original Camp Bowie location still carries the bones of the grocery store it used to be. The concrete floors are original. The counters cut from old shelving are original. The name on the door has changed exactly once, from Charles Kincaid to the Gentry family, and it’s stayed that way for going on sixty years.
The original location is at 4901 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth, open Monday through Saturday from 11am to 8pm and Sunday from 11am to 3pm. The other four locations, in Hulen, Alliance, Southlake, and Arlington, run Monday through Saturday from 11am to 9pm and Sunday from 11am to 7pm. Full menu and details are at kincaidshamburgers.com.
