Bill and Lynn Gross opened their first hamburger stand in a converted fire station on Central Expressway in the early 1980s. That detail tends to get mentioned in passing whenever Chip’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers comes up, which is a shame, because it explains a lot about why the place still looks and feels the way it does more than forty years later: built for a crowd, built to move fast, built with the sort of bones that outlast whatever’s trendy that decade.
The Grosses eventually moved the concept to Knox/Henderson, where it built its reputation, before financial trouble forced the closure of a couple of expansion locations along the way. Brent Gamster bought the business in 2011, looking for something to keep him closer to home after years of turning around other people’s struggling restaurants. He didn’t reinvent Chip’s. He renovated the Lovers Lane location, built out a new one in Lakewood, and kept adding a store roughly every couple of years rather than trying to franchise it into something it was never built to be. Four locations now cover Park Cities, Lakewood, Plano, and Oak Cliff, and the burger itself hasn’t needed to change to keep up.
The signature burger at Chip’s comes as a wide, thin patty rather than a tall smashburger stack, a full third of a pound or, if you’re hungry enough to say so out loud, a half pound, set on a soft poppy-seed bun. That format matters more than it sounds like it should. A thin, wide patty gets more surface area against the grill, which means more crust, which means more of the actual flavor people are ordering a burger for in the first place. It’s an old-school build, closer to a diner burger than a gourmet one, and that’s clearly by design.
Where Chip’s gets unusual is the protein list underneath that classic format. Alongside the standard beef, the menu runs bison, turkey, tuna, a vegetarian patty, and a portobello mushroom cap built to eat like a burger rather than apologize for not being one. It’s a build-your-own operation from there, with caramelized onions, blue cheese, poblano peppers, bacon, and avocado among the add-ons, which means the same base burger format can go five or six different directions depending on what somebody orders.
The sides do real work here too. Shoestring fried onions, piled thin and crisp rather than battered into rings, function as the closer’s move for people who’ve been coming for years. Cheese fries and sweet potato fries round out the rest of the fryer lineup, and the milkshakes are hand-spun, thick enough that the straw becomes optional.
None of this is flashy, not trying to be. Chip’s has picked up recognition over the decades from Texas Monthly for its burgers, fries, and shakes, the sort of steady, repeat-visit praise that accumulates slowly rather than arriving in one viral moment. Four locations, one format, more than forty years, and a fire station origin story that explains more about the place than any tasting note could.
Locations are in Park Cities, Lakewood, Plano, and Oak Cliff. Full menu and hours are at thebestburgerever.com.
