Today is National Cheeseburger Day, which is a real, official, calendar-sanctioned holiday, and also an excuse nobody needs twice. Dallas doesn’t have one burger. It has about forty of them, spread across every zip code and every price point, from a couple of bucks at a drive-in that hasn’t changed since Eisenhower to something you’d genuinely think twice about ordering unless someone else is paying. Here are five, cheapest to most ridiculous.
Start at Keller’s Drive-In, because everyone eventually does. Jack Keller opened his first Dallas drive-in around 1950 after learning the trade at Kirby’s Pig Stand, the joint often credited as the country’s first drive-in restaurant. Seventy-plus years later, almost nothing has moved. You pull under a carport, a carhop takes your order, and the food comes back on a tray hung off your car window. The menu is still bolted to a cinderblock wall: a plain burger runs around two dollars, and the No. 5, a double-meat cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and special dressing on a poppy-seed bun, tops out around $5.45. Bring cash. They mean it.
For something you can hold in one hand and still call a meal, Easy Slider does the Roadside: two sliders for $12, Angus beef under cheddar, grilled jalapeños, crispy fried onions and a barbecue sauce that leans smoky rather than sweet. Caroline Perini and Miley Holmes started it as a food truck back in December 2011 before it found four walls, first in Deep Ellum and now just across the railroad tracks in East Dallas at 3905 East Side Ave. The patties still come out cooked medium rare, which most places wouldn’t bother doing for something the size of a slider.
A step up in size and price, and a genuine detour from everything else on this list, is the Chimi Burger at Picadera, now living inside Trinity Cider in Deep Ellum. Chef Michael Tavarez grew up in Queens working his family’s Dominican bodegas before moving to Dallas and finding no Dominican food anywhere in the city, so he built his own out of his mother’s recipes. The chimi is a Dominican street classic: a thick, griddled patty wrapped tight in a thin sheet of pan de agua, doused in a garlicky, citrusy sauce that’s meant to soak through the bread as you eat it. It runs about $14, with yuca fries worth the extra five bucks.
Then there’s the Big Mike Burger at Hurtado Barbecue, which carries more weight than its $16.99 price tag suggests. It’s two smoked quarter-pound smash patties, American cheese, bibb lettuce, garlic aioli, stacked high enough that you’ll need both hands. Chef-owner Brandon Hurtado named it after his best friend’s father, who died of cancer at 59, and a dollar from every burger sold still goes to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. It’s the rare menu item where ordering the biggest thing on the board actually does something.
And if you want to see what a burger looks like once it’s been handed to a real kitchen with a real view, ride the elevator up to Crown Block, the steakhouse that replaced the old revolving restaurant inside Reunion Tower. The Rosewood Ranches Wagyu burger comes with Taleggio cheese, red onion marmalade and triple-cooked fries on a brioche bun, for around $29, looking out over the entire Dallas skyline while you eat it. It will not be the best burger on this list. It might be the best view any burger in Texas has ever had.
Two dollars or twenty-nine, drive-in or high-rise, Dallas doesn’t really have a ceiling or a floor on this one. Pick your number and go find out.
Read about Lakewood Landijng and the burger we dream about.
