Ask anybody who grew up in Dallas before the 2000s about Prince of Hamburgers, and watch what happens to their face.
First comes the smile. Then the story. Maybe it was the back seat of a station wagon on a summer night, windows down, waiting for a carhop to come back across the lot with a tray. Maybe it was a first car and a first date, or a Saturday night with a car full of friends circling Lemmon Avenue just to see who else was out. Everybody seems to have one.
The Prince of Hamburgers sat at 5200 Lemmon Ave., a little white building with red-and-white striped awnings and a sign that didn’t waste words. You pulled under the canopy, and before long a carhop was at your window to take the order. If the lot was full, and on weekend nights it often was, you could squeeze into the tiny dining room instead. Nobody really wanted to, though. Eating in the car was the whole thing.
The menu wasn’t complicated, and nobody wanted it to be. A cheeseburger grilled hot and greasy enough to soak the wrapper. A milkshake so thick the straw stood up on its own. And the drink a lot of people still bring up first, house-made root beer poured into a frosted mug that left a ring of ice on your fingers. Order a root beer float and the kids in the back seat would go quiet for a full five minutes, which every parent in Dallas understood as a minor miracle.
The place had been around longer than almost anyone’s parents. Doug Prince opened it in the late 1920s, back when Lemmon Avenue was still the edge of town. The story goes that he lost his job selling hats when the Depression hit, then found his next act at the State Fair of Texas, where he picked up a way of frying burgers in their own juices on a flat grill. In the early days he ran the stand alone, walking out to each car to take the order, cooking it himself and carrying it back out. He made his own root beer from the start.
Prince didn’t stay in Dallas long. In the 1930s he headed to Houston and built a whole chain of Prince’s drive-ins there. But the Lemmon Avenue stand kept going without him for decades, through three generations of customers, while the street around it filled up with car lots, chain restaurants and everything else.
Then, in 2005, it closed. The land under that little building had become worth far more than the burgers, and before long the canopies and the sign were gone. We wrote about it back in 2016 in A Burger We Miss, and readers wrote in asking exactly where it had stood. That tells you something. People don’t ask for the address of a place they’ve stopped thinking about.
What people miss isn’t really one burger. It’s the whole ritual. The headlights, the tray hooked onto a half-rolled window, the cold mug, a parent saying just this once. You can’t rebuild that with a drive-thru speaker.
You can still get close, though. Keller’s Drive-In at 10554 Harry Hines Blvd. still sends carhops out to the car with burgers on poppy seed buns and baskets of tots, every day from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Bring the kids, roll the window down and start a few memories of your own. Someday they’ll tell the story too.
