Fort Worth has kept a good thing mostly to itself for seven years. That ends this August, when the eighth annual Fort Worth Burger Week runs August 17 through 23 and Dallas finally gets a Burger Week of its own, held the same week, with the same beautifully simple premise: around 30 restaurants per city, each serving a specialty burger for $8.
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Somewhere up Preston Road, past the point where the restaurants start repeating themselves, a tavern called Bit of Grub is having more fun than anyone else on the strip. The menu alone earns the visit before a single plate lands.
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The food conversation in this town rarely makes it south of the Trinity, which is how a restaurant like Mi Sazon can cook honest Mexican food on South Polk Street for the better part of two decades without the attention it deserves. The regulars have never needed anyone’s permission to fill the place. The rest of us are late.
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Somewhere along the way, H-E-B stopped thinking like a grocery store. The clearest evidence sits inside the company’s Mueller location in Austin, where shoppers can finish the weekly run, order duck fat fried chicken from a Top Chef alum, and settle in at a full bar with a Texas whiskey cocktail before heading home.
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Somewhere on the menu at The Londoner, next to the burger description, sits the line that tells you everything about this place: “A burger to lose your head over.” It’s a Tower of London joke, the kind of dry British wink that could only come from a pub that named itself after a city instead of a saint or a street.
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Smokey John’s Bar-B-Que and Home Cooking turns fifty this year, and the story of how it got here is better than most restaurants could invent.
It starts with a mortgage broker. In the mid-seventies, John Reaves was juggling home loans, roofing, construction, and insurance businesses around Dallas, and every holiday season he thanked his clients with hickory-smoked turkeys and hams he cured himself. The gesture got out of hand in the best possible way. People started asking for them year-round. At one point the family had more than a hundred turkeys and hams stacked in the house waiting for pickup. A friend finally told him the obvious. You need to open a restaurant.
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Todd and Misty David started Cattleack Barbeque in 2010 as something to do in retirement. That plan did not survive contact with the public. Word got out, lines formed, and what was supposed to be a quiet hobby turned into one of the most decorated barbecue operations in North Texas. In 2023, Todd sold the business to Andrew Castelan, a 34-year-old former accountant who had been working there long enough to know what he was getting into. The name is a pun on Cadillac.
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Justin Fourton grew up going to his grandfather’s ranch in Abilene — a place called Pecan Lodge. The old man taught him how to build a fire, how to manage a smoker, and how to wait. That last part turns out to be the most important. Good barbecue is a function of patience more than almost anything else, and the brisket that comes out of Pecan Lodge in Deep Ellum is eighteen hours of patience made edible.
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