The State Fair of Texas opens Friday, September 25, and runs 24 days through Sunday, October 18, at Fair Park. This is the fair’s 140th year, and the theme is “Stars, Stripes, and Howdies.” Gates open at 10 a.m. daily, closing at 9 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday, with last entry at 9.
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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.
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Happy hour burgers have a bad reputation, and most of them earn it. A restaurant slaps a discount on a sad, dry patty for two hours a day and calls it a deal. You end up paying half price for something you wouldn’t order at full price either.
That’s not what’s happening at the five places below. There’s a difference between a bar burger going cheap and a real restaurant discounting the same burger it serves all night, made the same way, by the same kitchen, just priced lower for a stretch of the afternoon. These are the second kind. And sometimes only a great burger will hit the spot.
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We wrote about Jonny Butch back in May, before most people in Dallas-Fort Worth had heard his name. If you missed it, here’s the short version: Butch works the pits at Goldee’s Barbecue in Fort Worth, the place Texas Monthly has ranked number one in the state and that Food & Wine put among the best new chef programs in America in 2024. Before that, he cooked at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York and staged at Noma in Copenhagen. His resume reads like two careers stitched together — fine dining at the highest level, then a deliberate turn toward the oldest, most honest version of Texas barbecue he could find.
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Walk past Cock & Bull on Gaston Avenue and you might not stop. There’s no big sign pulling you in, no neon in the window doing its job. Just a door, and behind it one of the better neighborhood bars in East Dallas.
It’s small in there. One bar, a wall of booths, red walls with paintings of roosters and cattle, a jukebox somebody actually feeds money into. The wood is old. The lighting is low. When the place fills up on a weekend, and it does, you’re aware of everyone in the room. That’s not a complaint — that’s the whole point of a pub like this. People come here because they want to be somewhere, not just somewhere with a drink.
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The keg tap swings down on the first ceremonial barrel at Addison Circle Park on September 17, and for four days after that, Addison sounds nothing like Addison. Polka horns replace traffic noise. Lederhosen and dirndls outnumber golf shirts. A crowd that regularly tops 45,000 people by the closing hour files through the gates at 4970 Addison Circle to drink Paulaner out of half-liter steins and watch grown adults hold a full one straight out at arm’s length until their shoulders give out.
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The patio at the Old Monk is the best argument in Dallas for showing up somewhere with no plan. Wood benches, trees overhead, a smattering of people who each found their own reason to be out there, and a server who has seen every version of your evening and isn’t worried about it.
You sit down for one and stand up at closing. Everybody does it. Nobody minds.
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The cheese enchilada is the plate nobody brags about. Two corn tortillas, cheese, chili gravy. Nowhere to hide. You either have it or you don’t.
Tupinamba has it, and has had it longer than almost anybody in Dallas.
The cheese enchiladas come out on a plate hot enough that the cheese is still moving. The gravy is dark and beefy with none of the flat canned taste that ruins this dish all over town, and the tortillas hold instead of dissolving. That’s the test, and most kitchens fail it.
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