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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Fred’s Texas Cafe has been feeding Fort Worth since 1978, back when the restaurant was a scrappy outpost in a then-overlooked stretch of West Seventh, long before that part of town turned into Artisan Circle and everything around it got expensive. Forty-eight years later, the burger joint that built its reputation on Fred Burgers and ice-cold schooners is celebrating two birthdays at once, and it’s giving Crowley the gift.
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Burger Schmurger is bringing the sizzle back to the Lake Highlands Fourth of July Parade, returning for its third consecutive year with a burger-grilling parade trailer, festive giveaways and a community celebration that extends beyond the parade route.
Taking place on Saturday, July 4, 2026 at 9 a.m., the annual Lake Highlands Fourth of July Parade is one of Dallas’ most beloved Independence Day traditions, drawing thousands of residents, families and visitors to celebrate the holiday together. Following an enthusiastic reception during its participation the past two years, Burger Schmurger is returning with even more patriotic spirit and neighborhood fun.
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In 1985, John Green opened a burger joint on Greenville Avenue near 635 with no restaurant experience whatsoever. Six months in, he was done — overwhelmed, ready to sell. Morris and Susanne Bagheri bought it that same year with a plan: clean it up, improve it, flip it for a profit. Morris had decades of restaurant experience by then, having worked every job from dishwasher to manager to put himself through college, and eventually co-owned a French continental restaurant in Dallas. “We never planned to stay here,” Susanne has said. “It was not our thing.”
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Chef Eliott Azoulay trained at the École Ducasse in Paris, worked at La Fontaine de Mars on the Left Bank, and spent time at Le Petit Nice in Marseille — a three-Michelin-star restaurant overlooking the Mediterranean where the cooking is as serious as anything in France. He relocated to Dallas specifically to open Le Bistrot Bar Sardine for Vandelay Hospitality, a candlelit room with checkerboard tiles and flickering tapers at 6805 Snider Plaza in University Park that opened in December 2024. The menu is exactly what it should be: escargot in butter, oysters, salmon tartare, scallops, croque monsieur, salade niçoise. The food is genuine and unhurried and the room feels correctly like Paris.
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Dallas has never needed an excuse to argue about burgers. The city has old-school drive-ins that haven’t changed a thing in decades, craft burger spots with rotating monthly specials, and a handful of proper restaurants where the beef program is serious enough to anchor an entire evening. What follows is a working list of the places worth knowing, organized roughly by part of town.
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There’s a formula a lot of neighborhood bars follow: pour the drinks cold, keep the food simple, and don’t try too hard. Hillside Tavern, parked in the Hillside Village shopping center at 6465 E. Mockingbird Lane in East Dallas, mostly ignores that formula. The bar food here is better than it has any obligation to be, and the wine list is legitimately good — not the two token bottles on a chalkboard you’d expect from a sports bar with eight televisions.
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Everybody has a burger they measure all other burgers against. Most people can tell you exactly where they ate it and roughly what year. Mine was at a counter in Chicago that doesn’t exist anymore. It was nothing special to look at — wax paper, a paper boat of fries, a cup of water nobody asked for. But I thought about that burger for three days after I left town and I have been chasing it ever since. That’s the thing about a great burger. It doesn’t announce itself. It just stays with you.
Filed under Steven Doyle
