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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Look at what’s on this thing before you decide whether you’re the kind of person who orders it.
A beef patty, ground in house. A chicken fried mashed potato cake sitting on top of it, which is exactly what it sounds like and better than it has any right to be. Bacon. A fried onion ring, whole, riding the middle. And chorizo gravy over all of it, running down into whatever it can find.
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Ask ten people what they ordered at Bar Sardine last week and at least four of them will say a burger, in a French bistro built around escargot and steak Diane. Nobody planned it that way. That’s just what happened once people started eating there.
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Bonnie Shea spent years just trying to make sure her mother’s story didn’t disappear. Patty Lou Peters fronted an all-female western swing band called Patty Lou and the Texas Sweethearts back in the 1940s and 50s, back when female touring groups almost never existed. They piled into a convertible and drove routes stretching from Chicago to California, playing gigs along the way. Shea wanted people to know who her mother was. So she built her a restaurant.
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Bill and Lynn Gross opened their first hamburger stand in a converted fire station on Central Expressway in the early 1980s. That detail tends to get mentioned in passing whenever Chip’s Old Fashioned Hamburgers comes up, which is a shame, because it explains a lot about why the place still looks and feels the way it does more than forty years later: built for a crowd, built to move fast, built with the sort of bones that outlast whatever’s trendy that decade.
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Ye Olde Butcher Shop sits in a Plano strip mall next to a church, and nothing about the storefront prepares you for what’s actually happening inside. The shop has been running since 1974, with the current owner taking over in the 1980s, part butcher counter, part game processor, part burger joint that regulars swear is doing the best burger in Collin County. Step through the door and you’re surrounded by red and white gingham tablecloths, antique butchery equipment, and mounted longhorn and buffalo heads watching over the dining room, the kind of unapologetic small-town Texas atmosphere that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the metro.
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The building at 9812 Camp Bowie West Blvd. has already played a restaurant on television. It was the Patch Cafe on Taylor Sheridan’s “Landman,” the Paramount+ series with Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Hamm, and Demi Moore, filmed on location in the Westland Shopping Center before the crew packed up and left the storefront empty again. Now it’s becoming an actual restaurant, and the family behind it already runs one of the most recognized names in Fort Worth hospitality.
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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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