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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.”
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
