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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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
Most people driving through The Village on their way somewhere else have no reason to stop at Meridian. That’s their loss. The restaurant at 5605 Village Glen Drive reopened last October under executive chef Eduardo Osorio, and buried in a menu of wood-fired oysters, foie gras cornbread, and dry-aged steaks is one of the better burgers in Dallas — a burger that most of the city hasn’t found yet.
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The address was 4515 Greenville Avenue, but that didn’t help much. The building sat back off the street, down an alley near Yale Boulevard, behind nothing that looked like a restaurant. No sign. No parking lot to speak of. No indication from the street that anything worth finding was back there. Judge Buchmeyer — a federal judge, a man accustomed to having things run efficiently — drove up and down Greenville trying to locate it before finally giving up, parking, and walking until he found the door. When he walked inside, Mickey Mantle was sitting at a table eating a burger.
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Most people who end up at Square Burger in McKinney did not plan to be there. They were walking around the downtown square, realized they were hungry, and pushed open the door of a 1929 building on the corner of Kentucky and Virginia streets. What they found inside surprised them. It still does.
Brandon Horrocks and Craig Brundege opened this place in June 2010 with credentials that had no business ending up in a burger joint. Horrocks graduated at the top of his class from the Culinary Institute of America, did a fellowship at Wolfgang Puck’s Granita in Malibu, cooked in Mexico City, and worked Dallas rooms like Patrizio’s and Café Pacific. Brundege came through serious kitchens in San Francisco and Los Angeles — Providence, one of the best seafood restaurants on the West Coast, was on his résumé. They chose burgers. Specifically, they chose McKinney.
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A Greek immigrant named Prometheus “Jack” Koustabardis opened the first Burger House at 6913 Hillcrest Avenue in 1951. Dallas looked nothing like it does now — Central Expressway had just opened, “I Love Lucy” was the hot new show on television, and a cheeseburger, fries, and a drink cost less than a dollar. Jack cooked his burgers with a seasoning blend he developed himself, put that same seasoning on the fries, and built a neighborhood burger stand that people drove across the city for. He did not change the recipe. He did not need to.
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Jeff Bekavac opened Goodwins in May 2024 in the old Blue Goose space on Greenville. He named it after the cross street. He’s been in Dallas kitchens for years — Neighborhood Services, Cane Rosso — and this is his first real shot at doing it his own way. The room is warm, the bar is brass, the back bar is darker and better for a martini. It fills up fast on weekends and most weeknights aren’t far behind.
Filed under Steven Doyle
