Ask anybody who grew up in Dallas before the 2000s about Prince of Hamburgers, and watch what happens to their face.
First comes the smile. Then the story. Maybe it was the back seat of a station wagon on a summer night, windows down, waiting for a carhop to come back across the lot with a tray. Maybe it was a first car and a first date, or a Saturday night with a car full of friends circling Lemmon Avenue just to see who else was out. Everybody seems to have one.
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Some of the most talked-about sushi in North Texas is coming out of a gas station on a farm road south of Ennis.
Bristol General Store, at 5710 FM 660 in the tiny community of Bristol, was just named the No. 1 gas station restaurant in America by the car rental company SIXT. It topped a national list of 20. The ranking weighed TikTok views for 70 percent of each score and Google ratings for the rest. Bristol came out on top with a 4.7 rating and more than 380,000 views, edging out Billeaud’s Meat & Grocery in Broussard, Louisiana.
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Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer started in 2015 as a 15-seat burger joint on Broome Street in SoHo and got famous fast for milkshakes that look like a birthday party fell into a glass. Owners Chris Barish and Julie Mulligan have since taken it from Las Vegas to Singapore, Dubai and London. In August 2023 it landed in Texas for the first time, in Victory Park across from the W Hotel and a short walk from the American Airlines Center. Barish knows the area. One of his first concepts was Martini Park, which he opened in Plano in 2006.
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Shady’s Burgers & Brewhaha started with five neighbors, a backyard fire pit and a few beers.
That was 2012, in the Canyon Creek neighborhood of Richardson. Greg Cooney, Don Bouvier, Anthony Bolner, Dave Swiney and Steve Gumbert were sitting around Bolner’s fire pit talking about what the neighborhood was missing. What they landed on was a place with good burgers, cold beer and a patio where families could hang out on a weeknight. None of them had ever run a restaurant.
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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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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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