Seventeen years is a long run for anything in Dallas dining, and DIFFA Dallas brings Burgers + Burgundy back on Thursday, October 1, on the Glen Lawn at The Village Dallas. John Tesar built the thing and still hosts it. The setup hasn’t changed much either. Chefs take stations on a lawn, each one builds a burger, the wine keeps coming, and the money goes to organizations doing HIV/AIDS work across North Texas.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
Charles Kincaid opened a grocery store on Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth in 1946. Nobody involved that year had any reason to think they were starting a hamburger institution. It was a neighborhood market, the first in the area to run separate specialty departments, and its full-service meat counter was the part of the business that would eventually swallow everything else.
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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.
Continue readingFiled under Steven Doyle
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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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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Matt Tobin and Josh Yingling were bartenders who didn’t want to become the kind of bartenders who are still pouring drinks at fifty, chain-smoking behind the stick until dawn. So, in 2011 they did what seemed like the logical alternative: they opened a bar. The difference was that this time it was theirs.
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In February 1940, a teenage girl from Houston named Josephine Powell appeared on the cover of Life magazine. She was wearing a drum majorette outfit with very short shorts, a plumed hat, and boots. She was holding a tray. She was a carhop at a drive-in restaurant called Sivils, and after that issue hit newsstands, Louise Sivils started receiving letters from young women all over the country asking for a job.
Four months later, J.D. and Louise Sivils brought their operation to Dallas.
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