I love Club Schmitz. I think it's one of the best bars in Dallas, and as far as I can tell the hipsters have yet to ruin the place with Sunday night karaoke. This burger, though, needs some work if it's going to stand up to the history that's swaying the ceilings and rotting the floors. When actress Clara Peller asked "Where's the beef?" in her popular Wendy's ad, she might have been talking about a Club Schmitz burger. For what little beef there is, it's pretty tasteless and bland too.
See Also: Burger Smackdown: West Dallas Fast Casual Class, Off-Site Kitchen Vs. Maple and Motor
Adair's Saloon has a different problem, though. While their patty might be as big as the famous rendition served at The Grape, the burger here gets a spatula squish after every turn. And turn. And turn. If all that flipping wasn't bad enough, I cringed as I watched the cook stab the poor, defenseless burger to see if it was cooked through. Oh was it.
At the end of the day, the french fries are what solidified Adair's win for me. The kitchen doesn't have a deep fryer, so the cooks pour out frozen spicy spuds from a bag right onto the grill next to your burger. Between sprayed applications of cooking oil the cook turns those fries with the same spatula used to turn the burger, basting them in a mixture of aerosol canola and burger grease.
Wow.
