From classic institutions like Burger House, which has been serving paper-thin patties since 1951, and The Grape's version, named the best example of the food by Texas Monthly in 2009, to the Dallas Burger Tour, burgers are big business in Big D. It's no wonder, then, that mere months after the successful run of the Dallas Taco Bracket, Joe Flowers and friends are putting together the Dallas Burger Bracket.
Plans for the Burger Bracket were announced on the Dallas Taco Bracket's Facebook page. It will follow the same March Madness structure as the taco-themed contest, but because burgers can be served in practically infinite renditions without a baseline version, there won't be Traditional or Specialty brackets, nor will there be further sub-brackets dividing the competition into regions. The winners of each face-off will still be decided by popular vote.
"Since the burger can be done a million different ways, and it seems like it has been, everything is going to be crowd-sourced. When we open for submissions, we will provide boundaries and some basic guidelines to keep it local," says Flowers. "We will ask for burger submissions and for people to submit it under a category of their choosing (traditional meat and best deal, best hangover cure, best splurge, etc.). From there, we'll combine the similar ones and possibly do the brackets by category instead of region."
The details are still being hashed out, but if the first bracket is any indication -- there were close to 200 submissions for the Dallas Taco Bracket -- the upcoming Burger Bracket will be a hit. While the bracket will have a dedicated website built in conjunction with Matt Smith, the man behind the Twitter handle @eatthisburger and the DFW Burger Fans Facebook page, current updates can best be seen by following Smith on Twitter .
Whatever pieces of meat between two slices of bread triumph at the close of the Burger Bracket, Flowers is already planning a second taco tournament. This next one will be a Fort Worth-based competition. Flowers says, "I've had an influx of e-mails since the posting about the Fort Worth bracket on Facebook, but there's always been a buzz around setting one up there." Expect a formal announcement around late February/early March 2011. Until then, we'll just have to content ourselves with juicy burgers. Oh, darn.
