Is this the original smash burger? Hooker’s Grill rides a Fort Worth restaurant craze
The burger business has gone flat.
Thick gourmet burgers have given way to low-slung “smash burgers,” thin beef patties mashed onto a hot grill with onions and served with double-melty cheese for an old-time taste.
They’re a national favorite now, replacing all those bulky burgers topped with quinoa or bananas or candied orange peel or whatever.
The thinner, the better. That way, the smash burgers come out with more cheese and onion or jalapeno or fried-egg flavor.
In Fort Worth, we’ve known all about smash burgers since 2017.
That’s when Ruth Hooker brought “onion burgers,” a 100-year-old Oklahoma smash burger, to the Stockyards at Hooker’s Grill, 213 W. Exchange Ave.
“I think it must be the original smash burger,” she said this week.
The Oklahoma onion burger is a category all its own, smashed on a grill along with onions or jalapenos or egg and then pressed with a bricklayer’s trowel to sear the edges.
That’s the way it’s been made since 1926 at restaurants in El Reno, Oklahoma, west of Oklahoma City.
There isn’t an official history of smash burgers. Some writers talk about a 1930s eastern Kentucky restaurant, Dairy Cheer, where burgers were mashed as flat as possible with a No. 10 food-service can of beans.
But Oklahoma onion burgers are close.
Of course, you can order them without onions and with jalapenos or fried egg instead, Or just as a double-cheese smash burger.
“People like that crispy edge,” Hooker said.
“They say, ‘Do you do smash burgers? I tell them, ‘Yes, we were doing them before they were a thing.’ “
Hooker’s Grill gained fame when the streaming series “1883” used the facade. Hooker has kept that frontier look.
Now, she said, tourists from around the world come for weekday lunches.
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“It’s wild how different it is now in the Stockyards from when we first opened,” she said.
“People just want to take pictures of the restaurant. We’ve been in all these magazines. It’s wild.”
She’s added an Oklahoma fry bread taco, an American Indian tradition. The fry bread is topped with chili, beans, Hatch green chile, cheese, lettuce, tomato and sour cream.
Hooker’s Grill is open for lunch Wednesdays and Thursdays, for lunch through 2:30 a.m. Fridays and Saturdays and for lunch and early dinner Sundays; 817-773-8373, facebook.com/hookersgrillFTW.
This story was originally published January 4, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
