It’s Burger Week in Nashville. Sixty restaurants around town are offering burgers for just $8 and competing for votes. And in the past year, one Nashville Burger influencer has been bringing business to local burger joints.
Chef Chris Kahle always starts his Nashville burger reviews with the same three words: “Emergency Burger Review.”
“I didn’t put any forethought into it,” Chef Chris says. “I was in Bellevue. I was waiting to get my hair cut… Cledis had just gone in down the road, so I just figured I’d throw up a burger review. First thing out of my mouth came, ‘This is an Emergency Burger Review.'”
People loved that first video. So he did another and another. His third was at Karen’s Custard, an old-school burger joint in Smyrna. “I posted that. It got 1.5 million views. So at that point it was like, ‘All right, this is what the people want. And I really enjoy burgers, so I am going to continue to do these.'”
Chef Chris is a personal chef himself, so he has cred. And he is dedicated to being impartial. No comps or recognition. Just reviews.
Over the past year, his videos have gone viral, boosting his following on TikTok from 5,000 to nearly 30,000. He keeps a running list of his rankings and scores. And over the past year he’s become an authority on burgers in Nashville.
Emergency Burger Review faves
So, after all the tabulations, what are his top three?
“Number three: Cafe Roze. Super simple. Ratio is on point. Just amazing.”
“Number two: Bad Luck Burger Club. Incredible char. As far as doing the smash part of a smash burger, they do it the best. Perfect char, perfect lacing, a very tangy mustard-based sauce, caramelized onions. That one is right down the road from me, and I go to town on Bad Luck.”
“And then number one: Been number one for a long time, Dreamburger. Smash patties, Martin’s potato roll, he smashes his onions directly into the patty like an Oklahoma-style, so a little bit unique there. And then his sauce is ridiculous. Smoked tomatoes, German mustard and a bunch of secret spices that he would not share with me.”
Dreamburger, a little food truck tucked into the parking lot of Vinyl Tap in East Nashville, is Chef Chris’s number-one burger. The attention turned heads.
“It was very noticeable. We definitely got busy right away,” says Cole Meierstein, the owner and operator of Dreamburger. “We were definitely starting to sell out, because I wasn’t prepared for the amount of sales we were gonna have.”
After a year of reviewing burgers, you would think that he’d maybe be at the end of the line in terms of burgers. But Chef Chris notes that new burger joints open up all the time. He’s got a list of 50 new ones just from his followers — the people who make the whole thing work.
“All I do is go and, you know, make a goofy cheeseburger video and post it to TikTok. It’s the followers that are actually the ones watching it. They’re like, ‘Hey, that looks good. I’m gonna go support this place. Good or bad, I’m gonna go try it.’ They’re the ones who are actually making the difference, and that’s really cool.”
So Dreamburger is the top burger in Nashville. For now. For him. You decide the best during Burger Week, which runs through Sunday.
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