Photo by Cristina Cuellar

P. Terry's Double with Cheese.

​I first ate P. Terry's some years back when I was staying up in Austin for a few days with a friend. He just so happened to have one right around the corner from his place, and we must have eaten there four times in three days. It wasn't a high point in my life, from a health standpoint, but it was certainly enjoyable from a gluttonous food lover's standpoint.

P. Terry's can only be compared to In-N-Out, the West Coast-based chain of burger stands that prides itself on never-frozen, delivered-that-day produce and meat. (This is the reason why their eastward expansion was so glacial; they insist on having distribution plants within a day's drive from the surrounding stores.)

In-N-Out has as simple a recipe as can be: all-beef patty, white bun, lettuce, tomato, "spread," which is what they call their special sauce, and your choice of with or without onions, all placed between white buns. You can get a single or a double, with or without cheese.

It's the same at P. Terry's. You choose whether or not you want pickles and onions, however, and you've got the added (Texas) bonus of jalapenos. It also features a special sauce, which is a mayo/Thousand Island-style mix, but it provides just the proper ring of velvety tang. I don't generally take mayo on my burger, but this stuff is the perfect complement.

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Does that burger have Fritos and refried beans on top? Yes. Welcome to Texas.

​For the next 20 weeks, we'll be rounding up the runners-up to our 2011 Best of Houston® winners. In many categories, picking each year's winner is no easy task. We'll be spotlighting 20 of those categories, in which the winner had hefty competition from other Houston bars and restaurants.

Houston has a lot of burgers. A lot. We could do a dozen different Top 10 posts on just the different styles: gourmet, steakhouse, fast-food, burger stand, veggie, old-fashioned -- you get the drift.

Instead of that, we've picked 10 of our favorites from around the city that all represent the many different styles you can find in Houston. If you like burgers, you're guaranteed to find at least one burger that's "your type" on the list.

If not, you know the drill: Yell at us in the comments section until you feel better.

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Double-double, done up "animal style."

​When the first locations of California-based burger chain In-N-Out Burger opened in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, emotions ran high. Perhaps too high. One notable woman wept loudly into her fries as she exclaimed, "Pinch me, it doesn't feel real!"

It felt very real to me as I waited in a line out the door with my extended family to try my first In-N-Out burger on a sunny Saturday afternoon, my rambunctious first-cousin-once-removed (thanks for the ridiculously clumsy nomenclature, genealogists) climbing my limbs like a tree as we waited for the herd of In-N-Out fans to slowly shuffle forward toward the cash registers.

Even though this particular In-N-Out location in Fort Worth's tony West 7th Street development had opened months ago, my cousins told me, the line was out the door every single day. In the parking lot, miniature meltdowns were occurring as frustrated drivers found themselves unable to navigate the filled-up parking lot and snaking drive-thru lines.

Surely, I thought to myself as I surveyed the madness, a fast food burger cannot be worth all of this.

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

It's like a Paul Simon Song. Kudos if you can figure out this extremely vague reference.

​It had been a long time since I'd made the trek out to Tomball. I think the last time I was there was back in the summer, when I spent a couple of days slaving working at Bootsies' Heritage Cafe for Randy Rucker, as a stagiere, just before he closed up shop to prepare for the opening of Restaurant conāt. To be honest, with Bootsie's now under the direction of Rucker's mom, Bootsie Nicol, I probably wouldn't have made the drive out there again, if not for my kids.

I'm not trying to be mean, it's just that driving that far just to eat dinner (or help prepare it, on occasion) doesn't really appeal to me. When Chef Rucker was at the helm, it was different, but so was Bootsie's. As good a burger as it may be, the Mother Rucker just doesn't warrant upward of three hours of my time. As it happened, though, a recent weekend found me traipsing out to 249 for one of my daughter's classmate's birthday parties.

Actually, it had me driving back and forth between Tomball and downtown, chauffeuring my two kids between two different parties. By the time I'd picked the last kid up from the last party (Tomball edition), I had been driving for about three hours, more or less straight. It was close to dinnertime, and neither kid had eaten much aside from cake. Ah, birthdays. I figured that it was as good an opportunity as any to swing by Bootsie's and see how Randy's mom was doing.

While I know Randy reasonably well, having been graciously welcomed into his kitchen to learn and having eaten from that same kitchen on a couple of occasions, I do not know his mother from Adam. I've met her, even sat across the table from her at one of her son's dinners, but she wouldn't be able to pick me out of a lineup. That ought to wrap up the disclosure portion of our program. On to the main event.

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At this cozy burger joint, all the burgers come on Slow Dough buns and the tater tots are best dipped in the spicy jalapeño ketchup served on the side. Thirsty afterward? The owners are opening their own icehouse soon, adjacent to the burger joint itself. Think you know where we're chowing down on this blue-cheese-and-bacon burger this week?

​Leave your best guess in the comments section below.

Photos courtesy of Burger House

​Burger House -- the oldest continually operating burger joint in Dallas -- was opened in 1951 on Hillcrest Avenue, just down the street from Southern Methodist University. It remains there to this day.

Its red-white-and-blue sign is iconic in the Big D, and although the restaurant has franchised out to several other locations in Dallas -- and even one in Lubbock -- the burgers have remained as beloved as ever. Our sister paper, the Dallas Observer, awarded Burger House the Best Burger award in its 2007 Best of Dallas® issue, saying of the "classic":

[It's] an institution where son and father and grandfather can bond over a $3.70 double cheeseburger, a basket of the special-seasoning fries (best in town, till death do us part) and a "real" cherry coke.

And now the Dallas favorite is planning on opening a Houston location, complete with original owner Jack Koustobardis's famous "secret salt."

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Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

A perfect example of the iPhone's ability to take inexplicably good photos.

​I probably should have known better. In fact, my better instincts were telling me to keep moving when I stumbled on Howdy Burger while exploring the tunnel section stretching underneath the Esperson building. The glossy signage and faux-kitschy decor, heralding all of the same canned touchstones that have Top Chef pissing off food loving Texans, were out in force. The menu was confused and confusing, ranging from the expected burgers to New York-style hot dogs, with an odd swerve toward Mission-style burritos and a perplexingly pan-cultural array of salads and sandwiches bringing up the rear.

Photo by Nicholas L. Hall

Remember the clip art you used to play with in Windows 3.1? Yeah.

​It's one of the amusing idiosyncrasies of Tunnel Dining that I've learned to be leery of any place that seems too well put-together, as if the corporate-style, homogenized packaging is a harbinger of the food. Such was the case with Howdy Burger. Take a look at the menu photo and graphics: it's like some PR flack took the first stock images available for "burger" and "Texas," superimposed them on one another, and called it a franchise concept.

Figuring I should go with their advertised strengths, I ordered the "Howdy Ultimate Bacon Cheddar Burger" (emphasis theirs), sided with onion rings. Preparation of my meal took forever, which had me (momentarily) hopeful that perhaps I'd gauged Howdy Burger all wrong. Scenes flashed before my eyes of a cook hand-shaping my burger, slicing and battering onion rings while I waited amidst the bucolic photos of cows and over-size wooden six-shooters that lined the walls. The reality was somewhat different.

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Photo by Christina Uticone

Still hip to be square?

​Thanks to the magic of DVR I don't watch a lot of commercials, so I have only been vaguely aware of the new ad campaign Wendy's has going on for its new "Dave's Hot 'N Juicy" cheeseburgers. I had to ask the interweb what was so new about these cheeseburgers, since I hadn't eaten a Wendy's burger in about seventeen years. I ordered the quarter pound single ($3.80) and patted myself on the back for resisting the temptation of a Frosty.

The patty is still famously square, an homage to Dave's aversion to "not cutting corners" but apparently they are using a patty with a higher fat content to improve juiciness. "Premium Toppings" like red onions, crinkly hamburger pickles, crispy lettuce and fresh tomato slices have been introduced, plus a "buttered, toasted bun". I was dismayed to see that mayo came standard, but at least they apply it to the top bun, making it easy to scrape off. I hit mine with a little extra ketchup to offset any residual mayo (take that Texas!) and went to town.

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Head north on Highway 59 to meet this monster burger.

​On the way out to deep East Texas last week for a story, I found myself suddenly starving and in unfamiliar territory: Lufkin.

Unwilling to sacrifice myself upon the fast-food altar when I know that there's great small-town food to be had out here, I turned to the modern-day Swiss army knife, my iPhone, for help. After Googling "best restaurant Lufkin" (why not?), it quickly turned up a short Texas Monthly review for a place called Ray's Drive-In.

"We stopped at this favorite East Texas burger place three times in two weeks," read the mini-review. "No matter how juicy and tasty the burgers are in our memory, amazingly, the reality always surpasses our expectations." It seemed like a no-brainer. My photographer and I pulled off the main highway, found Ray's and pulled up.

Walking inside the dingy drive-in, however, I began to get wary. A table of locals -- all clad in red T-shirts, for some reason -- glared at us, and the women behind the counter barely glanced our way, then set about quickly ignoring us as we waited at the cash register.

Ray's Drive-In was starting to look like a bad idea.

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​If I were asked to create my own burger to be featured on a menu, it would contain blue cheese and bacon -- and would preferably be served on a locally-baked bun; none of this soggy Sunbeam business.

So imagine my surprise when I heard that Little Bitty Burger Barn owner Ricardo Luna had not only named a burger after me, but that it actually contained all three of those ingredients. (To be fair, I'd also add some grilled onions and Tabasco, but that's neither here nor there at this point. I've got my own burger, y'all!)

My burger -- the Katharine Shilcutt Burger -- is one of three burgers named after local media personalities, all of which are competing against one another to earn a $500 donation to the Houston Food Bank in our name. The other two burgers in the running are named after Alison Cook, food critic for the Houston Chronicle, and Ruben Dominguez, reporter for Fox 26 News.

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