Following an opening in Fort Worth back in January, NADC Burger (that stands for Not A Damn Chance) opened a location in Dallas in August 2025. Locations also exist in Austin, Chicago, Denver, New York City, and Nashville. It is a very good burger. I first tasted it while judging the Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival’s burger competition on a cold day in April 2025. We blind tasted around 25 burgers, which is too many to eat, even just one bite in one sitting, and NADC was the judge’s pick. It is no small feat to stand out in a field of that many burgers, and to my recollection, it was a hands-down winner with very little debate. The judges all liked it because it is the platonic ideal of a burger. It is a smash burger with a double patty, pickles, American cheese that melts but does not get runny, grilled onions, tamed jalapeños, and a secret sauce in the vein of McDonald’s. It is evocative of childhood memories of a burger but tapped into the current trends, creating the best of both worlds.
At the Dallas location, trying one will set you back $16. Adding a side of fries is $5, and it oh-so-cooly offers Rambler sparkling water out of Austin for $3 or bottled Dublin soda from Dublin, Texas, for $4. It offers counter service with the option to tip, so crunching the numbers, expect to spend $25 at a minimum.
For reasons that defy explanation, when I visited the no-frills location at 2908 McKinney Avenue on the evening of Tuesday, August 19, the AC was off, a door and bar window were open, and it was 100 degrees outside. Not a damn chance I was going to wait in the seven parties of multiple people deep line for a burger to come out, all to eat it in sweltering heat. You are not paying for the atmosphere here, inspired by skate parks of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
NADC is co-owned by professional skateboarder Neen Williams and Austin-based chef Phillip Frankland Lee. The duo also has a podcast called NADC. Lee started his public-facing career with a turn on season 13 of Top Chef. Lee’s Scratch Restaurants hospitality group, which he founded with his partner and pastry chef wife Margarita Kallas-Lee, also owns the Michelin-starred Pasta|Bar in Los Angeles, California (with a second location in Austin) and Sushi by Scratch, which has 15 locations.
Phillip Frankland Lee and Neen Williams
Lee made his way to Texas in 2021, when a significant outbreak of COVID cases shut down even outdoor dining in Los Angeles. He brought his restaurant Sushi|Bar ATX to Austin for a pop-up omakase, turning it into a permanent restaurant. Later in 2021, Lee and his wife sold their stake in Sushi|Bar to their partners and began building Sushi by Scratch. Speaking to Chef’s Roll about leaving California for Texas, Lee said, “Unfortunately, we tried to pivot to takeout and it just didn’t work. We were forced to essentially lay off all of our teams [at multiple restaurants] before Christmas, and it just didn’t sit well with us at all.” Scratch Hospitality asked all its workers if they were willing to relocate, and, according ot him, many people said yes. The first night of the Austin pop-up sold out.
Lee also says that the pop-up happened when Austin was in a stage 5 outbreak with the highest number of COVID cases, and so “nobody wanted to promote [the pop-up].” Austin moved back to stage 4 in February 2021, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott eased dining restrictions in March and removed the state’s mask mandate. Also in March, a study was released linking on-premises dining at restaurants to the spread of COVID-19. By March 2021, Travis County recorded 788 deaths attributed to COVID, and Texas as a whole had 47,000 deaths. In the Chef’s Roll interview, Lee discusses how word of mouth drove reservations, selling the pop-up out for January 2021 by the 9th or 10th day of the month. In short order, podcast host Joe Rogan came in and raved about it in an Instagram post, calling it the “Best sushi I’ve ever had in my life.” He says that endorsement landed Lee a waitlist of over 20,000 people who wanted to eat in his 10-seat omakase.
Rogan famously moved to Texas during the pandemic because he disliked how the state of California handled it, and felt his freedoms were being eroded. He also spread misinformation about COVID over multiple years in interviews on his podcast, including calling the vaccine “gene therapy,” that young people are more likely to more likely to experience myocarditis as a side-effect of the vaccine, and a litany of speculation and misinformation so robust in an episode with virologist and vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone that the New York Times fact checked it, and that episode kicked off a slew of musicians and other podcasters removing their work from Spotify in protest. Nevertheless, Rogan’s endorsement of Sushi|Bar earned it a lot of buzz, customers, and attention. COVID misinformation is not Rogan’s only controversy; the podcaster has a history of using racist language, being a forefather of the “manosphere,” which many consider to be sexist, and of using anti-trans rhetoric. His podcast and many in the same vein are widely considered a key factor in Trump’s re-election.
Running a restaurant during the early days of the pandemic was a bag of impossible decisions and bad choices. With no idea how long the pandemic would continue, small business owners of all stripes, like Lee, had to figure out how to keep the business going, keep paying employees, and navigate a public health crisis. It was a challenging time — the Biden administration didn’t roll out the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 until March, a full year after the initial outbreak and shutdown. Perhaps Lee was just making the best and savviest decisions he could in a challenging time to keep his business alive.
Add to that, restaurants cannot control who eats in them or endorses them. Lee benefited from a “Joe Rogan bump,” but he could have ended the association there. He didn’t. In 2022, he appeared on Rogan’s podcast. So have a lot of Austinites, including Matthew McConaughey, Gary Clark, Jr., and Austin mayor Steve Adler.
Lee opened a Sushi by Scratch pop-up in Dallas at the Adolphus in December 2023, and following the Austin model, it became permanent some months later. Lee’s coming to market social media announcement was a clip from Rogan’s podcast endorsing his food. Lee has not publicly expressed a political affiliation but seems to have taken a calculated risk to appeal to a certain demographic. And if all is fair in love and unchecked capitalism, then sure, why not? However, it does mean alienating customers who feel his choices don’t align with their values.
Let’s get back to the burgers. There’s no getting around the fact that this is a damn good burger. Something piqued my interest when I saw a TikTok about it from Dallas influencer Madison Sieli; she referred to NADC as owned by a “Michelin-star chef.” No, it isn’t. Michelin stars are awarded to restaurants, not to chefs. There are individual excellence awards that Michelin awards to chefs, but Lee is not a recipient of one of those. It’s also worth noting that even if a Michelin star could be awarded to a chef, the one Lee currently has is for his pasta restaurant, not his hamburger. It turns out that Sieli got that information right off the NADC website, which identifies Lee in that manner. NADC’s PR for Dallas said that Lee is aware of the distinction because they “clarified” it around the Fort Worth opening. That raises some questions about how involved Lee is in NADC Burgers if he doesn’t know that his restaurant’s website incorrectly identifies him.
Setting aside the responsibility a person with three million followers has to understand how to speak about the industry they create content about for a moment, this exchange made me consider the responsibility someone talking about a restaurant has to present an authentic experience. When this misstatement on the website was brought to the Dallas PR team, they confirmed that it would be corrected (it was not yet at press time). And when the issues with heat and a non-working bathroom were mentioned, that got addressed, also. It made me consider the relationship between influencers and the public versus their relationship with restaurants as clients. Do they defer to the person giving them a free meal or paying a fee for their visit, or do they have a greater obligation to the public to tell them what a place is like and paint a picture of who owns it? This couldn’t fit into a 30-second video, but that doesn’t make it information people don’t care about.
Eater conducted a study, released in March 2025, on the media consumption habits of Gen Z, which is worth a look. They love influencers and primarily use social media to discover new restaurants. This was of particular interest: “[B]uzzy restaurants act as a sort of social capital for younger generations, with around 30 percent of Gen Zers and millennials picking out restaurants based on social influence and reputation (recommended by influencers, has positive online ratings, and/or is trendy).”
I’d like to tell you this is why local journalism is so important, but even that frequently focuses on a wheel of openings and closings rather than in-depth reporting about who makes your food and why it matters. That is driven by consumer preferences for new, trendy, shiny, and fun. Food should be all of those things. But not only those things. Under capitalism, how we spend our money is often our biggest voice. Researching who owns the cool new burger spot is much more work than asking if it’s a good burger. That, my friends, is the price of a really good burger.