Somewhere on the menu at The Londoner, next to the burger description, sits the line that tells you everything about this place: “A burger to lose your head over.” It’s a Tower of London joke, the kind of dry British wink that could only come from a pub that named itself after a city instead of a saint or a street.
The Tower of London Burger is an eight-ounce patty, cooked to order, piled with lettuce, red onion, tomato, and mayonnaise on a brioche bun, with a side of pickles and a stack of house-cut fries. A veggie version sits right next to it on the menu for anyone who’d rather skip the beef and keep the pun. Cheddar or Swiss runs a dollar, bacon is three, and depending on which of the three DFW locations you’re sitting in, you can pile on avocado, a fried egg, or sautéed mushrooms too. It isn’t trying to reinvent the burger. It’s trying to be the one you order every single time you walk in, and depending on who you ask, it already is.
The Londoner opened its first location in 2012, the brainchild of founder Barry Tate, who built the concept around a simple idea printed right on the pub’s own walls: no matter where you’re from, when you’re here, you’re a Londoner. Locations followed in Colleyville, Addison, Dallas’s Mockingbird Station, and Arlington, close enough to Toyota Stadium that the Addison location has been recognized by NBC Sports as one of the country’s top Premier League bars.
Whichever one you walk into, you get the same formula: dark wood, British flags, a wall of taps, and a menu that treats English pub cooking and American bar food as equally serious business.
Because the burger is really just the entry point. The Fish & Chips uses beer-battered Atlantic cod, fried to order with house-cut fries and a proper tartar sauce, and it’s the dish regulars measure every other fish and chips in Dallas against. The Scotch Egg, a hard-boiled egg wrapped in pork sausage, breaded, and fried, comes with a strawberry-jalapeño jam that shouldn’t work with something so classically British and somehow does.
Chicken Tikka Masala gets a proper curry-seasoned, yogurt-marinated treatment, served over basmati rice with naan, a reminder that this is as much a London menu as an English one. Bangers and Mash comes with real Yorkshire pudding underneath the gravy, and the Guinness Short Rib, braised low and slow, gets ladled over potato-parsnip mash with an ancho chili corn succotash that has no business being that good next to something so traditional.
Save room for the Sticky Toffee Pudding, served warm with a thin custard layer and an amber caramel drizzle. It’s the dessert people order before they’ve finished the entrée, just to make sure the kitchen doesn’t run out.
The bar takes itself just as seriously. Guinness pours on draught the way it’s supposed to, alongside Fuller’s London Pride, Old Speckled Hen, and Samuel Smith’s full lineup of English ales and stouts. The cocktail list leans into the theme without being precious about it: an English 75 built on London dry gin and sparkling wine, a Barrel Aged Old Fashioned made with Milam & Greene Port Cask Rye, and an Irish Coffee that’s a genuine cold-weather fix rather than an afterthought. Scotch drinkers get a real list too, from Glenfiddich and Macallan up through a Lagavulin 16 for anyone celebrating something.
Between the burger with the beheading joke and a bar that actually respects Scotch, The Londoner has figured out the trick most theme pubs miss: commit to the bit, but never let the kitchen or the bar coast on the theme alone.
The Londoner has locations in Addison, Colleyville, Dallas, and Arlington. The Addison pub is at 14930 Midway Road; call (972) 458-2444. Full menus and locations at thelondonerpub.com.
