5 Local Burger Spots I Keep Coming Back To In Atlanta

I've spent over 15 years living in Atlanta, where I've eaten my way around the city and happily played tour guide whenever friends come to visit. But it's not just because I love food (I do). One of Atlanta's nicknames is "the city too busy to hate," a phrase that emerged during the Civil Rights Movement. Around here, we also sometimes joke that we're too busy eating to hate. Between brunches, birthdays, meetups, dinners with friends, and meals for no reason at all, there are lots of opportunities to eat out. Food is big business across Georgia, too; the food and drink industry generated $49.8 billion in direct economic activity and employed nearly 494,000 people in 2025, according to the National Restaurant Association.

My love of burgers started in Houston, Texas, where I grew up and where beef is, well, a big deal. Needless to say, burgers and barbecue were a staple of my childhood. However, I've spent most of my adult life in Atlanta, my "adopted hometown," and have become so intertwined with the city that people assume I'm from there. Between my Texas roots and all these years in Atlanta, I've tried my fair share of great burgers.

A quick geography lesson: Atlantans divide the metro into ITP and OTP, meaning "inside" or "outside" the Perimeter (Interstate 285). My five picks are ITP, though some have OTP locations. There's also The Varsity, the world's largest drive-in diner and an Atlanta icon. However, for a great burger, I'd definitely go elsewhere. Friends have ignored my warnings and stopped at the downtown location before heading to the airport, only to spend the flight home wishing they'd listened. Needless to say, it didn't make my list, but these delightful burger places did.

Grindhouse Killer Burgers was one of the first places I tried after relocating to Atlanta in 2012, so it holds a special spot in my heart for introducing me to Atlanta's distinctive burger culture. This Atlanta cult favorite's retro aesthetic pays homage to "grindhouse" cinema, low-budget exploitation movies that were popular in the '60s and '70s, such as "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre." The menu at Grindhouse Killer Burgers lets you build your own burger or choose one of the restaurant's signature combinations; the Cowboy Style consists of cheddar, applewood bacon, a crispy Vidalia onion ring, and barbecue sauce, while the Yankee Style goes with blue cheese, bacon, and caramelized onions. For something with a Southern spin (we are in Georgia, after all), the Dixie Style includes a fried green tomato stuffed with pimento cheese, Southern-style cole slaw, and chipotle ranch.

Today, you'll find several Grindhouse locations around Atlanta, as well as inside Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (ATL), so if you aren't able to eat one during your trip, you still have time before your flight to fix that. If you are around on a Monday, you can also test your skills at the weekly "Sex, Drugs, & Music" trivia night from local group Dirty South Trivia at locations around the city.

Grindhouse's story began in 2009, when founder Alex Brounstein opened the original location inside the Municipal Market, an artisanal downtown market with local vendors and plenty of history. During segregation, Black vendors were prohibited from selling inside, so they sold their goods along the curb outside the building — hence the nickname Sweet Auburn Curb Market, which is another name for the market. That original Grindhouse location has since closed.

Shortly after moving to Atlanta, I was driving through the trendy Little Five Points neighborhood with vintage shops and bars galore (also called L5P) when I saw The Vortex Bar & Grill's enormous Laughing Skull for the first time. My immediate reaction was, "What is THAT?" to the point that I almost crashed my car. The 20-foot-tall skull has loomed over L5P since the early '90s, and you walk straight through its mouth to enter the restaurant, a carnivore's haven known for its over-the-top burgers.

Vortex's tongue-in-cheek "Idiot-Free Zone" policy should give you some idea of what you're getting into, and don't bring the kids; the restaurant is strictly 21 and up. The Blue 'Shroom promises you'll "see God," the Classic Bypass warns it'll "give you palpitations," and the Freaky Tiki is billed as "a luau for your mouth." I love spicy food, so my go-to is Hell's Fury, loaded with pepper jack cheese, Atomic Death Sauce, habanero relish and a roasted jalapeño. The menu warns that it is "not for sissies," and it is very hot. There's also the Fat Elvis, topped with peanut butter, bacon, and fried plantains, a spin on the famous sandwich associated with the King of Rock and Roll.

The booze menu is just as over-the-top. The Skull Crusher combines tequila, vodka, rum, bourbon, and mysterious fruit liqueurs. You can order it in a collectible Vortex glass and take it home as a souvenir to commemorate getting sucked into the Vortex. I may or may not have three or four of them myself, but I can neither confirm nor deny this.

H&F Burger is another Atlanta cult favorite with humble beginnings. Back in 2008, chef Linton Hopkins was reluctant to put a cheeseburger on the regular menu at his gastropub, Holeman & Finch Public House. He worried diners would choose it over dishes such as herbed red snapper and roast Moulard duck breast. His wife, Gina Hopkins, came up with a compromise: Make the burger a late-night special, but with a catch. Only 24 burgers were up for grabs each night. Hopkins wanted everything prepared fresh daily without leftovers, and with room for only 12 burgers on the griddle, two batches gave him the magic number of 24. Then, at 10 p.m., a voice from the megaphone would announce, "Burger Time."

So what were people waiting for? On paper, the burger doesn't sound that glamorous, and I'll admit I wasn't expecting to be impressed the first time I tried it. When everyone raves about something, I tend to wonder if it's really as good as they say. The burger consists of two griddled beef patties with American cheese, bread-and-butter pickles and shaved red onion, plus house-made ketchup and mustard. Now, after eating more H&F Burgers than I can count, I'd recognize that taste anywhere. It really is delicious.

Thankfully, you don't have to spend your Atlanta vacation waiting around for a megaphone announcement. The 24-burger ritual drew ever-larger crowds, and what began as a late-night special eventually became a standalone restaurant. Today, you'll find H&F Burger at Ponce City Market, a sprawling former Sears complex along the Atlanta BeltLine with trendy eats and rooftop fun.

I once went through a phase where I visited Farm Burger — which was recently named No. 10 for Best Regional Fast Food in USA Today's 10 Best Reader's Choice Awards — every single Friday. I can't take credit for the name "Farm Burger Fridays" (a friend did), but I participated enthusiastically in our end-of-week tradition. We went so often that "FB" became our shorthand for Farm Burger, not Facebook. Can you tell I'm an elder millennial or what?

My go-to then, and still one of my favorites now, is the namesake Farm Burger with aged white cheddar, caramelized onions and FB sauce. When I'm feeling as sunny as the name, I go for the Sunny-Side burger with bacon, pepper jack cheese, a sunny-side-up egg and salsa verde. You can also build your own burger, with toppings such as pimento cheese, local goat cheese, roasted garlic and caramelized onions, among many other options, and there's roasted bone marrow for when you really want to go all in. I'm also a sucker for sauces, so I don't order the hand-cut fries without a few dips on the side, such as smoked paprika mayo and sherry-date barbecue sauce.

Farm Burger dates back to 2010, when farmer and rancher Jason Mann teamed up with restaurateur George Frangos to serve burgers made with 100% grass-fed beef from cattle raised without antibiotics or added growth hormones. The restaurant has since grown, with locations around metro Atlanta and other spots in Georgia, such as Athens. Most of my Farm Burger Fridays happened in Dunwoody, but the Farm Burger restaurant experience began in Decatur, a walkable Georgia gem just east of Atlanta and inside the Perimeter.

If you're wandering through Atlanta's charming Kirkwood neighborhood around lunchtime on a Sunday and spot a long line, chances are that people are waiting for a burger. Evergreen Butcher + Baker, a butcher shop that also makes breads and sweet pastries, makes 175 cheeseburgers every Sunday and starts selling at 1 p.m. until they're gone. You might not know about the tradition from a quick look at the website; I first learned about it word of mouth from a friend. The burgers became so popular that people even started reselling them (as reported by Atlanta Magazine), which prompted Evergreen to limit orders to one per customer. A cheeseburger flag flies outside while they're still available. If it's down, better luck next Sunday.

Husband-and-wife team Sean and Emma Schacke opened Evergreen in 2019. Emma studied at Chicago's French Pastry School before baking professionally in several U.S. cities and abroad, including Amsterdam. Sean spent more than a decade cooking in Atlanta and Nashville before turning to butchery, which took him to Chicago and Maine. The couple sums up Evergreen on its website: "Mostly, this is a love story. A love for each other and a love for our work."

Evergreen gets its meat from small Georgia farms and practices whole-animal butchery. This means that beef from the shop's weekly butchering goes into Sunday's burgers, which include two patties with American cheese, grilled onions, house-made pickles, and garlic aioli. Emma makes the long-fermented sesame seed bun in-house with organic flour, and, as with all of Evergreen's breads, it is a leavened sourdough without commercial yeast. When I tried the burger for the first time, the bun was one of the first things I noticed; it has a spectacularly delicious crunch.