Our city has a point of civic pride we didn’t even know about: our very own sauce. Dallas sauce is named in our honor, but it’s from Belgium, and nobody in Dallas actually served it. Until now.
I should confess up front that the campaign to bring Dallas sauce to Dallas is my own invention. I spotted advertising for the sauce while visiting Brussels in 2017, and began an investigation in 2022. We ordered some bottles from Belgium to the D Magazine offices and conducted a taste test. Afterwards, I distributed spare bottles to a trio of chefs around town. To recap: Dallas sauce was named after the TV soap opera, its Belgian production company is owned by a lifelong Mavs fan, and it tastes sweet from caramelized onions with a bit of tartness and spice, kind of like a spicy Cane’s sauce.
But you don’t have to trust me. You can now, finally, order some Dallas sauce for yourself, made in Dallas, by Dallasites.
The venue is Alamo Club, and the sauce is served two ways: as a side cup with chicken tenders, or on the cheeseburger. Chef Jeff Bekavac, beneficiary of one of my three given-away bottles, reverse-engineered his Dallas sauce recipe and immediately tapped a vein of burger nostalgia.
“That packaged sauce [Dallas sauce manufactured in Belgium] kind of gave me McDonald’s cheeseburger vibes with the little baby onions in there,” Bekavac explains. “I always loved that combination as a kid, those little fine diced onions smashed into the patty. I think that’s fun. It’s nostalgia for me.”
So he designed a McDonald’s-inspired burger around the sauce. Alamo Club’s burger is a marvel of simplicity. The thin patty, slice of American cheese, dill pickles, and finely diced white onions all point to their nostalgic origin. Only the gentle sweet-tang of Dallas sauce takes it in a slightly different direction.
The Alamo Club cheeseburger, topped with Dallas sauce.
The Alamo Club cheeseburger, topped with Dallas sauce. Brian Reinhart
“More people should run with it, especially with burgers,” Bekavac says of the sauce. “There’s a lot of umami going on. The base of it is a lot of caramelized onions with Worcestershire. I use our dijonaise. I put a little bit more ketchup, obviously black pepper because people like the pepper. But the oniony caramelized sweetness is what really came through to me, with a little bit of tang from some mustard.”
His recipe development process involved trial and error, and he’s still making a few tweaks. Alamo Club, unlike the Belgian inventors, doesn’t leave the caramelized onions in big chunks, and its sauce is a little less spicy than the original, too. But Dallas sauce isn’t a fixed template. If we’re taking it back from the Belgians, we have the right to make it our own. After all, our name’s on it.
Bekavac is ready to see other local restaurants adopt the condiment. “I’d love for people to do their versions, and see what else it goes with. It’s an interesting story, so quirky and weird that of all cities, why Dallas? And why is that the sauce? It could have been Milwaukee or Cleveland.”
It could have been. But it’s ours. Now we can celebrate with burgers and tenders at Alamo Club. What will be the next Dallas restaurant to take up the Dallas sauce cause, and how will they serve it? No matter where it is, I’ll be there to order it.
Alamo Club, 1919 Greenville Ave.
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Brian Reinhart
Brian Reinhart
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Brian Reinhart became D Magazine’s dining critic in early 2022 after six years of reviewing restaurants for the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News.