Charles Kincaid opened a grocery store on Camp Bowie Boulevard in Fort Worth in 1946. Nobody involved that year had any reason to think they were starting a hamburger institution. It was a neighborhood market, the first in the area to run separate specialty departments, and its full-service meat counter was the part of the business that would eventually swallow everything else.
O.R. Gentry came home from World War II in 1947 and took the job of butcher and market manager. For almost two decades he cut meat and ran the counter the way any good grocer’s butcher would. Then in 1964, using the store’s own beef and produce, he started cooking hamburgers on a small griddle for customers who wandered by. There was no grand plan behind it. It was a guy with a griddle, feeding people who were already in the building to buy something else.
The burgers did not stay a side project for long. Word moved through the neighborhood the way it always does in Fort Worth, one satisfied customer at a time, and demand for O.R.’s hamburgers started outpacing demand for canned goods. The store added griddles. Shelves got sawed down to counter height so people had somewhere to eat standing up. None of it was designed. It was a grocery store getting quietly overtaken by what people actually wanted, which turned out to be a hamburger, not a can of soup.
In 1967, O.R. Gentry bought the store outright. A decade later, in 1977, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram named Kincaid’s the best burger in the city, and that same year a national food critics’ panel judging 400 hamburger restaurants across the country called it the best burger in America. That is not a local puff title. That is a national panel picking a converted grocery store on Camp Bowie over every drive-in and diner they tested.
O.R. retired in 1982 and handed the business to his son Ronald, the second generation. Ronald had grown up working the counter, so the transition wasn’t a stranger learning a business, it was a son taking over something he’d already had his hands in for years. Under Ronald, the last of the grocery inventory disappeared. By 1992 Kincaid’s was fully a hamburger restaurant, and the Gentry family hand-built picnic tables so there would finally be real seating instead of standing room at cut-down shelves. Ronald’s father-in-law, Morris Gardner, ran the original Camp Bowie location for thirteen years and became one of those figures regulars just knew by name, the guy behind the counter who made a fast-food transaction feel like a conversation with someone from the neighborhood…