Every now and then, a customer will still grab a can or bottle off the grocery shelf and proceed to the checkout. That is how convincing the décor at Kincaid’s Hamburgers is even though they have not sold groceries since 1991.
“We always want to keep Kincaid’s looking the way it has always been,” said owner Jonathan Gentry. “We think of it as a time capsule.”
And whether it is the old postage machine from the time it housed a post office sub-station or the almost unchanged white building with big green letters, there is not much that visually separates the Kincaid’s Hamburgers on Camp Bowie Road in Fort Worth from what it was in 1975.
That was when WFAA reporter Doug Fox went to Kincaid’s to do a story on the hamburger many claimed was the “best in the west.” The story preserved in the SMU Jones Film Archive shows people eating the hamburgers on grocery shelves just like they do today. It also shows longtime Kindcaid’s butcher turned owner O.R. Gentry talking to Fox about the secret behind the burger’s success.
O.R. Gentry was the grandfather to current owner Jonathan Gentry.
“We were excited to see that video,” said Jonathan. “Being 3rd generation, we are so proud to be where we are today in Fort Worth lore. I think that was one of the coolest aspects seeing that video and seeing my grandfather in his element.”
However, at the time of the 1975 story, Kincaid’s was not even a hamburger restaurant. It was still a grocery and market as it had been since 1946 where O.R. Gentry worked as a meatman and butcher. After buying the store from namesake Charles Kincaid, he started grilling up burgers in the late 60s and it eventually became their moneymaker. As lunch crowds began to overflow, Gentry lowered the height of his grocery shelves to form makeshift tables where people could standup and eat.
As a child, Jonathan Gentry remembers helping build the wooden sit-down tables that would be moved into Kincaid’s when the store finally transitioned from a grocery to a straight-up burger business. However, the grocery shelves, the old cans of tuna fish with faded labels, and the steel grocery carts near the door are a nod to the store’s past and the Gentry family members that came before Jonathan.
“We still pay homage to where we came from."