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Restaurant Reviews

First Bite: Community Beer Co. Debuts Its Kitchen, and a Great Bacon Cheeseburger

After months of waiting, the brewery finally has a kitchen to go with its brand-new taproom.
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The vegan Nashville mushroom sandwich (foreground) and Bavarian double cheeseburger (background) at Community Beer Co. Brian Reinhart

After more than two years of planning, permitting hell, and construction, the last piece of Community Beer Company’s new location is finally in place: its kitchen is open and serving killer bar food.

Community’s kitchen opened at the end of October with a keep-it-simple menu of sandwiches, salads, and giant German pretzels. The food program is headed up by chef Jenn Dahlen, a veteran of restaurants in Denton, Lewisville, and Fort Worth. (Dentonites might have seen her at Barley & Board or LSA Burger.)

The food menu focuses, for now, on burgers and sandwiches with Germanic touches. The Bavarian burger is a knockout, served with beer-braised onions, grainy mustard, gouda, and bacon. (For burger construction nerds: the two bacon strips are arranged in an X across the bun.) You’ll have to choose between a single and double patty; since these are thin, smashed burgers, the double cheeseburger is a good call. Vivid yellow potato buns hold up against the weight of all that meat and cheese.

But the vegan sandwich option is just as impressive. It purports to be a riff on Nashville hot chicken, only with fried oyster mushrooms instead of chicken. I didn’t detect a Nashville-style spiciness or see a reddish color in the batter, but the crunch of the mushrooms and thick-cut horseradish pickles still made for a standout bite. Both sandwiches come with mountains of heavily seasoned, salty fries—the kind that causes you to order more beer.

“Outside of vegan and some healthy options, we wanted to give a nod to the German heritage of beer,” says Kevin Carr, the brewery’s founder and owner.

He adds that more menu additions are planned. Since Community Beer Co. now has space to distill spirits in addition to brewing beer, they’re planning to release a tequila and pair it with tacos. (The tequila will be called an “agave spirit,” since by law beverages can only be called “tequila” if they are from Mexico. But Carr thinks that Community’s agave spirit will be “at least as good as” many of the tequilas on today’s market. I am not an expert on the Dallas-area agave spirit game, but the only other bottling I know about is from Bendt Distilling.)

It’s worth remembering the long process that Community struggled through in order to open this new taproom and kitchen. When the pandemic arrived in 2020, Community was a Dallas success story: the third-largest independent craft brewery in Texas with annual revenues of more than $10 million. Then all of that crashed to a halt. Coronavirus wasn’t the problem. Dallas’ government was.

In the city’s notorious permitting department gridlock, Community’s plans for a new production facility and taproom withered, seemingly ready to die. Carr had to store his shiny new equipment in the parking lot. Carr told D’s Matt Goodman in 2021 that the city’s red tape was his worst setback ever, worse than the pandemic or the 2009 recession, and that his doctor had ordered brain scans to make sure that the stress would not induce a stroke.

“I’m not sure most companies would have survived it,” he says now that Community’s future is assured.

It was a close thing. Delays added nearly $3 million in expenses to his new brewery. The kitchen was supposed to open at the same time as the taproom, but its arrival came months later.

“The plan was we were supposed to do everything at once, way back when,” Carr says. “At that time too, once we got our construction permits, we saw an increase in construction material prices from the supply chain. Our kitchen equipment got delayed due to supply chain stuff as well. If we hadn’t had all those permit delays, we could have got our equipment before all those price increases. They put us in the eye of the storm. But we’re a stubborn group, passionate about what we do. Opening the kitchen is kind of the cherry on top of our original plans.”

These might be simple bar snacks, then, but the backstory is complex. Carr, Dahlen, and their crew came a long way, through years of tribulation, in order to serve you a cheeseburger. You’d better savor it. Thankfully, it’s good enough that you will.

Community Beer Co., 3110 Commonwealth Dr.

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Brian Reinhart

Brian Reinhart

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Brian Reinhart became D Magazine's dining critic in 2022 after six years of writing about restaurants for the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News.

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