Revisiting Smokehouse, a Berkeley Classic for Late-Night Burgers and Shakes

The Midnight Diners is a regular collaboration between KQED food editor Luke Tsai and graphic novelist Thien Pham. Follow them each week as they explore the hot pot restaurants, taco carts and 24-hour casino buffets that make up the Bay Area’s after-hours dining scene. This week, guest artist Briana Loewinsohn joined the burger party.

Lit up like a beacon on the corner of Telegraph and Woolsey in Berkeley, Smokehouse is a picture-postcard image of a classic American burger shack: the big, red, retro diner–style sign; the no-frills menu; the string lights twinkling over the cluster of picnic tables in back.

On a recent chilly Friday night, we could smell the smoke and the charred meat from all the way down the block. Jackpot.

We’d come because we were in the mood for a fast food–style char-grilled burger — and, like generations of Berkleyans before us, we knew that Smokehouse was the spot to satisfy that craving, especially after 10 or 11 o’clock at night.

Open since 1951, the restaurant has a frozen-in-time quality that we found incredibly charming. The one of us who’d been a Smokehouse regular as a high schooler in the ’90s spotted only a handful of visible changes: Now, you order outside from a guy manning a tablet set up on a wheelie cart instead of lining up inside the restaurant itself. There’s now an Impossible Burger on the menu. And, after a post-fire renovation during the pandemic, the grassy back patio has gotten a nice little makeover — if you come earlier in the day, there are always a bunch of kids running around on the lawn.

One other gesture to modernity: Smokehouse now has one of those Coke Freestyle machines — a relatively rare sighting in the non-movie-theater wilds — adding 60-some flavors’ worth of whimsy and mad science to your burger shop experience.

Otherwise, the place feels more or less the same as it always has. Even as the prices have crept up over the years, the burgers and hot dogs are still shockingly inexpensive by Bay Area standards — less than $9, for instance, for a double cheeseburger. Now, as always, the restaurant is the kind of place where everyone in Berkeley goes. During our visit, we saw a multi-generational Filipino family, a handful of elderly couples who seemed like they lived in the neighborhood, a pack of teens, a couple of professor types, and several college kids enjoying the last gasp of their winter break. It was a nice, welcoming vibe.

Let’s be real, though: If you’ve come to Smokehouse, it’s probably because you want to see your food get set on fire. The big sign outside touts the restaurant’s “flame-grilled” hot dogs and burgers, and that’s something the line cooks take seriously. Every minute or so, the entire grill bursts into massive flames, engulfing everything on it. And that’s the taste I crave: The cheeseburgers at Smokehouse are super-simple (my order is lettuce, diced onion, caramelized onion, hold the tomato, add a little tub of cherry peppers on the side), but the deep smoky, charred flavor that they get on the patties is tough to beat.