09/30/2026
🌠Long post incoming…
💫 Last night Nick & I received a Spark Joy award from the Chamber of Commerce for winning Best Burger In Iowa 2026. Thank you to the Decorah Chamber for hosting such a lovely event and recognizing local businesses for all their hard work, longevity, and contributions to our community.
We felt like this award was the cherry on top for us for winning Best Burger🍒
🫶🏼We want to say thank you from the bottom of our hearts to everyone who joined us on this wild ride. This experience humbled us, challenged us, tested our limits, and helped us GROW! We are nothing but grateful for the recognition & the growth that we’ve experience since winning.
Since winning Best Burger in Iowa, we have served over 14,000 smash burgers!!! 😮 We quadrupled the number of smash burgers we sold compared to last summer & more than quadrupled the amount of beef we brought in. While we didn’t know what we were in for when we won this award, we anticipated that it would be big so we bought a new flat top, another frier, and additional cooler space. We saw people from as far as Chicago & many people who said they came to Decorah just to give our burger a try.
Our team. They did the damn thing! We have the BEST crew & found a lot of new members along the way to help us this summer. They hustled 👏🏼 all summer long! Most of us have worked really busy days but this was something entirely different. It was non-stop, GO GO GO. Most days we had every single table inside and outside full for the entire day. Typically you hear people say “It’s a marathon, not a sprint” but we felt like we had to sprint a marathon 😅 Dixie’s team, you should be so proud of yourselves… we love you guys!
Our kitchen crew really made the dream happen. We have such a solid team right now in the kitchen & they did such an amazing job cooking tens of thousands of smash burgers (keep in mind most of these are doubles, so they balled & smashed over 20,000 patties). Sometimes our kitchen members work 12-13 hour days & on those busy days they never stopped. They really put their heads to the grindstone and we couldn’t be more grateful for those who we have on the line.
We did face some challenges throughout this journey: our biggest being wait times. Dixie’s didn’t have a kitchen when we bought it- we had a small break room that we turned into a kitchen, which makes our kitchen very small. So seriously THANK YOU to everyone who waited patiently for us to cook your food fresh to order. Our kitchen crew does not stop for breaks whatsoever when we have orders on the board. Since summer has come to an end, our wait times have gotten SO much better! Especially for those wanting to try us out for lunch again but are on a time-restraint, food times will not be even close to what they were this summer. We’ve got this 💪🏼
Although we’ve only been serving food from Dixie’s kitchen for two years now, our smashburger was created almost six years ago when Nick owned his food truck. Nick was so pumped to be able to bring the smashburger back to all of our locals who first came to love it on the truck. And now after winning best burger in 2026, it was so cool to be able to see thousands of new people try our burger. It’s not just a burger to us: it represents all of our dreams, hard work, time spent in the kitchen creating recipes, late nights cooking, and all of the challenges and wins in-between.
Once again, thank you. It’s really hard to put into words how blessed we feel and how much we love our customers and our Dixie’s team. We are excited for the future at Dixie’s. Getting back into creating, our new fall menu, unique specials and of course smashing lots of burgers.
—Nick & Jordyn
