Elvis' Favorite Drive-In Burgers Are Known For A Secret Ingredient

Elvis Presley was many things — a rock and roll legend, a film actor, a heartthrob, and a great lover of food. The late music icon had his favorite Southern comfort foods and go-to restaurants like the longstanding Memphis diner, the Arcade, where he had his own booth and would typically order the same thing every time he went, a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Hey, he was a man who knew what he liked. Another thing the "Hound Dog" hitmaker enjoyed? The dough burgers from Johnnie's Drive-In in Tupelo, Mississippi, where he was born and lived until his family moved to Tennessee. 

The small, no-frills restaurant's most popular menu item is not what you might think. Dough burgers are not patties nestled between two halves of a glazed doughnut — that's what you'd call a Luther Vandross burger. Instead, this unique burger actually got its name from cooks using flour and water as a filler to stretch the meat. This method of cooking burgers saved everyone money during the Great Depression. Dough burgers were one of the foods popularized during those economically trying times. 

The story goes that around 1917, a Chicago man named John Weeks of Corinth, Mississippi, started it all when he had his local butcher combine hamburger meat with fillers like potato flakes and flour. He called them Weeksburgers and sold them for just 5 cents a pop. At some point down the line, they would be dubbed slugburgers due to "slug" being used as a slang term for nickels. An alternative history is that Borroum's Drug Store, which was founded in 1865 and still exists today, created slugburgers. Either way, this type of burger became so popular in Northern Mississippi that the city of Corinth has held an annual Slugburger Festival every July since 1988.

Why Johnnie's, Tupelo's oldest restaurant, decided to call their burgers dough burgers instead of slugburgers isn't known. It's possible they just wanted to differentiate themselves from the competition. Other names for the starchy burger include fillerburger, Dudie Burger, and cerealburger. At Johnnie's, they're made with ground beef, cooked on a flat top, and served on white buns with pickles and onions. The humble establishment reportedly sells approximately 400 dough burgers a day, on average, with a burger costing around $1.75. Like at the Arcade in Memphis, you can still go to Johnnie's and order a dough burger from Presley's booth.