A stand on Ayers Street
Corpus Christi counted 317,863 people at the 2020 Census, and it wraps around Corpus Christi Bay with its city limits running out onto North Padre Island. Plenty of seafood is eaten here, but the dish the city sent around the country came off a flat top grill.
On August 8, 1950, Harmon Dobson opened the first Whataburger on Ayers Street, working with Paul Burton. The company's own history says his goal was a burger so big it took two hands to hold and so good that one bite made people say the name out loud. In 1953 the first franchise opened in Alice, and in 1959 the first store outside Texas opened in Pensacola.
Corpus Christi keeps turning up in that history. A local artist, Will Clay, won the 1973 contest that produced the Flying W logo. The flagship Whataburger by the Bay opened in the city in 1999, and in 2004 Whataburger Field opened as home of the Corpus Christi Hooks, a Class AA baseball team.
In 2001 the Texas Legislature recognized the chain as a Texas treasure, and the head office stayed in Corpus Christi until it moved to San Antonio in 2009. Out on the island side of town, the National Park Service holds public sea turtle releases on Malaquite Beach at Padre Island National Seashore each summer, and Nueces County reopened the rebuilt Bob Hall Pier in February 2026.
What makes the city's burger its own
The company history describes the build that made it famous: never frozen beef on a big toasted five inch bun, made to order with the extras you ask for. Grilled jalapenos are one of those extras, and jalapenos joined the menu in 1973, the same year as onion rings.
That is the template for the recipe below. A wide, thin patty with a hard sear, a toasted bun big enough to need two hands, and jalapenos charred on the same griddle. It is a backyard tribute, not a copy, and the smoke comes from a rub instead of a secret.
