Best Burgers in Charlottesville
Charlottesville, Virginia — updated August 22, 2026
Three places in Charlottesville that take a burger seriously, and the chain to skip.
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Three places in Charlottesville do burgers properly, and between them they cover most of what anyone actually wants: a small counter that does one thing, a full restaurant, and a bar on the Corner that will still feed you at midnight.
Jack Brown's Beer & Burger Joint
The best burger in Charlottesville and the highest-rated of the three at 4.6 across 1,230 reviews. It is small, it is on Second Street SE just off the Downtown Mall, and the menu is deliberately short. Beer list is longer than the food list, which tells you how they think about it.
Expect to queue at peak and expect the room to be loud. Neither is a complaint.
Citizen Burger Bar
The one to pick when you need a table, a proper bar and somewhere everyone in a group can find something. 4.3 across 2,671 reviews, which is the most feedback any restaurant in this city has accumulated, and a 4.3 across that many visits is more reassuring than a 4.8 across fifty.
At 212 E Main Street on the Downtown Mall, open 11am to midnight daily. The kitchen closes at 10:30 Sunday to Thursday and 11:30 Friday and Saturday.
Boylan Heights
The Corner option, at 102 14th Street NW, 4.1 across 567 reviews. Build-your-own burgers in a bar that runs until 2am every night, which makes it the answer to the specific question of where to eat a burger after eleven o'clock in Charlottesville.
Open from 11:30am Tuesday through Sunday and from 5pm on Mondays. Happy hour Tuesday to Thursday, 3 to 6. It fills up on UVA game days.
What we left off
BurgerFi is in our data at a 3.4 and is a national chain. Neither fact recommends it.
The previous version of this guide did not mention a single burger restaurant. It linked to The Gray, which is a wine and beer shop; to "Belmont", which is a neighbourhood rather than a business; and to jackson + park design, which is a design firm. All three carried a restaurant category in our place data and nobody had read the guide closely enough to notice. It also surfaced burger restaurants in Virginia Beach and in Watertown, Massachusetts, both of which had been filed under Charlottesville by an old import. Those records have been corrected.