Bless Your Heart Burgers Is Opening a Restaurant in Vancouver, Wash.

Its neighbor also happens to be Ben’s Bottle Shop, which won third Best Beer Bar in USA Today’s Readers’ Choice Awards.

Bless Your Heart Burgers Photo credit Austin Phelps.
By Andi Prewitt

The Bless Your Heart Burgers brand that expanded and then contracted is growing once again.

Sesame Collective, the restaurant group that took ownership of the burger joint from Toro Bravo Inc. after it dissolved in 2020, announced that it would open a new place at 7910 E Mill Plain Blvd. inside The Mill shopping center in Vancouver, Wash.

For those unfamiliar with our suburb to the north, that’s about 2 miles west of Interstate 205, a complex that beer nerds would know for Ben’s Bottle Shop, which just took home third place in the USA Today Readers’ Choice Awards Best Beer Bars 2022.

Good beer neighbors aside, this will be Bless Your Heart’s first location outside of Oregon when it opens on Saturday, Dec. 17. Longtime fans may recall that the original site launched in Pine Street Market in 2017 (WW praised its double cheeseburger as “a banger”), then spun off a McMinnville location in 2018, though that closed just a few months after it began operations. Portland’s current Bless Your Heart is near the corner of Northeast Killingsworth Street and 33rd Avenue.

At the restaurant across the Columbia River, you can expect the same nostalgic smashburgers, fries and hot dogs that the brand became well known for. New to the menu are draft cocktails, like The Real Thing, which is a riff on an old fashioned, with rye whiskey and a dash of housemade Coca-Cola-inspired syrup.

The dining room will be family friendly, feature 40 seats in all, as well as three TVs and spaces for groups both small and large, like an expanded patio that’s still in the works.

“We’re excited to bring some love to our neighbors to the north in the best way we know how…with delicious burgers and fries!” says Jamal Hassan, co-owner of Sesame Collective. “We were drawn to Vancouver and can’t wait to take this giant leap forward and share Bless Your Heart Burgers with the vibrant community there.”

To celebrate the opening, Bless Your Heart will host a Burger Bash from noon to 6 pm Saturday, Dec. 17. You can expect to receive one free burger per person as well as merchandise giveaways.

Willamette Week’s reporting has concrete impacts that change laws, force action from civic leaders, and drive compromised politicians from public office. Support WW's journalism today.