Bite Burger House on Tenth Line

The ketchup is smoked in house. The mustard is a Cajun curried blend mixed on site, the fries are cut from whole potatoes, and the Certified Angus beef is ground in house — all of it sitting underneath the burgers rather than on a specials board. Bite Burger House treats the components most kitchens buy by the case as things worth making itself. Owners Glen Klepsch and Bettina Klims have run the Orléans burgerhouse on Tenth Line Road since 2019, building a long roster of named burgers on that from-scratch base. It bills what it does as local flavours meeting gourmet comfort, and the menu leans hard on the gourmet half.

That roster runs long and the names run loud. The Juicy Lucy stuffs cheese curds inside the chuck patty and finishes it with caramelized onion and gravy; the Aporkalypse piles pork belly, smoked bacon, and pulled pork under Swiss; the Fromage A Trois answers with three chuck patties and three cheddars. The Bite Me is the plainer house classic — chuck, smoked bacon, and cheddar, plated with the house-cut fries, the smoked ketchup, and the Cajun curried mustard — and a recent roundup of the city's best burgers singled it out alongside the fries. The Gardener holds the vegetarian slot with a black bean and red beet patty under goat cheese, built to be ordered on its own merits rather than as a concession.

The menu does not stop at the patty. A smoked-meat thread runs through it — the MTL burger layers Montreal smoked meat with Swiss and Russian dressing, and the Reuben carries the same idea onto grilled sourdough with sauerkraut. Beyond that sit a four-cheese grilled cheese with smoked bacon, a foot-long hot dog, fish and chips in potato-flaked haddock, and wings thrown with anything from maple mustard to hot garlic. The sides hold their own corner: classic poutine made with St-Albert curds, truffle fries, Tin's Nachos, mac and cheese built for add-ons, and Snap Crackle Pop, mozzarella sticks armoured in rice cereal. Dessert is deep-fried ice cream in a cornflake crust.

The naming is the easy part to notice — Funion, Getting On My Goat, Pig's Squeal, Identity Crisis — but the builds underneath are specific rather than gimmicky. Each commits to one idea and follows it: Pig's Squeal leans entirely into pork and heat, the Misteak runs steak spice into smoked portobello and espresso BBQ sauce, the Louie Luau sets pork belly against cayenne-grilled pineapple. What holds a menu this size together is the in-house work behind it — the espresso BBQ sauce, the smoked condiments, the house remoulade — the difference between a long list and a pile of toppings reshuffled into new names.

Glen Klepsch and Bettina Klims own the restaurant, and Glen's history with burgers runs back well before this address. Trade coverage from earlier in his career described a two-grind, no-filler approach to the patty and early work on a plant-based build. Local reporting has placed him in the kitchen over the years, though the restaurant lists no current chef by name. Those early instincts still read on the current menu — and the Gardener, the black-bean-and-beet burger, carries that first plant-based experiment forward.

The burgers share the menu with a gastropub's drink list — craft beer, wine, and cocktails — and a comfort-food bench deep enough that no one at the table comes up empty. That breadth is the point on Tenth Line Road, where the restaurant works as the answer when a group can't agree, the standby that handles a quiet family dinner and a loud weekend table off the same menu. A burgerhouse that grinds its own beef and smokes its own ketchup could trade on that alone; this one spends the effort making sure the rest of the table eats just as well.