Customer Highlight: Lee’s Sandwich Shop wins Cabarrus Burger Madness 2025

This year was the fifth annual Cabarrus Burger Madness, where 20 local restaurants entered a burger into the month-long competition. This year, one of our customers, Lee’s Sandwich Shop, won the award for their Beer and Bourbon Burger. So we wanted to make sure we gave them a spotlight.

Lee’s Sandwich Shop is the oldest burger restaurant in Cabarrus County, opening in 1949. This was Lee’s third year participating in CBM, and their first time winning the competition. “It’s the way that they done the voting, it made it more fair across the board,” said Lee’s owner, Chick. This year was different from past years, as each customer could only vote once. Customers would sign up for the Explore Cabarrus mobile pass and check in when they were at a participating restaurant. They could only vote for one burger based on the restaurants they had been to and checked in. “Now it’s more fair, everybody’s on an even playing field,” Chick stated.

The competition has grown over the years, and customers from all over Cabarrus spend time trying out different spots and burgers throughout the month. “We had a lot of people up here in our restaurant that had never ate here before,” said Chick. He said they would say things like “‘Hey, I’ve been living in Concord for 60 years, I didn’t even know you guys existed, now we got somewhere else to come and eat.’ We had a lot of people doing that,” Chick continued.

The competition has become a great promotion for local restaurants throughout the county and will continue into 2026. “They said ‘we couldn’t shut it down now if they wanted to,’” Chick told us. CBM was supposed to be a one-and-done event to help local restaurants during COVID-19 in 2021, but it has become so popular that it will enter its sixth consecutive year in 2026. If you spend time in Cabarrus County, check out Lee’s Sandwich Shop’s award-winning Beer and Bourbon Burger, and if you spend time in Cabarrus next year, make sure to check out all the local restaurants that participate in CBM throughout March.