When Dickey’s Barbecue Pit opened near Henderson Avenue in Dallas 80 years ago, the address wasn’t 4610 N. Central Expressway, like it is today. It’s been there so long, the highway wasn’t built yet.
Back then, brisket, sausage and ham sandwiches sold for 10 cents apiece. Those who wanted a vegetable got a bag of potato chips or hand-cut fries.
Its beginnings were simple: Travis Dickey opened a barbecue restaurant “because he liked to eat it,” says Roland Dickey, the founder’s son. When Travis Dickey died in 1967 of a heart attack inside the original Dickey’s, there was just one restaurant, and not much had changed in 26 years.
If only he could see what happened next.
The second and third restaurants opened in 1968 in Garland and in 1969 in Richardson. In the next 25 years, Roland Dickey opened about a dozen more. Then, in 1994, the restaurant group started franchising, and Dickey’s ballooned to 500 stores.
Today, the family-owned business is the oldest barbecue joint in Dallas and the largest franchise of its kind in the world. Dickey’s operates just under 650 restaurants in the United States and nearly 300 internationally.
“When we started out, my idea of a foreign country was Corsicana [Texas],” says Roland Dickey, Jr., who goes by RDJ.
He’s the grandson of Dickey’s founder Travis Dickey. Alongside current CEO Laura Rea Dickey, RDJ’s wife, the two have supersized Texas barbecue with two things in mind:
“It’s about food. And it’s about folks,” Laura Rea Dickey says. “And how do we get more food to more folks?”
‘Nobody had ever heard of barbecue’
It’s the golden age of barbecue in Texas right now, when fanatical customers will drive all over the state for peppery brisket and house-made sausage. Dickey’s doesn’t compete with smalltown spots like Goldee’s Barbecue, which was just named the No. 1 barbecue joint in the state by Texas Monthly; or Snow’s Barbecue, the middle-of-nowhere spot near Austin that was the subject of a Netflix documentary.
Dickey’s competes with quick-service restaurants. And it wins when the customer wants brisket chili stuffed in a baked potato, not a taco covered in queso from another major chain.
The best-selling items at Dickey’s are brisket, pork ribs and mac and cheese. Hand-cut fries are up there, too. Looking back several decades, that kind of food wasn’t available in many states outside of the South.
When family patriarch Roland Dickey, the former CEO, expanded Dickey’s to California, “nobody had ever heard of barbecue,” he says. “It was like bringing sushi to Dallas.”
Soon, they were franchising in California, Colorado, Arizona and parts of the northeast, where platters of barbecue were a bit of an anomaly.
Expanding internationally was inevitable. Then and now, the business case was almost too good, the company leaders say.
“The whole world wants what the U.S. wanted 15 years ago,” RDJ says of new barbecue fans in Japan, Singapore and the UAE.
Internationally, Dickey’s sells what Laura Rea Dickey calls a “romantic version of Texas barbecue” — the stuff some foreigners think we eat every day while we tend our cattle wearing a cowboy hat. True or not, “It’s something a lot of folks can relate to,” she says.
Beyond barbecue
As the Dickey family sits on the patio of the original restaurant, telling stories about Granddad’s little barbecue business, it’s easy to envision the small road out front, before Central Expressway was installed. Travis Dickey lived within walking distance, on Goodwin Avenue in today’s M Streets neighborhood.
It’s 80 years later, and the company has now gotten so confident with its barbecue that RDJ is focused on a separate arm of the business, one that accounts for 22% of the revenue. This emerging brands division operates Wing Boss, a smoked wing restaurant; Big Deal Burger, a barbecue burger shop; Trailer Birds, a Nashville hot chicken company; and six other businesses that sell meat, kitchen equipment, sauce and hospitality-related technology.
Wing Boss’ first standalone restaurant opened in Addison in September 2021 after starting as a ghost kitchen, where the food was made inside existing Dickey’s restaurants and delivered or offered curbside to customers. Five more standalone Wing Boss restaurants are planned to open in Dallas-Fort Worth, and dozens of others still exist as ghost kitchens inside Dickey’s.
All of the virtual brands — the wing business, the barbecue burgers and the Nashville hot chicken company — use 80% of the ingredients already inside Dickey’s barbecue joints. And each one was launched during the coronavirus pandemic as a way to expand the brand, when the technology was already there.
They’d already built a robust online platform and started using third-party delivery in 2016 — putting them ahead of the thousands of restaurants that scrambled to reach customers at home during COVID-19 scares.
All three of the new restaurant companies will eventually be franchised, like 99% of Dickey’s restaurants are now. But first, the Dickeys plan to operate Wing Boss, Big Deal Burger and Trailer Birds themselves, to prove each concept.
Perhaps they’re wondering what their great-grandkids might say about the company eight decades from now.
“We’re looking forward to the next 80 years,” RDJ says.
80th anniversary events
On Oct. 20 from 5 to 7 p.m., the original Dickey’s restaurant at 4610 N. Central Expressway, Dallas, sold will sell $1 pulled pork sandwiches and $1 Lone Star beer. All money collected goes went to the Dickey Foundation, which buys protective gear for first responders. During the pandemic, Dickey’s gave away 113,000 sandwiches to first responders.
On Oct. 28 at 6:30 p.m., the Dickeys are hosting an 80th birthday party and auction at the Rustic in Dallas, 3656 Howell St., Dallas. From 7:30 to 8:30 p.m., they’ll attempt to set the Guinness World Record for Most Photos of People Holding From a Reusable Cup Uploaded to Instagram in One Hour — a record that doesn’t exist yet. (“We felt we had a good shot of winning,” Laura Rea Dickey says, laughing.) Tickets to the concert and auction cost $115.01 per person and some proceeds benefit the Dickey Foundation. Details at prekindle.com.
