Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer’s wild expansion has jetted it from its home in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood in 2015 to Las Vegas and Disneyland and overseas to Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Iraq and Bahrain.
A Black Tap restaurant will next land in Dallas, where co-owners Chris Barish and Julie Mulligan are planning an artsy burger joint and milkshake shop in Victory Park, expected to open by the end of 2022.
The time’s just right for them to move their burger joint with personality into Texas, Mulligan says.
Barish opened Martini Park in Plano in 2006, so they had a connection to the area already. “We think that we could be a good addition to an already exciting culinary and nightlife scene,” Barish says. His nickname is “king of clubs,” according to Vanity Fair.
One of their partners lives in Switzerland, which is why the overseas expansion happened fairly rapidly. The Dallas location and upcoming restaurants in Nashville and Miami are an effort to “catch up” domestically, Mulligan says.
It started as a tiny, 15-seat burger joint selling simple milkshakes, with street art on the wall. But soon, they added oversized milkshakes sporting slices of cake, sprinkles and tall squirts of whipped cream. Lines three hours long formed at the original Black Tap, Mulligan says. They trademarked those drinks as CrazyShakes. And they expanded their little restaurant to cities where they thought customers might enjoy a hearty burger and an over-the-top, Instagram-worthy dessert.
Dallas fits, they say.
The No. 1 seller is the All-American burger with American cheese, pickles and special sauce. Another popular one is the Texan burger: a beef patty topped with bacon, cheddar, crispy onions, mayo and Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce. It should be interesting to see if their first-in-Texas store has high sales for the Texan burger.
One of Mulligan’s favorites is the Wagyu steakhouse burger, which has A.1. steak sauce, pepper jack cheese, bacon, roasted garlic aioli and fried onions.
The restaurant also sells Korean barbecue wings, cheese fries, fried mozzarella sticks and salads. (But you don’t go to this place and get salad, do you? Anyway.)
The bestselling CrazyShake is the Cookies ‘N Cream Supreme. A dulce de leche and cinnamon shake called the Churro Choco Taco has our eye.
The coming-soon Black Tap restaurant in Victory Park is expected to be open 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., but it’ll likely stay open later serving cocktails, beer and shakes when there’s an event at American Airlines Center.
Black Tap Craft Burgers & Beer is expected to open at 2475 Victory Park Lane, Dallas, in late 2022.
