Original Velvet Taco in Dallas will close in early 2023 - The Dallas Morning News

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It’s the end of an era for late-night customers at Velvet Taco on Henderson Avenue in Dallas.

The original Velvet Taco, open for more than 11 years in a former Church’s Chicken restaurant right on the Central Expressway frontage road, will close on Jan. 2, 2023. The lease was up, then extended, and CEO Clay Dover says it’s finally time for that original building to hit the history books while the company continues to expand in other parts of Dallas and Fort Worth, then on to Nashville, Waco, Oklahoma City, Austin and Miami.

The Velvet Taco at 3012 N. Henderson Ave. is owned by the family behind Dickey’s Barbecue; it sits next-door to the original Dickey’s that’s more than 80 years old. By May 2023, Velvet Taco is expected to transform into Trailer Birds, a chicken tenders and hot wings joint owned by the Dickey family.

Employees at the location have been given the option to move to a new Velvet Taco near Elm Street and Good-Latimer Expressway in Deep Ellum that’s expected to open Jan. 16, 2023.

The original Velvet Taco on Henderson Avenue in Dallas is a nothing-fancy place selling tacos with chicken tikka, fish & chips, Nashville hot tofu and more. As the restaurant continues to grow across the United States, the original one in Dallas is closing permanently on Jan. 2, 2023.(Rex C Curry / Special Contributor)

The opening of that Deep Ellum restaurant signals the start of Velvet Taco’s second-biggest year on record. In 2021, the company opened 11 restaurants. In 2023, Dover and his team plan to open 10. (The company opened six restaurants in 2022.)

But it all started with that one little taco shop on Henderson Avenue, opened at a time when Knox-Henderson was becoming the hottest restaurant and bar block in town.

The original lease “was literally sketched out on a paper napkin by the original founder Randy DeWitt,” Dover says. For more than a decade, the lease was just two pages long.

“With everything we’ve built, there are touches of that original place,” Dover says. The company has more than 30 restaurants open.

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The yellow grid ceiling at the original restaurant, installed to draw attention away from the exposed ceiling in the aging building, has now become a design element at other Velvet Tacos. The original is where the company started selling “backdoor chicken,” the limited-quantity rotisserie chickens sold on certain days of the week. That tradition has continued at the newer Velvet Tacos, with birds now sold out of a side door or at a walk-up window. There was something lovable about the original taco shop’s nothing-fancy back door.

Velvet Taco has a menu of tacos made with chicken, pork, beef, fish and vegetarian ingredients. It always has a "WTF" taco on the menu. That stands for Weekly Taco Feature.(Rex C Curry / Special Contributor)

Dover came in as CEO as the fourth restaurant was opening, but before then, he remembers standing in line for chicken tikka tacos at 2:30 a.m. on the weekends, as do many longtime Dallasites. (I was among them.) Some of the recipes have not changed since the beginning, even as the company has now been acquired by two large investment firms, Leonard Green & Partners and L Catterton.

The store’s opening general manager, Brandon Bradrick, calls the restaurant “a disruptor” at the time.

“Most guests who came to Velvet Taco knew of street tacos, but no one was doing what we were doing,” he said in an email. “Guests came in thinking they were going to get tacos with the usual cilantro and onion and would leave with their minds blown.”

He called that store “a place for the people.” It was quite an after-bars social scene, too.

"We believe the brand has got national exposure opportunities," says Velvet Taco CEO Clay Dover. "And we're excited about the growth." But the original Velvet Taco in the Knox-Henderson district of Dallas is closing on Jan. 2, 2023.(Courtesy of Velvet Taco)

When Dover was starting as CEO, he trained for a month at the original Velvet Taco. Emma Munoz was his guide; she started at the company working at the counter and later became a manager. Today she’s a managing partner for the growing business.

She’s Velvet Taco’s longest-tenured employee. She recalls the atmosphere in the restaurant: “the vibe, lighting, languages spoken, all walks of life, dates, lunches, dinners, proposals, birthdays ... Velvet Taco was the one place you wanted to be at,” she said in an email.

Yes, there have been proposals at the original Velvet Taco.

The late-night traffic on Henderson Avenue has dwindled compared to a decade ago, Dover says. He believes customers’ late-night taco cravings might be better served in a neighborhood that seems to keep later hours, like Deep Ellum where the new restaurant will stay open until 4 a.m. on weekends.

In 2023, Velvet Taco plans to expand to Deep Ellum, Grapevine, Rockwall, Allen and near an H-E-B in north Frisco. In 2024, Dover plans to expand to the Alliance area of Fort Worth and Mansfield, again near an H-E-B.

The original Velvet Taco sign will be saved and displayed inside the company’s headquarters in Far North Dallas.

It will remind Dover and his team of the original — “an essential part of the brand,” he says.

The original Velvet Taco is at 3012 N. Henderson Ave., Dallas. It will be open throughout the day on Jan. 1, 2023 and will be closed starting Jan. 2, 2023.

For more food news, follow Sarah Blaskovich on Twitter at @sblaskovich.

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