Original Velvet Taco in Dallas will close in early 2023

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 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. 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.