With its hand-painted signs hawking “BAR-B-Q” and “BEST BURGERS” and “CHICKEN FR. ST.,” its beat-up tin awning, a rickety red neon sign barely blinking “BEER,” Hickory House Bar-B-Q & Grill looks like it’s always been there. Because it has. Since the Truman presidency, anyway, along the boulevard formerly known as Industrial in the shadow of the Houston Street Viaduct. In this town, that’s forever and an extra afternoon.
There’s some debate about its opening date: The sign out front says “Since 1952,” but its longtime owner told me Tuesday he discovered a few years ago that the joint opened in 1950. The first time the words “Hickory House” appeared in a local newspaper was August 1949, in a full-page Dallas Times Herald ad listing new landowners in the old Trinity Industrial District located “Under the Skyline of Dallas.”
There’s now a likely last time, too: May 30, 2026. That’s how long Nick Spyropoulos has to move out and close up, courtesy of a landlord who found a new tenant willing to pay high rent for an old building on a beat-up stretch of street at last getting its long-promised, high-priced makeover.
Almost every table was filled a little before noon Tuesday – most with regulars staring down plate-sized burgers, some with local tourists who’d come to say their farewells over a chicken fried steak with sides.
Nick Spyropoulos is the latest in a long line of Hickory House owners dating back to its opening on Industrial Boulevard in 1950. He will also be the last.
Robert Wilonsky
“This is not a place for the young generation,” the 65-year-old Spyropoulos said. “It’s older people. The young people eat downtown.”
Opinion
“There aren’t many of these places left,” Dan Miller said as he waited to pay his check. The 71-year-old Oak Cliff native hadn’t been here in years. But he saw on the TV last week that the Hickory House is closing soon, so he brought his wife, a Louisiana native who’d never been, to pay their respects.
“It’s sad these places are going,” Miller said.
It didn’t have to be this way. Spyropoulos told me Tuesday he had a buyer lined up to take over Hickory House for $100,000. The would-be owner, a restaurant regular, had just one caveat: Spyropoulos would remain in place as the face of the institution of which he’d been the longtime caretaker.
Spyropoulos told me he broke the news to his landlord, Thansai Mantas, who said a transfer of ownership was a no-go. Mantas told Spyropoulos he’d lined up another tenant, a Spanish-language nightclub, whose owners were willing to pay about triple the current rent of $3,500 a month. The new tenants brought tape measures on Monday, Spyropoulos said, so they could measure the place for a refit – “if they don’t tear it down,” he said in the Greek accent he hasn’t shaken 56 years after his parents moved their four sons to Dallas.
He grinned. “Money talks.” He shrugged.
Crews were busy on Tuesday building palapas for the new club scheduled to take over the Hickory House location sometime this summer, before the World Cup kicks off.
Robert Wilonsky
I left messages for Mantas, who made millions when he sold Silver City Cabaret on N. Stemmons Freeway to a publicly traded Houston strip-club conglomerate in 2012. But construction has already begun outside Hickory House: On Tuesday, three guys were trimming palm fronds to lay atop newly built palapas tucked between the Mixmaster and the Houston Street Viaduct.
Spyropoulos said the next owners want to get the place ready by July 1. “For World Cup,” he said. He laughed.
None of this is terribly surprising. In 1996, city planners ignored Industrial altogether, with one former official telling this newspaper that “it has a lot of character to it,” and let’s just leave it at that. Seven years later came the Trinity River Corridor Project’s Balanced Vision Plan, which, in addition to nearly drowning a toll road between the levees, promised to transform the eventually renamed Riverfront into a “transition to the downtown street system.” City Hall committed more than $60 million to a project promised in 2010 but only recently underway.
Work has finally begun on the $60+ million remake of Riverfront Boulevard all the way to the front door of the Longhorn Ballroom.
Robert Wilonsky
Riverfront or Industrial or whatever you want to call it was forever just a stretch of liquor stores, bail bonds dispensaries, dive bars and juke joints, including Rusty Montgomery’s Round-Up Club, which opened downtown in 1928 and moved to Industrial in 1965 to be next to the Hickory House. Now, from the Able Pump Station and Fuel City all the way down to the Longhorn Ballroom on Corinth Street, Riverfront is an obstacle course of barricades and rubble, with local investors and out-of-town LLCs and developer Jack Matthews owning property on both sides of the torn-up street.
“In 10 years, all of this will be unrecognizable,” Spyropoulos said as he looked out the window. “All this construction, these new sidewalks, they think will make it look like the Riverwalk in San Antonio.” He shook his head. “I was going to do a lot of improvements before all this. And it’s hard for me to walk away. But I don’t have a choice.”
I expect most readers have never been to Hickory House, except maybe on the way to the Longhorn or, once upon a time, the Sportatorium. It always looked like a set made for the movies, which might be why it was a regular on the short-lived Bradley Whitford-Colin Hanks series The Good Guys and the narco-empire series Queen of the South, whose location scouts and publicists treated Hickory House like the landmark it should have been – and would have been in any other city that doesn’t treat its lifers like afterthoughts.
Walking into the Hickory House in 2026 probably isn’t too different from walking into the Hickory House when it opened its doors in 1950.
Robert Wilonsky
For Spyropoulos, Hickory House was initially just a good, steady job handed to him by his brother Pete, who bought the barbecue joint 20 years ago, then headed to California and tossed Nick the keys. Nick’s had countless jobs since coming to Dallas, from throwing the Times Herald to installing floor tile to owning Collin County convenience stores. But this is the one that stuck.
Nick reminded me that his brother John owns the beloved John’s Cafe on Lower Greenville, which opened in 1972. Their brother Dino works at John’s in the mornings before heading to Hickory House most afternoons to join seven other longtime employees who hope Nick can find a new home for Hickory House before closing time.
For most of the last two decades, Nick has been on Industrial from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week, except last Thursday, when he buried his 38-year-old stepdaughter claimed by breast cancer. He talked about her three children, and how all of this was so hard, all at once.
“I have to stop, or I will get too emotional,” he said, his eyes wet. “It’s a shock, mostly, knowing I am going to have to be gone in two months,” Spyropoulos said softly. “There’s sadness, too. But I know it won’t really hit me until I start moving things out, taking things down. That’s when it will hit me.”