Dagwoods Fire Grill Tap closes after less than 5 months

It’s getting so that you need a scorecard to follow all the openings and closings in Fort Worth’s West 7th corridor. The latest closing: Dagwoods Fire Grill and Tap, which closed after less than 5 months on Foch Street.

Our Eats Beat columnist, Bud Kennedy, reported on the closing via Twitter, in a tweet that noted another closure, Rough Creek of San Saba Steakhouse in Burleson.

Manager Carlos Cueva confirmed the closure via Facebook email. “Main investor there pulled the plug on that spot,” Cueva writes. “No longer with them.”

Dagwoods FGT was one of three Fort Worth restaurant that chef/owner David Hollister and his team opened last fall. Common Ground Grill & Tap, near TCU, is still open, as is Ridgmar Mall-area sandwich shop/craft-beer bar Dagwoods Grinders & Growlers. Common Ground made DFW.com’s lists of best new restaurants of 2015. (Hollister is also the executive chef at Gas Monkey Bar N’ Grill in Dallas, and has been working on the opening of a Gas Monkey in Key West.)

We have to admit that our first reaction upon hearing about Dagwoods FGT closing was “We’re going to miss the Dagwood Burger,” the stunning burger that kicked off DFW.com’s Burger of the Week series. But when he had that burger during a lunchtime visit, the restaurant was practically empty.

“In an area already flooded with bars, restaurants and faceless combinations of the two, Dagwoods FGT differentiates itself with distinctly Texas cuisine,” Malcolm Mayhew wrote in his DFW.com review of the restaurant. “Chicken-fried steak topped with bacon gravy, fried quail legs, grits laced with red chiles.”

But its Foch Street location suffered from a lack of visibility (a Bottlecap Alley that was previously in the location also closed quickly) and, often, parking. And competition in the area is so stiff that longtime Fort Worth restaurateur Eric Tschetter said that it was his reason for closing Trinity River Tap House, still better-known as the Pour House, in February (Tschetter, who lives in Dallas, continues to operate Pour House PhD in Oak Cliff).

Coincidentally, Mayhew was also our reviewer for Rough Creek Steakhouse of San Saba, which opened in later 2014 on the outskirts of Burleson. “[It] presents a picture-perfect image of a small-town Texas restaurant,” Mayhew wrote. “It’s as if you walked into a Robert Earl Keen song.”

The restaurant’s Facebook page is still up as of this writing, and we’ve sent a query to the restaurant via Facebook email. The last post was on March 8, but if you look in the “visitor posts” rail on the left-hand side of the page, you’ll see a question from a couple of days ago about the closure and a reply that the majority of the ownership has decided that it’s time to shut down.

The Burleson restaurant should not be confused with Glen Rose’s Rough Creek Lodge, which participated in the recent Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival.

This story was originally published April 7, 2016 at 11:04 AM with the headline "Dagwoods Fire Grill Tap closes after less than 5 months."