Popular food truck to open burger restaurant in new west Fort Worth beer garden
Big Kat Burgers, an award-winning food truck offering “big. messy burgers,” will open a restaurant in 2025 in a new west side development.
Big Kat will be an anchor in the new Crystal Springs Hideaway patio restaurant and beer garden, 113 Roberts Cut Off Road in the River District.
It will join a cheese-and-wine shop in a remodeled 1924 home at an entrance to the new Crystal Springs development, on the banks of the West Fork of the Trinity River near White Settlement Road.
The Hideaway is described as a beer garden with burgers and wines. It’s owned by J.D. and Shanna Granger, former river authority officials and the operators of festivals such as Oktoberfest.
Mike Sugg, Sean Chadwick and Bryce Blackburn opened the Big Kat truck in 2017. They won Fort Worth Food + Wine Festival recognition for burgers such as the “Classic Kat” or the towering “Big Kat.”
Texas Monthly magazine praised the “Bottle Kat,” jalapeno spears and bacon atop a pepper jack cheeseburger, and the mushroom-bacon-Swiss melt with jalapeno-bacon jam.
The name Crystal Springs refers to both the river and the Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion, a 1930-40s dance hall and swimming pool nearby at 5336 White Settlement Road.
Crystal Springs is legendary in country music as the dance hall where Fort Worth bandleader Milton Brown and later fiddler Bob Wills first combined swing-dance tunes, jazz and country music to create the sound known as western swing.
This story was originally published December 17, 2024 at 5:30 AM.
