Long-standing Fort Worth burger favorite to add new location in south Tarrant County
Fred’s Texas Cafe, often ranked Fort Worth’s favorite burger grill, will open a new location in old downtown Crowley, co-owner Quincy Wallace announced Monday.
The third location for the 46-year-old Texas-themed burger cafe will open along West Main Street in the south Tarrant County town’s business district, renamed Crowley Crossing.
Fred’s, a two-time winner in the Star-Telegram “Burger Battle,” now serves 22 different hamburgers. But it’s best known for the “Fred Burger,” hand-cut fries and buttermilk-battered chicken-fried steak, along with a new peach cobbler.
The new Fred’s will replace a current retail building at 101 N. Magnolia St., but the owners will ask Crowley to renumber it as 100 N. Texas St., Wallace said.
Fred’s will join Moontower Pizza, which recently moved from Burleson to 117 S. Texas St. Another burger grill is also expected.
It’s the first Fred’s outside Fort Worth, joining locations at 2730 Western Center Blvd. in north Fort Worth and 7101 Camp Bowie Blvd. West.
“Crowley looks like an up-and-coming place,” Wallace said by phone Monday. “I like the community feel. It feels like home. It feels like Fred’s.”
He hopes to expand to other cities, he said: “This is our first test outside of Fort Worth. The plan is growth.”
The announcement sets up a head-on competition against Nicky D’s Family Restaurant, a 22-year Crowley hometown favorite at 1605 Farm Road 1187.
“We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve been doing for 22 years,” Nicky D’s co-owner Tammy Danelski said.
“Crowley is growing fast, but it still has that little-town feel where everybody knows everybody.”
Fred’s opened in 1978 when founders Gari and J.D. Chandler took over a ramshackle cafe built in what was then an industrial area off West Seventh Street after the 1949 Fort Worth flood.
In 1990, son Terry Chandler came back from the Marines, and Fred’s came to life as a counterculture burger hangout.
Terry Chandler brought a free-wheeling mindset, adding late hours, more drinks, spicier dishes and the restaurant’s signature “Fred Burger” and hotter “diablo” and poblano burgers.
Chandler described Fred’s as a “blue-collar greasy spoon with a lot of white-collar infiltrators.”
In 2011, a new Fred’s opened on Western Center Boulevard near Interstate 35W.
When the shopping center now named Artisan Circle went in next door to the original location, Fred’s refused to budge at first and became an eccentric holdout of old-time Texas in the middle of new restaurants and bars.
Beset with parking problems and a rougher neighborhood clientele, the restaurant eventually relocated in 2022 to Camp Bowie Boulevard West. The original location at 915 Currie St. remains vacant.
