After making “flat meat sandwiches” at pop-ups and stirring up more than a little good trouble on the internet over the past six years, Austin’s burger phenom Bad Larry Burger Club is getting a permanent home.
Bad Larry’s, an all-day bar and restaurant serving a menu of high-low comfort food and Austin’s best smashburger, will open in the first quarter of next year in the old Quickie Pickie space at 2027 E. Cesar Chavez St.
The bar/restaurant is a collaboration between Bad Larry founder Matthew Bolick (co-owner of Brew & Brew and Better Half) and Open Road Hospitality. The latter is a venture from Nathan Hill (White Horse, Frazier’s Long & Low), Jeremy Murray (Kitty Cohen’s), KKDW design studios, and Frazier’s general manager Heather Muir. Open Road operates the recently opened Busty’s Bar & Jukebox in northeast Austin and the forthcoming Jackie's Desert Rose in San Antonio. Frequent Bolick collaborator and designer Lauren Dickens is also a partner in the new Bad Larry's.
Who exactly is this "Larry"?
Many have long asked Bolick, who worked in the coffee world for about 20 years before getting into bar and restaurant ownership, if he is the titular Larry. But the biggest fanatics of the smashburgers know there is no “Larry.”
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“I like to say that we’re all Larry,” Bolick told the American-Statesman.
The name derives from Larry Lane, the street on which Bolick and his now-wife used to live and hold monthly backyard burger parties with friends. The Bad Larry Burger Club pop-up grew from that, beginning in 2019 and picking up steam with viral marketing stunts like a pandemic-era burger chute that safely delivered burgers to guests and raucous metal shows. (Legendary band Converge caused pandemonium in front of Bad Larry sibling bar Little Brother in summer 2022.)
The best smashburgers in Austin will be easier to find
The star has always been the burger. Smashed flatter than a pancake with crispy caramelized edges, while still maintaining a tender juiciness, the two three-ounce patties are made using a chuck and brisket mixture with 20% fat content from Austin’s K&C Cattle Co. Bad Larry dresses them simply with ketchup, mustard, diced onions, American cheese. Hold the lettuce and tomato, because who needs a salad on their smashed beef sandwich?
The pop-ups have gone from Instagram-fueled culinary cult to the edges of the mainstream, with consistent long lines and regular sell outs.
Now, people will be able to get them without obsessively tracking the pop up that may appear at a natural wine bar one week and a record release at a dive bar the next.(Note: the Bad Larry Burger Club will continue as a pop-up event.)
Bad Larry’s breakfast menu will include a Breakfast Larry (smashed sausage and egg patties on a housemade English muffin), silver dollar pancakes and a breakfast burrito. Dinner specials will feature a steak night, a possible “meatball/parm smashburger situation,” and sandwiches made on homemade Texas toast. There will also be loads of booze, including “fun, trashy, cheeky co*cktails and frozens.”
Pre-loading the party with an irreverent persona
And don’t expect the irreverent tone to change from a brand that has encouraged mostly cheers (and the odd jeer) for its acerbic sociopolitical commentary on everyone from Greg Abbott to Elon Musk and Joe Rogan. And if people push back, or want to criticize the burger, or take shots at the line, or the hipsterness of it all, Bad Larry is happy to clap back.
“It just kind of morphed into this want to troll. I don’t know where that came from,” Bolick said. “I’d definitely never been that way on the internet until I opened the Bad Larry Instagram feed.”
Hill, who has created some of Austin’s most identifiable nightlife brands over the past decade, says the online persona and presence, along with Bad Larry’s penchant for mischief and rowdiness spoke to him.
“If you look at early White Horse days, that is what we did. We took the business seriously but the persona was just wild and crazy guys,” Hill told the American-Statesman. “We’re still selling a party in the end. We’re kind of pre-loading the party with this irreverent persona. It felt to me like some of my best memories of Austin, floor shows at the Parlor and SXSW parking lot parties. When (Bolick) started doing donuts in a go-kart in the parking lot at the White Horse, I thought, ‘We’re gonna be fast friends.’”
Bolick’s good (literal) taste and guerrilla marketing savvy aside, the burger brat savant finds it funny that people still get so worked up for a burger.
“Just another burger on the Internet,” Bolick says.
