Terry Black's Dallas Made $2 Million in 5½ Days as the World Cup Turned Beef Ribs Into Trophies

Walk into the Dallas location of Terry Black's Barbecue on a World Cup afternoon and the first thing you notice is the bones. Fans from Japan, Austria, Argentina, and Norway hold up gnawed beef-rib bones like trophies, filming each other for social media before they have even found a table. Terry Black's, a Texas chain that started in Austin in 2014, has spent this tournament turning a single smoked beef rib into the most photographed souvenir in the host city.

The business behind those photos is staggering. During the first full week of the World Cup, the Dallas restaurant brought in $2 million in sales, general manager Nate Werner told Texas Monthly. The next week it hit the same figure in five and a half days. The location's previous best week, before any of this, was $752,000. Werner, who runs the floor, put the jump in plain terms. He is up almost 250 percent over the same stretch last year, while the numbers keep climbing.

That demand shows up by the truckload. Terry Black's Dallas now goes through roughly 35,000 pounds of brisket a week, about a semi-truck's worth, up from its usual 25,000, KERA reported. A standard beef rib weighs about a pound and a half and can run around $60, and Werner said the international crowd does not blink at the price. They do not care what it costs, he said. Craig Crisafi, who has worked the pit since the Dallas location opened seven years ago, has watched every service of the run and summed it up in five words: I have never seen anything like this.

The beef-rib bone became a symbol because the fans made it one. A traveler who runs the Instagram account bob_travel__, a supporter of Japan's national team, filmed his first-ever bite of Texas barbecue at Terry Black's on June 17, declared that he loved it through a full mouth, and posted it to TikTok, where the clip has climbed past 4 million views. The restaurant's social team leaned in, holding a clean rib bone out like a microphone and asking guests to call their World Cup champion. What began as one tourist's lunch turned into a running piece of tournament content.

The Father's Day perfect storm

The single biggest day of the run arrived on June 21, and it was no accident of the calendar. Father's Day landed in the middle of the tournament, and days earlier a Food Network series called Top 10 had named the Terry Black's beef rib the best barbecue item in the entire country. Crisafi called the combination a perfect storm, and the pit numbers back him up.

On a normal weekend the Dallas location smokes up to 90 racks of beef ribs. That Sunday it smoked 280. To pull it off, the restaurant borrowed a thousand-gallon offset smoker from the original Austin location, then called in reinforcements from across the chain. The Waco kitchen sent 90 finished briskets and Fort Worth sent 60 more. By closing, Dallas had served every one of its 435 briskets.

Too busy for a king

The crowds have been big enough to turn away royalty. When King Abdullah II of Jordan wanted barbecue before watching his country play Argentina on June 27, he asked for a private room at the Dallas location. It did not have one open. We are too busy for the king of Jordan, Werner said, so the visit shifted to the Fort Worth restaurant, which had the space to give a head of state a proper welcome.

The geography of the boom traces back to a FIFA decision. The tournament branded the region as a Dallas host city and renamed AT&T Stadium in Arlington as Dallas Stadium for the duration, which is where Japan and the Netherlands played to a 2-2 draw. The Fort Worth location of Terry Black's actually sits three miles closer to that stadium, yet it has seen only about a 25 percent lift. The Dallas name, and the neighborhood buzz that came with it, sent the surge to Werner's door instead.

The tournament's star power reached the counter as well. Ahead of the France and Spain semifinal at Dallas Stadium, David Beckham stopped by the Main Street location in a cream Stetson, posed with the pit crew, and looked over a tray of brisket, ribs, turkey, and sausage before summing it up on his Instagram Stories with one word and a fire emoji: WOW. His son Cruz came along and posted photos of his own. A soccer icon in a cowboy hat, holding a beef rib in a barbecue joint, was the crossover moment of the tournament in a single frame.

Beckham was not the only famous face to find the counter. Across its locations, Terry Black's has become a celebrity magnet. NFL receiver Tyreek Hill has stopped in, the streamer iShowSpeed filmed himself trying the brisket for the restaurant's own feed, skateboarding icon Tony Hawk made a pit stop, and the barbecue-obsessed crew behind Yes Chef pulled up to watch the slicing up close. The through line is simple. When people with the whole world's attention want Texas barbecue, a lot of them end up here.

A barbecue joint built to feed a crowd

Terry Black's has been a Texas barbecue powerhouse for years, a chain known for producing smoked meat at a volume most joints cannot match, with locations in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Waco. That capacity is the reason it could absorb a once-in-a-lifetime rush without running dry. For diners who did not want to stand in the line stretching down the block, the restaurant offered the Terry Black's BBQ Experience through OpenTable, a $150-per-person seating that skips the wait for half a beef rib, brisket, turkey, a pork rib, sausage, sides, dessert, and a tour of the pit room. Werner estimated the Dallas location was selling about 60 of those seats a day.

What makes the scene unusual is that the crowds are not really there for the soccer. Terry Black's is not a sports bar. It has a single small television at the end of the bar, nothing like the wall of screens at the pubs in Dallas's Deep Ellum. Yet on the day before Argentina beat Austria, the dining room filled with Argentina fans dancing and chanting in front of that one tiny screen, and during a recent lunch a crowd of about thirty gathered at the bar to watch Brazil knock out Japan. The barbecue drew them in, and the tournament gave them a reason to stay.

Even the staff has been chasing its own records. Crisafi finally got a Saturday off and, instead of resting, drove to Lexington to eat at Snow's for the first time and meet its legendary pitmaster, Tootsie Tomanetz. Werner stayed in Dallas, focused on a friendlier rivalry. The Dallas location had never outsold the flagship Austin store in a single week. On a Monday afternoon, still counting, he delivered the line he had been waiting to say. Last night, at 9:35, I beat them by three thousand dollars. The World Cup will leave Texas soon. The beef rib, and the bragging rights, are staying.

Sources

Texas Monthly: This Barbecue Joint Is the World Cup's Biggest Winner in Dallas (Daniel Vaughn)

KERA News: International travelers are eating a semi-truck of Terry Black's BBQ every week

Yahoo Sports: Football legend David Beckham visits Terry Black's Barbecue in Texas

Dallas Observer: One semi-truck of brisket a week, Terry Black's World Cup feeding frenzy