A Chapel Hill pop-up restaurant is giving the quesadilla a big twist. Meet the ‘dilla.’
Americans are known for their love of convenience food — from fast-food to pizza, as long as it’s quick.
A summer pop-up restaurant in Chapel Hill, called ThrillaDilla, seeks to meet that need with an American twist on Mexican quesadillas.
When the owners, all veterans of the Triangle restaurant scene, had filled the traditional grilled cheesy tortillas with fried chicken, seared mushrooms, veggies and brisket, they felt they’d riffed on the classic dish so much it needed a new name: a dilla.
And that’s what ThrillaDilla has been serving up since May in Mardi Gras Bowling Center, on N.C. 54, just off Interstate 40.
When ThrillaDilla — pronounced thrill-a-dill-a — winds down July 31 at the end of their summer trial period, the owners will be satisfied that the concept works. And they hope to bring dillas back more permanently.
“We asked the question: ‘What if we created this new class of food? Would people go for it?’ and the answer is that people really liked the product,” said co-founder Sam Poley in an interview with The News & Observer.
ThrillaDilla primarily prepares food for take-out, although they also serve bowlers at Mardi Gras. They offer 10-inch personal-sized dillas as well as 14-inch sharable dillas.
“The 14-inch is almost exactly twice as much food as the 10-inch. Maybe it’s logical, but it’s still weird,” their website says.
The dillas come with multiple options, from “The Veg 1.0,” which features grilled mushrooms, spinach, potatoes and cheese, to “Crispy Chicken,” which includes spicy fried chicken in honey with radishes, bell peppers, and scallions.
Developing dillas
Poley is a marketing consultant with nearly 15 years of experience in the food industry. He stepped away from his last food venture, Only Burger in Durham, to focus on his family.
“It was time for me to get out of the food service industry. My son was very young, and it just made sense for me to go back into more of a communications marketing role,” Poley said.
Poley has spent years brainstorming and rejecting restaurant ideas, but the one idea he couldn’t shake drew him back into the restaurant business.
“Usually, I was able to come up with an idea and then kill the idea in my head pretty effectively, like, ‘Why won’t this work? How do I break this?’ and then I had this idea for ThrillaDilla, and it kind of wouldn’t go away,” he said.
So, he pitched the idea to his good friend Eric Burchfield, who runs Thrive Kitchen & Catering on Duke’s Campus, and his partner, Reed Frankel. When they couldn’t break the idea either, they decided to test it for the summer. They worked quickly to find a location and landed at Mardi Gras in late May.
“At the end of July, this is going to shut down, not because it was a failure or anything else like that,” Poley said. “It’s just the end of the pop-up window. And, you know, we’re going to take what we learned, and we’re going to go back and do some thinking and look at the next steps.”
Although they don’t know when they’ll be able to bring back dillas to the Triangle, they are looking for locations for a more permanent site.
Customer experience is at the center of the business, said Poley, and has made the pop-up venture worth it.
“That’s the reason you’re in it, right? It’s to make people happy,” he said. “Of course, we live in a capitalist world, so we have to do it to make money, but you know, the big take-away from this is that we just made a lot of people super happy. We introduced people to an idea that there can be a new class of food, and they responded well to it. That’s satisfying.”
Recalling some of his earliest customer feedback, Poley talked about a picture of a young customer in swim gear with a huge grin and two fists full of a dilla with sour cream smeared across his face.
“That’s may be the best moment of this whole thing,” said Poley. “[He was] living his best life in that moment.”
Mardi Gras Bowling Center is at 6118 Farrington Road. Dillas can be ordered online to-go or inside the bowling center. They are open all week from 11 a.m. till 9 p.m.