As though pandemic-spurred problems—staffing issues, supply chain delays, ingredient cost increases—weren’t enough, a few restaurants and bars have to fend off the threat of car crashes, too.
Late last year, an SUV plowed into Haute Sweets Patisserie, injuring three employees inside. (Second-degree burns from a hot ganache, but there were no broken bones, the Dallas Observer reported. Still not a great day at the bakery.)
Maybe if the restaurants were more alert and practiced the hyper-vigilance of a wildebeest, they wouldn’t get utterly smashed into. (This is sarcasm. We’re obviously glad no one’s been grievously injured.)
Glib jabs aside, we shouldn’t treat these vehicular collisions as acceptable occurrences throughout the year. It’s not normal and it doesn’t have to be this way. Yes, they’re called accidents for a reason. People usually don’t intend to launch their 4Runners into businesses. But perhaps a city that prioritizes other modes of transportation, smart urban layouts, pedestrians, and safety (for all), can reduce car accidents as (a really great!) byproduct of such city planning.
Until then, let’s take a look back at moments when cars did the smashing thing instead.
July
Somebody (the City?) needs to tell motorists that the world isn’t their oyster. S&D Oyster can’t catch a break—and the cars that keep flying into the McKinney Avenue restaurant can’t seem to find their brakes. S&D owner Herb Story told the Dallas Morning News this summer that it was the second time in eight months a car had crashed through the restaurant wall in its 45-year history. The accident occurred on July 17 and about eight hours after the incident S&D was patched up and back open for lunch. That’s hardcore.
November
Here’s a snippet from the story I wrote about Thunderbird Station, whose heavy-duty patio fence was turned into twisted tubes of metal after a car careened into it.
Just before 1 a.m. on Tuesday, November 30, video surveillance shows what appears to be a white Subaru barreling down Commerce Street in Deep Ellum. Then the road forks. Commerce splits off into Second Avenue, and this is where Thunderbird Station sits, nestled in this angled wedge. It’s this point where the car, turning too late and driving too fast onto Second, crashes into the bar’s patio barrier.
Thunderbird Station is closed on Mondays, which meant no one was sitting on the patio and staff weren’t cleaning up to close shop. On another night, who knows.
“We’ve had this happen at Double Wide, too,” Finch said about her other bar located northeast of Thunderbird just on the other side of Exposition. “There’s a curve—we’ve watched people Dukes of Hazzard launch over that, too,” taking out a tree. She said she’s tried notifying the city about these drivers going full Hot Wheels around her bars. So far, it just keeps happening.
Mere days after a vehicle took out a part of Thunderbird’s fence, another car crashed into its temporary replacement wall. Seriously. In the bar’s camera footage, that car is seen reversing out and driving back onto Commerce Street—in the wrong direction of the one-way-only road.
Like, Just Earlier This Month
On December 1, a black Audi shattered the glass storefront of Gigi’s Cupcakes on Lovers Lane. From the DMN:
The incident happened mid-afternoon, at about 2:30 p.m. The bakery reports that the driver placed her vehicle in drive instead of reverse, then hit the accelerator. No one was injured, according to a report from the Dallas Police Department. When the driver backed the vehicle out of the bakery, it slammed into another car, police say.
The Nashville-born bakery franchise’s lone Dallas location is still temporarily closed.
