Opening in May 2015 in the Dallas gayborhood of Oak Lawn, the restaurant’s location unsubtly implied a target demographic of thirsty homosexuals firsthand accounts affirm that the clientele was indeed, fairly gay, but it also featured a mix of genders, straight women among them. Now, Tallywackers is just a faint memory of abs and underwear. Below the waist, the guys - the Wackers? - wore only fire-truck-red or grey boxer briefs that conveyed more than just a hint of what was beneath the fabric. (“Tallywhacker” is in fact 18th-century British slang for penis, yet it never solidly fell into the vernacular on either side of the Atlantic.) At Tallywackers, staff wore uniforms that went a little higher up the scanty scale than at breastaurants Hooters and Twin Peaks: Per the local health code, servers were required to wear tank tops (at least until later in the evening, when most went shirtless). In the spirit of “breastaurants” like Hooters and Twin Peaks, it was named Tallywackers - the name, an oblique reference to the ’80s sex comedy Porky’s, evokes imagery of the restaurant servers’ junk, while simultaneously appearing to mean nothing at all. “What if Hooters, but with dudes?” is a thing that existed, shirtless and in the flesh, in Texas. What if you’re looking to get that same experience, but with men, though? You have zero options.
There are more than 300 Hooters locations in the United States, coupling a chain restaurant experience with gaggles of lightly dressed, flirty women as servers.