A TikTok influencer recently wound up spending more than $500 while dining solo at The Boiler Atlanta restaurant. Though she hadn’t realized he had ordered the most expensive item on the menus — the $200 Sizzling King Crab offering of two pounds of steamed king crab.
Although Damienne Flagler didn’t expect to dish out so much money for her dinner, she said in a TikTok posted she loved everything she ate and said she may have gotten a little carried away with her order, Yahoo reported. “Y’all got to try this place. But I got to keep it 100% with y’all. This is not a cheap date. My big ass ordering all of this food, and I didn’t even realize the king crab alone [was] $200.” After a 3 percent processing fee, taxes, and 18 percent tip, the total price for the seafood feast cost $527.37.
The viral post has only added to the allure of The Boiler, the first Black-owned seafood boil restaurant in Atlanta.
Chad Dillon, 31, is the founder and CEO of The Boiler Seafood Atlanta. Dillon, a Brooklyn transplant to Atlanta, told Travel Noire he was inspired to open his restaurant, realizing the city lacked food businesses within the seafood boil niche.
First he tried to open a Juicy Crab franchise but was denied, so he came up with the Boiler idea in 2019 and opened on his own in 2020.
“I found that as Atlanta’s outskirts were growing in the seafood boil industry, the actual city of Atlanta hadn’t been tapped into,” he said. “So I created and launched a seafood boil restaurant, The Boiler Seafood, in Atlanta’s most prominent neighborhood, Buckhead.”
Overcoming the challenge of opening a restaurant business during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Boiler soon became known as Buckhead’s No. 1 seafood and crab boil restaurant earning $8 million-plus in its first year of business, Travel Noire reported.
“I am a thinker and innovator, so even without a culinary background, I enjoy finding voids in the business market and creating solutions; creating restaurant concepts from ideation to execution, coming up with new menu items, and creating amazing customer experiences. I’m also very hands-on. I spend about 10-plus hours a day being in the restaurant, running errands, and handling needed logistics for the restaurant.”
And the most popular menu item, said Dillon, is the Fried King Crab, which sells for $200.
The Boiler’s success has led to Dillion fielding offers for franchises in 48 out of 50 states. Dillon is also in the construction phase of a three-floor Asian fusion restaurant in Midtown Atlanta and an experiential ice cream parlor in Buckhead.
“We’re definitely growing, and I’m excited to expand my portfolio as a restaurateur.”
