South Tampa’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen closes original location this weekend

This weekend, nearly 34 years after opening, Wilton Morley’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen is closing its doors—then opening new ones less than a mile away before next month.

Morley, founder of the storied South Tampa pub and restaurant, told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that the Mad Dogs at 4115 S MacDill Ave. will close after Sunday.

He was in the car with longtime business partner and co-owner of Mad Dogs, Rick “The Colonel” Craig, and both of them were in their feelings about the next chapter, albeit in different ways.

“It’s very bittersweet for me. I’m definitely more emotional about it than Wilton is,” Craig told CL. “I mean, my customers are my friends, and it’s where all my friends meet. We’ve had discussions like, ‘Where are we going to go in the two weeks between?’”

Morley, for his part, said he’s slightly less sentimental than everybody else because he’s had to run Mad Dogs for 33 years. “So I’m quite glad that they’ve built this beautiful new place for us,” he added.

That place is Mad Dogs and Englishmen 2.0, which he’s opening in partnership with restaurateur Blake Casper, a McDonald’s heir whose first job was at Mad Dogs as a busboy.

Craig told CL that the soft opening of the new Mad Dogs and Englishmen—less than a mile away at 4918 S MacDill Ave. in the old Love’s Artifacts Bar and Grille—will be on Sunday-Monday, Jan. 26-27, with a grand opening set for Wednesday, Jan. 29.

While the Colonel said he’s not the best guy to talk about the menu, he promised that old staples like fish and chips, shepherd’s pie, and bangers and mash will come over along with “new exciting dishes as well.”

Morley said it was getting more and more difficult to run his pub, with more regulars leaving for the summer, and no liquor to sell, and thought about hanging it up several times. But his “old mate” Casper—who is behind other concepts like Oxford Exchange—said Mad Dogs must continue. Then Morley, Casper and the project’s architect took an overseas holiday in Reykjavík and made the plan for an upgraded Mad Dogs real.

“I said, ‘OK, if you really want to do it, that really, really sweet of you to do something, but do a real English pub,’” Morley expained, describing the current Mad Dogs are more of a bar or “little kind of Florida shack.”

The new spot—purchased last June by an entity linked to Casper for $2.1 million—is a 5,500-square-foot upgrade, double the size of the original, according to the Tampa Bay Business Journal, with more outdoor dining, TVs, space for darts and traditional Sunday roasts.

Craig said all of the less than three dozen employees from the original Mad Dogs and Englishmen will follow him and Morley to the new spot, where they’ve also had to hire close to 120 more part-time employees.

Any gift cards issued at the old spot will be honored at Mad Dogs 2.0, they said.

Morley stopped short of saying the new spot’s decor was museum-esque, but it will be extremely British, with a history of England on the walls. The music will be extremely English as well (think The Clash, The Cure).

While no one is disclosing much capital it’s taking for the upgrade, Morley told CL that nobody in England would spend this much on a pub.

“But that’s what we wanted, and that’s what we got, and I love it,” he said, admitting some kind of sentimentality about the new beginning. “I really am genuinely excited about what that’s going to look like in the new place.”

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