MAD DOGS 2.0
By Ashley Gurbal Kritzer
Tampa Bay Business Journal
Published: Oct 10, 2022

Restaurateur Blake Casper has partnered with the owners of Mad Dogs & Englishmen and plans to relocate and reimagine the iconic South Tampa pub.

Oxford Commons, the hospitality company Casper owns with his sister, Allison Casper Adams, has purchased the former Love's Artifacts Bar and Grill less than a mile south of the current Mad Dogs location on Macdill Avenue. The Love's property will be scraped and, in its place, Mad Dogs 2.0 will rise: a 5,500-square-foot modern take on a British pub, with outdoor dining in an English garden-style courtyard. At more than double the size of the original restaurant, it will have room for British traditions that Mad Dogs couldn't accommodate, from Sunday roasts to darts to TVs dedicated to English football.

Mad Dogs will stay open at its current location at 4115 S. Macdill Ave. until the new one is ready to open, likely in early 2024. It is a multimillion-dollar investment, Casper said, though he declined to put a dollar figure on the project. Alberto Alfonso, president of Alfonso Architects, is the restaurant's architect. Oxford Design Studio, also owned by Oxford Commons, is handling the interior design.

Key to the new location's success are Mad Dogs founder Wilton Morley and co-owner Rick "The Colonel" Craig, who remain partners in the business and are intimately involved in its design and concept.

"It's going to be fabulous," Casper said, seated at a table near the kitchen in Mad Dogs, "but we're not going to lose the soul of this. And that's why Wilt and the Colonel are critical."

Mad Dogs' next chapter is also the latest evolution of a decades-long relationship between the Caspers and Morley, who founded the pub in 1991. Casper's mother, who lived on nearby Wallcraft Avenue, had befriended Morley in the pub's early days and suggested her son take a job there as a busboy before leaving for college.

Though Casper grew up in restaurants — the family business was Caspers Co., which was the largest McDonald's franchisee in Florida until Oct. 5, when the siblings sold their stores to McDonald's for an undisclosed sum — he said Morley's way of running Mad Dogs had a "major impact" on him.

Morley, who managed theater productions in England and Australia, sees a parallel between the stage and the dining room.

"I largely got through for a number of years with atmosphere, because I had this very firm belief that what a lot of restaurants lacked was atmosphere," he said. "I said that the restaurant should be like a very small play every night."

The approach was counter to everything 19-year-old Casper had ever observed about the restaurant business. His father's restaurants ran on organized systems, not theatrics.

"I had never seen atmosphere in that way Wilt describes it," Casper said. "And that was really all Wilt had in the beginning. That was it. It was strictly atmosphere. The rest of it —"

"The food was terrible when we opened," Morley says, laughing.

By 2021, however, Morley began to wonder if he and the Colonel were approaching their final act. He'd been in business 30 years; the building, originally a pizza parlor in the 1950s, was beginning to show its age. Morley had stayed in touch with Casper over the years — he played an integral role in conceptualizing Oxford Exchange at Casper's request — and mentioned that he was thinking of closing Mad Dogs.

"Blake said, 'Oh, well, that seems like a shame. Perhaps we should rebrand it — should we have some fun with it?' And that's basically where we are," Morley said.

In June, a corporate entity linked to Casper paid $2.1 million for the .6-acre Love's property, purchased as the new home of Mad Dogs.

The reinvented Mad Dogs will look nothing like the other hospitality concepts that have come to define the Caspers' brand as they move beyond their McDonald's era. It won't be another version of the Oxford Exchange, with its air of European sophistication, or the design-forward Stovall House.

"This is such a different project for us," says Tate Casper, Oxford Design Studio principal. "Everyone has such a strong sense of what Mad Dogs is — how do you keep and balance the soul of Wilt's world with a new space? That has its own challenges."

The Colonel — a retired U.S. Marine Corps colonel — summed up the challenge: More than anything, Oxford Design has been tasked with recreating a vibe.

"What I hope for is to retain — I guess Blake used the word soul, and that's a good word — the feeling people get when they come here," he said, "in a shiny new building with more space, better equipment. That's my vision."

To recreate that feeling, Tate Casper and her team are sourcing reclaimed wood and flooring for the new Mad Dogs, so that "you don't feel like you're walking into a Disney World British pub." The key word, she says, is restraint: The British pubs the team has visited for inspiration aren't overdecorated, and they're working to capture the spirit of Morley in a modern but restrained new restaurant.

Morley, who was looking to close the business before talking to Casper, says the new location has renewed his passion for his pub. The Colonel says this is a scene that has played out several times over the last 30 years.

"I've seen this many times that Wilton seems to be getting a little fed up with something," the Colonel said, "and something happens and he gets reinvigorated."

For now, with help from his longtime friend, Morley is looking forward to Mad Dogs' next act.