A Durham restaurant known for its hard-to-pin-down menu and offbeat marketing tactics—like purposefully hanging its outdoor sign upside down, so that passersby might be enticed to stop in and point out the mistake—has closed its doors.
In a Monday social media post, Bull City Solera and Taproom owner Seth Gross did not provide a reason for the closure but wrote that he hopes to “reopen one day with a new concept.” Gross owns the building that housed the restaurant at 4120 University Drive, according to property records.
Gross’s flagship restaurant, Bull City Burger and Brewery, remains open in downtown Durham. Pompieri Pizza, another Gross venture, closed in December 2023 after the landlord proposed a rent increase of more than 100 percent.
Bull City Solera opened in July 2020. The restaurant’s menu was originally slated to feature “Mexican pizza and Italian tacos,” but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed Gross toward a more takeout-friendly kind of fusion: “Durham-style burritos” with fillings like collard greens and bacon marmalade, plus a weekly fried chicken special with Asian-inspired fixings: pickled daikon, Korean BBQ sauce, and Togarashi curly fries.
The restaurant was housed in a former Chick-fil-A, and for its first year in business, it took advantage of its predecessor’s drive-thru window. When it opened for dine-in service, the window was sealed shut, and an extensive remodel unveiled, including a sprawling outdoor deck, a fire pit, and the restaurant’s namesake feature, a pyramid of 33 bourbon barrels used to age beer in the Spanish solera method. The Mexican pizzas and Italian tacos finally made their debut, though they were eventually replaced with burgers—plus a “Burgerrito” and accompanying eating challenge.
Throughout the menu tweaks, menu item names consistently reflected Gross’s penchant for dad-joke humor, from a snack called “Are You F%!&$n Nuts” to a burrito mod called “Add-a-cado.”
Other prominent local restaurateurs have tried their hand in the area with mixed results. Ashley Christensen opened a Durham outpost of her now-defunct BB’s Chicken franchise at the nearby University Hill development in 2022; it closed two years later. Matt Kelly and Tom Cuomo opened Dino’s, a pizza joint, in the same space last year; it recently earned praise from the News & Observer as the spot to find Durham’s “most epic cheese pull.”
Gross did not immediately respond for comment. In his post announcing Bull City Solera’s closure, he noted the space is available for private events.
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