The Mulrine features corned beef, Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing.
The Taylor topped with peanut butter, jelly and bacon.
Bill Taylor and Frank Mulrine, owners of Frank & Bill’s Burger Shack in Curtis Lanes with their namesake signature burgers. (Staff photo by Bill Sanservino.)
Frank and Bill’s Burger Shack offers unusual flavor combinations
By Scott Morgan
Let’s try something: Burger. With bacon. And peanut butter and jelly.
Let me guess: Ew. That’s an easy guess, it’s what many people say when they first hear about the Taylor Burger at Frank & Bill’s Burger Shack.
But Burger Shack proprietors Frank Mulrine and Bill Taylor, both residents of Hamilton, insist that most people who have tried the Taylor Burger went from “Ew” to “Where have you been all my life?” within two bites.
Mulrine was one of the first converts. As was Taylor’s soon-to-be mother-in-law, who thought her daughter crazy for eating “that” only to come back later just to get a whole one for herself. And while the combination might seem a stretch for most people, for Taylor it’s all rather obvious.
“Pretty much everybody likes peanut butter and jelly,” he said. “And who doesn’t love bacon?”
Indeed. And the Taylor is the most popular burger on the menu at the modest restaurant located inside Ewing’s Curtis Lanes, Mulrine said. (There is a Mulrine Burger, too, by the way. It’s essentially a Reuben sandwich on a burger. And people have responded well to that, too.)
Yes, Frank & Bill’s Burger Shack is located inside the Scotch Road bowling alley. Which fits for two guys who love to cook and who’ve bowled together for years. The pair met about 25 years ago, when Mulrine delivered for the deli and catering service Taylor’s mother ran in Lawrence.
They actually attended Nottingham High School together, but never hung out, as they were separated by a year. Just after graduation, Mulrine got his delivery job, and the two have been inseparable friends since. Even when Mulrine went to Kansas on a bowling scholarship.
Mulrine at 18 had aspirations to be a professional bowler. His scholarship to Witchita State University—the best bowling school in the country at the time, and where he earned his bachelor’s degree in administration of justice—got him closer to the dream, but he met a girl, fell in love, got married three years after college and had a family to support. So Mulrine took a job with the state Department of Children and Families.
He still works for the DCF full-time. The restaurant is only open in the evenings, except for Tuesdays and Saturdays, because these are the times bowling leagues are at their peak. Taylor, an electrician by trade, has been out of work and mans the early Tuesday shift.
Both, however, still tour as bowlers, and both are quite good—Mulrine averages 205 and Taylor, who didn’t start bowling until he was 18, 210. And it’s this touring that has generated so much of the menu at the Burger Shack.
“We’ve traveled to a lot of places for bowling, especially up and down the east coast,” Mulrine said. “We’ve eaten a lot of different foods in different places. Our menu is inspired by our travels.”
Case in point, the Taylor and Mulrine burgers are joined by the Carolina (cheddar, coleslaw and barbecue sauce) and the southwest burger (pepperjack, an onion ring and A-1 steak sauce—the second most popular sandwich at the Burger Shack). And if you can’t make up your mind, there’s the Train Wreck, which has everything all the other burgers have, just in one hard-to-bite, but flavor-dense sandwich.
So, you may ask, how did two 40-ish bowling buddies from Hamilton end up running a burger joint inside a bowling alley? The simple answer is, they thought it would be cool. The previous luncheonette inside Curtis Lanes closed last year. Meanwhile, Taylor and Mulrine kept on bowling. Independently, each thought “I’d like to open that luncheonette.”
For Taylor, it was more about doing something productive. He’s been laid off from his electrician job for a few months now, and he saw the opportunity to reconnect with his past restaurant life.
Back in the day, his mother’s deli was in the same building as the state Department of Personnel training center. During training times, “sometimes we’d get a couple hundred people who get 45 minutes for lunch, all at once,” Taylor said. He worked with his mother and sister, but sometimes it was only him working the lunch rush.
Other days, there’d be no training upstairs, which made for far less business downstairs. When the state moved the training center site elsewhere, business dropped sharply and Mrs. Taylor closed the deli. Years later, Taylor held on to his knack for large-scale cooking and had always thought about getting back to it.
In a similar vein, Mulrine has a huge family for whom he’s always loved to cook. Though his experience in the food industry was pretty well limited to his delivery job for Taylor’s mother, his ability to fire off barbecue and party foods for dozens of guests has been good grounding for life behind the Burger Shack’s counter.
The idea to open a burger joint struck Taylor one night hard enough to call his longtime friend and ask “What do you think?” Mulrine’s answer was “I was thinking the same thing.” So the two approached Chuck Dimisk, the owner of Curtis Lanes, and asked about starting up the kitchen. Dimisk jumped at the idea, Mulrine said. And Taylor calls Dimisk “an amazing owner” who’s been nothing but supportive of the Burger Shack.
Frank & Bill’s opened on Oct. 25, just in time for the busy fall season. Remember how Taylor was used to the rush-and-nothing cycle of the deli below the training facility? He’s aware of that dynamic in the bowling cycle, too. In the fall, he said, people want to do things indoors.
“It’s a busy time for us now, but when the summer comes, business will drop,” he said.
He and Mulrine are prepared for that, but Taylor still calls the idea “scary.” It doesn’t help that a mere week out of the gate, the restaurant’s fire suppression system broke down and the Burger Shack had to shut its doors for about four days.
The breakdown is fixed and the restaurant reopened, but Taylor is sufficiently spooked by the timing.
“It doesn’t look good when a restaurant is open one week and the next week it’s closed,” he said. “I know if it were me, I’d eat before I went bowling in case it’s not open again.”
Neither partner is too worried that the shutdown will scare customers away, though. Their familiarity with the lanes and with the kinds of foods bowlers want to eat floats their hopes that one day the place will be successful enough to hire some additional help and maybe, Mulrine said, open a location outside the alley, too.
In the meantime, Frank & Bill’s is betting on its rather unique menu and those with adventurous tastes.
“So far it’s been a lot of fun,” Mulrine said. “I feel like I’m not even working.”
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