What has business been like for Crafty Cow, the Milwaukee-based fried chicken and burger joint whose chicken Caesar wrap went massively viral a few weeks ago?
“Chaos,” said owner and operator Devin Eichler. “But in a good way.”
Hundreds of thousands of people have seen the TikTok or Instagram Reel in which Eichler prepares the revamped Caesar wrap, complete with piles of delicately shredded Parmesan cheese, crispy fried chicken and a gigantic tortilla to hold it all together.
It took a while for Eichler to realize Crafty Cow was headed for instant, unexpected fame.
“We didn’t really notice it at first,” he said. “All of a sudden, we just started getting busier. What we started noticing is other people’s videos taking off, and that’s really what the kicker was.”
Before going viral, Crafty Cow sold about 300 chicken Caesar wraps a month across three locations in Bay View, Oconomowoc and Wauwatosa. They’re now up to 3,000 a month. The restaurants had 800 to 1,000 customers per week – now it’s 15,000 to 20,000. Visitors as far as Iowa and Texas have come to try the wrap.
They’ve also hired 10 to 15 staff members to keep pace with demand, mostly in the front of house. Sales have been up some 50 to 100 percent, Eichler said, and that’s been “holding for the most part” with some weather-related dips.
Customers who tried the viral wrap are coming back to try other menu items, Eichler said, like Crafty Cow’s fish fry or burgers.
Going viral often invites armchair critics or negative comments, some of which have shown up on Crafty Cow’s feeds. Instead of writing those off, Eichler sifts through them for genuine ideas for improvement, like handling long wait times during the earliest days of going viral.
“People should be critical. We’re in the public eye,” Eichler said. “I always tell our team, the focus is just getting 1% better every day. That’s actually what we’ve been doing for a long time.”
Recently, that meant taking some items off the menu and reworking others, including the chicken Caesar wrap, which Eichler started workshopping in the fall. A lot of planning went into the wrap, with no idea that it would go viral, like changing the cut of the lettuce and omitting tomatoes.
Eichler has a three-year plan for Crafty Cow, but “we’ll probably have to tweak it a bit now,” he said.
Like many Milwaukee-area restaurants, Crafty Cow struggled in 2025, almost on par with the COVID-19 pandemic. Inflation hit restaurants hard, and customers were uneasy about spending money on dining out.
Crafty Cow isn’t the only Milwaukee-area eatery going viral – Rupena’s Fine Foods in West Allis got their own dose of TikTok fame – and Eichler sees it as a positive for business. But going viral is hard to predict, depending on what the algorithm picks up and what resonates with viewers.
“It doesn’t happen all the time,” he said. “There’s going to be moments where you freak out. There’s going to be moments where you’re happy about it.”
His other advice for restaurants? Tell your story, and don’t just make another social media commercial, he said.
“I think you shouldn’t bank on becoming viral and you shouldn’t be doing things to get viral,” Eichler said. “You should be doing things because you like them and that will, in turn, help you a lot more.”
Hope Karnopp can be reached at HKarnopp@usatodayco.com.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What happened since Crafty Cow went viral for its chicken Caesar wrap
Reporting by Hope Karnopp, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
