A restaurant dedicated to chicken & waffles with celebrity ties has doubled down on Dallas-Fort Worth: Johnny's Chicken & Waffles, founded by reality TV star Crystal Smith; her ex-husband singer Ne-Yo; and Karlie Redd (VH1’s Love n’ Hip Hop), has opened a location in Fort Worth, at 2707 Race St. #117.
The restaurant opened softly on July 11, with an official opening coming on July 22.
This marks the second location for the brunch favorite: AFter debuting the concept in 2020 in the Atlanta area, they opened a location in Dallas at 1326 Botham Jean Blvd. in 2024.
Chicken & waffles, their signature dish, takes its cue from the famous Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles in southern California (although the dish originated in Harlem at a place called Wells Famous Home of Chicken and Waffles).
Johnny's menu lets diners mix-and-match: You choose how you want your chicken and then a flavor of waffle, so you can customize your chicken-and-waffle situation to order.
- Chicken comes in choice of whole wings, tenders, Buffalo wings, or a combo
- Waffles comes in choice of buttermilk, pecan, red velvet, or strawberry
Their other big signatures include mac & cheese which you can order with chicken tenders, fried shrimp, or fried lobster tail, for $29.95; and cocktails served in mason jars, such as bloody Marys, margaritas, espresso martini, and a strawberry lemonade with cognac.
They also have entrees like Cajun penne pasta, brioche French toast stuffed with cream cheese, fried shrimp basket, catfish & grits, and salads like a kale Caesar. Most items are priced between $22 and $30.
Operations manager Randy Lamp says that the Dallas restaurant has been such a smash — always busy, and especially on weekends, when brunch draws big lines — that expanding was a no-brainer.
"We thought, we have this wildly successful restaurant here, it makes sense to open something in the area — but not right in Dallas," Lamp says.
They scouted about 20 locations, but it didn't take them long to narrow it down to Fort Worth, where they opened at at 2707 Race St. #117.
"Race Street fit a lot of same criteria as our Dallas location," Lamp says. "It's centrally located but it's not in a saturated retail area, and that is to our benefit. We are careful in how we choose our neighborhoods and spaces."
Lamp says that the Dallas location "showed us some things about ourselves that we liked learning."
"One lesson we learned from Dallas is that you don't need foot traffic for brunch," he says. "People don't mind driving somewhere to get brunch. So a standalone spot with good parking becomes a positive. The Race Street location has a great parking lot right behind it, and there's no one nearby that's going to get mad if we have people waiting in line."
