Lucky’s Hot Chicken has a fiery plan to expand across North Texas.
The Nashville hot chicken shop — which started on Gaston Avenue in Old East Dallas and has grown to a second location in University Park across the street from Southern Methodist University — is expected to open five new restaurants in North Texas by early 2022.
That’s an aggressive and optimistic growth plan for the Dallas-based company. And its parent company Vandelay Hospitality Group is expanding other brands across the region, too: It owns and operates Hudson House, East Hampton Sandwich Co., Drake’s Hollywood, and two coming-soon restaurants, Brentwood and D.L. Mack’s.
Lucky’s Hot Chicken is the most casual of all of them. It has a no-nonsense menu of chicken, crinkle-cut fries, coleslaw and mac and cheese. The Big Lou sandwich puts nearly everything on the menu inside two buns: tenders, coleslaw, cheese, comeback sauce and pickles.
The chicken comes in five spice levels, including the cayenne-laced variety that has become so trendy in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Here’s where the new restaurants will open:
- At Lemmon and Oak Lawn avenue, in a former Einstein Bros. Bagels. It, like the University Park restaurant, is expected to stay open later than the other restaurants.
- Near Belt Line and Plano roads in Richardson, in a former Quizno’s
- On South Buckner Boulevard in Pleasant Grove, in a former Taco Bueno
- At Forest Lane and Webb Chapel Road in northwest Dallas, in a former Long John Silver’s
- And in a new building in Grand Prairie’s flashy new Epic Central development, near Warrior Drive and the President George Bush Turnpike
The restaurants in Richardson, Pleasant Grove, northwest Dallas and Grand Prairie will be drive-throughs. In the crowded Nashville hot chicken market in Dallas, a drive-through can be a difference-maker.
Each of the five new restaurants will have red and white checkered vinyl floors and a ‘60s vibe, like the original.
