Crystal Smith grew up on Georgia’s favorite brunch dish, and by 2020 she’d decided it deserved a restaurant built entirely around it. She opened the first Johnny’s Chicken and Waffles in College Park, outside Atlanta, with then-husband Ne-Yo and Love & Hip Hop’s Karlie Redd backing the idea. Six years and a handful of states later, the plates are still enormous and the waffles are still stacked with more toppings than seems reasonable. Johnny’s now has two DFW locations: Dallas, open since May 2024, and Fort Worth, open since July 2025, and both are worth the drive on an empty stomach.
The Dallas spot has its own bit of local history baked into the address. It sits at 1326 Botham Jean Blvd., across the street from the Dallas Police Department, in a building that was most recently home to Monica’s and, before that, the well-known cocktail bar Cedars Social. That’s a lot of turnover for one storefront, and Johnny’s is the version that’s stuck around longest.
The whole menu runs on one idea: let people build their own plate instead of picking off a fixed list. Choose your chicken. Choose your waffle. Let the kitchen figure out the rest. Chicken comes as whole wings, tenders, Buffalo wings, or a combo of everything, and if plain fried isn’t enough, you can get it “made wet” with buffalo, medium, BBQ, Nashville hot, or lemon pepper sauce for a couple bucks more. The waffles run buttermilk, pecan, red velvet, or strawberry, and none of them show up plain.
The pecan waffle comes loaded with caramel drizzle, cream cheese frosting, three scoops of vanilla ice cream, candied pecans, graham cracker dust, whipped topping, and vanilla wafers, more dessert than side dish by the time it hits the table. The strawberry waffle follows the same logic with sliced strawberries and strawberry puree instead, and there’s an Oreo waffle for anyone who wants to skip the fruit entirely and go straight for crushed cookies and white chocolate syrup.
Smith has said more than once that people compare Johnny’s to Roscoe’s House of Chicken & Waffles out in Los Angeles, and she takes it as a compliment rather than a knock, since Roscoe’s is the restaurant that made the dish famous nationally even though it actually started decades earlier in Harlem. Johnny’s leans into that lineage instead of running from it.
There’s real range past the signature dish too. The Center Cut salad stacks iceberg lettuce, crispy chicken tenders, chopped bacon, cherry tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, and blue cheese crumbles into something substantial enough to be its own meal.
Stuffed French toast, filled with cream cheese and finished with caramel drizzle, comes with bacon, scrambled eggs, and crispy breakfast potatoes on the side for anyone who wants brunch without the waffle at all. There’s fried catfish, six golden fried shrimp in a basket with waffle fries, and a blackened salmon plate with herb garlic mashed potatoes and broccolini for the table that wants something lighter mixed in.
The drink program plays along with the same over-the-top energy as the food. Big carafes built for sharing sit next to individual mason jar pours, including an espresso martini made with Barebone vodka or cognac, espresso liqueur, and Baileys, the kind of drink that turns a Sunday brunch into something that runs a little longer than planned.
Johnny’s Chicken and Waffles has two DFW locations: 1326 Botham Jean Blvd. in Dallas, and 2707 Race St., Suite 117, in Fort Worth. Both are open daily.
Read about Street’s Fine Chicken.
