Restaurant Serves ‘Baddest’ Wings But For How Long?
Chicken eatery has only seven months remaining on Preston Center lease
Bad Chicken has seven months before its Preston Center building comes down to make way for an office building.
That was part of the deal when co-founders Tim Woehr and Bobby Shuey signed the restaurant’s nine-month lease. Instead of doing a few pop-ups for the restaurant’s proof of concept, they decided to open a short-term storefront to start selling bird.
“Bobby had this concept in his head,” Woehr said. “He’s in the IT world, so he needed someone to operate, and through friends of friends that he and I both know from the culinary world, we got in contact, he pitched me the idea, and I liked it.”
The name is meant to imply that they serve the “baddest chicken in town,” but it came about because the restaurant was initially going to be owned by two men: Bobby and David, creating the acronym “B.A.D.” When Woehr came on board and David couldn’t be part of the startup anymore, the name Bad Chicken stuck.
The restaurant opened its doors on Nov. 5 and serves wings, bomb bowls, sandwiches, and more. The wings, as opposed to other restaurants with a similar vibe, are smoked first then fried to cut down on frying time. After that, they’re tossed in the customer’s sauce(s) of choice, with an extensive list ranging from jalapeño lime to jelly glaze to a classic honey barbecue.
“We’re not one of those places that [will put you] on the wall by eating something spicy,” Woehr said. “That’s not really our thing. We wanted to have a good restaurant … that was also a wing place.”
The bomb bowls are chicken nuggets tossed in sauce and served over fries with a dipping sauce. Notably, the peanut butter and jelly bowl includes nuggets covered in jelly glaze and peanut butter drizzled on top.
“It’s different, you know, because it’s sweet and sour and salty and savory, and [peanut butter and jelly is] not normally hot,” Woehr said. “It’s interesting.”
Shuey said they wanted to open their restaurant because he couldn’t find a place in Dallas to satisfy what he was looking for. Each local chicken spot had either a long wait, minimal sauce options, soggy food, or a lack of satisfying desserts.
“I just had the idea and killer recipes,” Shuey said. “Tim runs everything and even further perfected the recipes and brought some of his own.”
After the restaurant gets booted from its current location, the plan is to open two more locations, with hopes of one being in or near Preston Center. From there, Woehr and Shuey plan to open more locations and begin franchising with a consistent brand.
“This way, everything is set and ready to go,” Woehr said. “We know exactly [how] to smoke and exactly the temperature frying and all that kind of thing. … We’ll have it all down so that we can go from one to two to three to eight to 10 [locations, and] eventually franchise.”
