News that longtime Oak Cliff restaurant Rudy’s Chicken is closing reverberated across social media this past weekend and drew hundreds of people to its drive-through to order fried chicken one last time.
On Monday morning, a line of cars snaked around the building and continued down the block as the chicken shack was set to open at 10:30 a.m. A sign taped to Rudy’s walk-up window said its last day of business will be Feb. 28.
“I’m gonna sit right here and wait on this chicken,” said Kendall Meadows, who came from Garland to order a 5-piece tender meal with fries for him and some gizzards for his sister, just like he has for the past decade.
He came the day before and waited several hours, he said, but left empty-handed after the restaurant sold out of chicken. When he arrived Monday, he said, an employee took his order from the walk-up window but told him it would be two hours until food came out of the kitchen because of how backed up they were.
Restaurant News
Rudy’s makes the best fried chicken in Dallas-Fort Worth, as far as Meadows is concerned, so he said he’d wait as long as needed.
“I’m retired,” he said, as a crowd of other customers started to form around him. “I ain’t got nothing else to do.”
Rudolph Edwards opened Rudy’s Chicken in the early 1990s in Oak Cliff’s Lancaster-Kiest corridor and it instantly became a cornerstone of southern Dallas’ food scene.
In 2013, Rudy’s Chicken made headlines when the Dallas City Council agreed to invest $890,000 in bond money to relocate it to a newly constructed building next door to the rundown one it occupied along South Lancaster Road.
The effort to relocate Rudy’s, part of an initiative to revitalize that pocket of Oak Cliff, was led by former City Council member Dwaine Caraway.
Edwards said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News that he told Caraway he didn’t want to move his business, and that he lost his land in the move.
Related
The relocation didn’t change the lines that formed in the morning before the chicken shack’s opening and nearly a decade and a half later, the lines are still forming.
As the restaurant’s opening time came and went on Monday and the drive-through line didn’t budge, dozens of people approached the walk-up window trying to order but were met with a sign that said the restaurant was no longer taking orders there.
The restaurant’s staff could not be reached for comment.
When Meadows told one woman orders wouldn’t come out until 12:30 p.m., she replied, “No, seriously?” She and a handful of other people walked away, deterred by the wait.
Some people, like Meadows, were determined to get Rudy’s one more time.
Jay Barrera, who made the drive from Fort Worth, was ready and willing to wait for hours.
He said he came to Rudy’s on Sunday when he saw on social media it was closing, but he also left empty-handed and decide to try his luck again Monday. “I said, ‘I gotta come before they close.’”
If he were to turn up empty-handed again, he said he’d come back Tuesday.
“The chicken is good,” he said. “I’m going to miss it.”
Rudy’s Chicken is located at 3115 S. Lancaster Road, Dallas. It is expected to close Feb. 28, 2026.