Today, just one Texas restaurant is open, in Austin.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What happened to Shaq’s big expansion for his fried chicken company? After all, expanding in Dallas-Fort Worth was a natural fit, CEO Josh Halpern told The Dallas Morning News a few years ago. He’d already toured D-FW, looking at potential sites in Plano, Frisco and Prosper.<\/p>\n
“You’ll probably be seeing a lot more of me,” he said a year ago.<\/p>\n
Big Chicken still has over 30 restaurants in the United States, plus others in Canada, England, Honduras and on Carnival Cruise ships.<\/p>\n
Many of the restaurants in the United States are inside venues: in the New York Islanders’ home hockey rink, the UBS Arena; at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena; in a food hall at Emory University; and at Casablanca Resort and Casino in a city outside Las Vegas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Dallas Morning News has reached out to CEO Halpern to ask what’s next for Big Chicken in Texas and why the Texas plan has stalled. A publicist has not responded to questions yet.<\/p>\n
For now, Texans wanting fried chicken \u2014 or a supersize\u00a0sandwich called The Ultimate, which is\u00a0loaded with mac and cheese and fried onions \u2014 will have to visit the Moody Center, an arena on the University of Texas at Austin’s campus.<\/p>\n
It’s a crowded market when it comes to fried chicken in Dallas-Fort Worth. Raising Cane’s, Chick-fil-A, Golden Chick and Dave’s Hot Chicken continue to expand here.<\/p>\n
Big Chicken’s selling point is its big man.<\/p>\n
“People come the first time because they want to check out Shaquille’s restaurant,” Halpern told\u00a0The News a few years ago, “and they come back because we were built by two really great chefs.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Today, just one Texas restaurant is open, in Austin.\u00a0 What happened to Shaq’s big expansion for his fried…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":381126,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[49,116,118,117,91555,116222,88643],"class_list":["post-381125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fort-worth","tag-food","tag-fort-worth","tag-fort-worth-headlines","tag-fort-worth-news","tag-tp-celebrities","tag-tp-dallas-fort-worth-fast-food","tag-tp-fort-worth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=381125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/381126"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=381125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=381125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=381125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}