Chicken fingers and pork burgers: Johnson County restaurant expanding to Kansas City

Todd Johnson has looked at more than a dozen spaces for another Strip’s Chicken in the last year. Some developers have even offered to put up buildings for him.

But now he’s picked a former KFC building in Waldo, just blocks from a Chick-fil-A that has a constant stream of customers in its new double-drive thru. He plans to open there in October.

“I’m excited to be near Chick-fil-A. I want to see how the customers respond,” said Johnson, who founded Strip’s in Olathe four years ago. “There are so many little things we do that really make a difference.”

More than half of Strip’s orders are for chicken strips with fries and donut — either three, five or seven chicken strips.

Johnson uses fresh boneless and skinless chicken breasts (not tenders), battered and rolled in a pretzel breading (hand-crushed in the restaurant) and fried for exactly two minutes and 10 seconds.

About 12% of orders are for chicken nuggets. He tweaked his gluten-free breading recipe dozens of times until he considered it as good as the gluten versions, and he added a ‘”honey kiss.”

He has his own “secret sauce,” but his goal has been for the chicken to stand on its own.

His pork burgers are made with 75% whole pork loin and 25% boneless and skinless chicken breast. They are currently cooked on a griddle, but Johnson is putting in char-broilers at the Olathe and Waldo locations so they will taste even more like bacon, he said.

Other menu items include Mac & 7 Cheese Bowl (with bacon and chicken nuggets, or pulled pork and strawberry barbecue sauce), Buffalo chicken wraps, pork tenderloins, chicken Parmesan sandwiches, white chili burger with chicken, pecan-smoked pulled pork, and sweet potato tots with marshmallow dipping sauce.

Most items are made from scratch, but not the french fries and tater tots. He recently introduced gluten-free onion strings, which are gaining in popularity with his french fries.

Four years after opening in Olathe, he said the location is doing three times the business as the fast-food chain that previously occupied the spot. He knows because they left several months of receipts in the office when he took over.

Johnson grew up on a farm near Erie, Kansas. One grandmother had a 24-hour diner where he hung out, with customers feeding him their french fries.

“I’m probably still carrying around a few of those,” he said.

His other grandparents and his parents were farmers, so he grew up on farm-to-table items in scratch-kitchens.

He worked at a soybean research center at Kansas State University while earning an agronomy degree. Then he was a vice president for a small town bank for a dozen years.

He had already invested in small hotels in Cherryvale and Chanute, Kansas, and he left banking to open a microbrewery in the Chanute hotel.

After the financial crisis in 2008, he closed the brewery and moved to the Kansas City area.

He started consulting with restaurants and bars around the country, helping them upgrade to scratch kitchens. During his travels he saw such emerging “better chicken” chains as Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers and Zaxby’s. He thought he could improve on the concepts and came up with Strip’s.

The longtime KFC/Long John Silver’s combo closed a year ago.

Strip’s Chicken will be open 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. It is closed on Sundays.

Johnson also has a food truck with a limited menu that is currently parked at the Waldo site from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday thru Saturday.

This story was originally published August 29, 2020 at 5:00 AM.