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Lucky J's Chicken and Waffles

Something crispy, something sweet from a little red trailer on Burnet Road

By Mike Sutter
AMERICAN-STATESMAN RESTAURANT CRITIC
Thursday, April 16, 2009

The big food news in town this week is the Texas Hill Country Wine & Food Festival, with dozens of restaurants to sample, dozens of wines to taste and hundreds of dollars to spend between now and Sunday. That's great, if you've got the coin and the clothes to match. If not, Austin probably has a food trailer to fill the gap. And lucky you, Lucky J's Chicken and Waffles has popped up just in time on Burnet Road.

Lucky J's, which opened on April 4, is the work of Jason Umlas, whose cooking credentials include time as executive chef for Rio Grande Mexican Restaurant downtown and Roux on Sixth Street. Umlas named the business for his 3-year-old son, Joss, and hired Austin artist Federico Archuleta to paint the tiny red trailer with its logo of a waffle-wielding woman in a black bodysuit astride a pre-fried bird.

The menu is simple: fried chicken, waffles and sweet tea, which Umlas brews and sweetens himself. Prices run from $1.99 for a waffle, and chicken can be ordered by the piece or in package deals, including the "Short Stack" (breast or thigh and one waffle for $5.99) and the "Baller" (a whole chicken and four waffles for $14.99). You can upgrade to maple syrup for $1.49.

For $7.99, American-Statesman food writer Addie Broyles and I split a plate called "The Deal": half a fried chicken and two 8-inch round waffles with butter and syrup. The chicken came chopped into a wing, leg, thigh and a big chunk of breast, fried crumbly and crisp with the skin on, too hot to handle at first, giving way to moist meat inside. To make the trailer concept work, Umlas fries the chicken most of the way through, refrigerates it, then crisps it to order in a deep-fryer on-site. With that technique, the flavor of the crust suffers a little, taking on some of the burned flavors you usually associate with cooking oil that's been used for a few birds too many. But I'm guessing that nobody wants to wait in a parking lot for the entire time it takes to fry a chicken fresh, and that touch of bitter breading is the trade-off.

The waffles were made fresh on twin irons inside the trailer, cooked crisp enough to cut through, but still pliable enough to fold around pieces of chicken torn from the bone. You haven't lived until you've folded a syrupy waffle around a glistening hunk of hot fried chicken. But just to be clear: Lucky J's isn't selling a cone or a wrap or some Deep South breakfast burrito. The idea is that you eat the waffles with a fork, and you gnaw on the chicken with your hands. Syrup still manages to get on everything.

With no outdoor tables or counters when we visited last week, Broyles and I sat on the front sidewalk of an empty Hertz building next door to eat, but in a recent post on www.luckyjs.com, Umlas said he's ordered picnic tables. The site also lists the "updated summer hours" as 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays for brunch.

This isn't Austin's first chicken-and-waffles operation, but it raises the profile here for food that's big on the West Coast, where Umlas was living when he visited Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles in Los Angeles. It was there that a friend uttered the words that became Lucky J's motto: "Chicken for strength, waffles for speed." More of both, please.

msutter@statesman.com; 912-5902

Lucky J's Chicken and Waffles

5703 Burnet Road, 296-9914,

www.luckyjs.com.