Russel Taylor said he lived “many different lives” before calling Austin home in 2013 and opening Chicknic, a restaurant serving family-style roast chicken and more, in 2023.

A family affair

Prior to Chicknic, Taylor worked in restaurants around the world, including Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and London; held a brief stint as a restaurateur with his brother after moving to Texas; and later transitioned into a marketing career at tech company IBM.

A family dinner request in Dripping Springs during the COVID-19 pandemic helped Taylor find his way back to the kitchen and into what would become Chicknic.

“One night, my father-in-law called me up and said, ‘Can you please bring us dinner? And it can’t be barbecue, burgers, tacos or pizza,’” Taylor said. “That really seemed to be all the options there were for families in the area. So we did what we love doing with friends—we went to Swedish Hill and picked up a roast chicken, some vegetable sides and salad.”


Over the next year, Taylor and his in-laws—who at the time were working at another restaurant in Dripping Springs—developed Chicknic’s concept, partly inspired by Taylor’s memories of Sunday roasts in London pubs.

“Nowhere really felt like home until I found that it was always [at] a chicken restaurant,” Taylor said. “Chicknic is like a picnic. We are primarily to-go, but the goal is to spend time with people. When you go on a picnic, usually you don’t do it by yourself. You’re spending time with people.”
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Russel Taylor, second from left, opened Chicknic with other family members. (Courtesy Chicknic)
On the menu

Chicknic is known for its roast chicken meals, either served whole or as tenders or wings. Classic sides include roasted sweet potatoes, roasted carrots, roasted beets, and freshly-baked popover rolls.

The menu also has South American- and Asian-inspired flavors from Taylor’s in-laws, such as the street-style corn chicharrones, the Asian salad or Asian chicken sandwich and an authentic chimichurri sauce.
Chicknic's menu includes South American and Asian inspired flavors, such as the Asian salad with napa cabbage, carrots, green onion, red bell pepper, orange, roasted peanuts and crispy chicken skin 'wontons' tossed in a spicy peanut vinaigrette. (Courtesy Chicknic)
Chicknic's Asian salad includes napa cabbage, carrots, green onion, red bell pepper, orange, roasted peanuts and crispy chicken skin "wontons" tossed in a spicy peanut vinaigrette. (Courtesy Chicknic)
“Everything has an origin story,” Taylor said. “It’s all kind of a lived experience menu of the things that we love.”


Chicknic’s gluten-free pumpkin cream cheese bread and honey almond tea cake desserts are also made locally by Wild Bloom Kitchen.

What’s special about it?

Chicknic strives to serve families the highest quality chicken around, Taylor said.

“We call ourselves fast-fine because the ingredients we use are the absolute top quality,” Taylor said. “It’s not just that we want to use the most expensive, but we want to use the best, because if you were cooking at home for your family, you want to make sure you're using the cleanest ingredients, the most well-raised chicken, a chicken that is not pumped full of vaccines and antibiotics and raised with no fresh air or constantly raised under artificial light.”


People have been trained to think that chicken is cheap which can lead to “sticker shock” when it comes to menu prices, Taylor said, but that sacrificing quality for the restaurant to be more profitable diminishes their philosophy.

“The whole purpose of the restaurant is that if you cannot cook for your own family, that you will bring them to a place where you are nourishing them with high-quality, healthy, nutrient-rich ingredients,” Taylor said. “I would rather go out of business and not have the restaurant then serve a subpar, chemical, additive-filled product to my guests.”