Buddy’s Chicken & Waffles

Buddy Brown started cooking chicken in his brother’s kitchen during the pandemic lockdown, trying to reverse engineer a fast food recipe and ending up somewhere better. “I was trying to replicate the KFC recipe, and I ended up with something that basically beat the recipe,” he told Converge Media. Waffle Wednesdays for his brother’s friends turned into a ghost kitchen in November 2021, and the dining room across from Lincoln High School opened on Mother’s Day 2024, after the neighborhood put roughly fifty thousand dollars into a crowdfunding campaign to get it built.

The chicken is halal and hand breaded, a combination that is genuinely hard to find in Pierce County, and the waffles are where the menu shows off. The Southern cornbread waffle lands closer to savory than sweet and the strawberry shortcake waffle does not land anywhere near it. Chicken sandwiches are on the board too, and everything arrives with the house Buddy sauce. Converge Media described the room as a vibe, with the music, the artwork and the films on the television doing as much work as the food.

It is closed Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday through Friday it runs 10 AM to 8 PM, and at weekends 10 AM to 5 PM, so the late night version of this place does not exist yet. The News Tribune has reported a second Tacoma location in the works.