Red-lining, rolls and rivalry: The story behind Seattle’s legendary Ezell’s Famous Chicken

For Seattle fried chicken fans, the story of why Ezell Stephens no longer plays any part in the restaurants that bear his name seems like a classic story of family feud writ large and public.

Ezell’s Famous Chicken and Heaven Sent Fried Chicken, on the surface, show the same dynamics as New York’s Ray’s and Original Ray’s pizza shops, Detroit’s Coney Island sibling rivalry, and Aldi Nord and Aldi Süd (known as Trader Joe’s and Aldi, respectively, in the U.S.): close connections split over business deals gone sour.

With Ezell’s on the brink of its 18th location, coming to West Seattle later this year, plus Heaven Sent locations in Lake City and Everett, the story of Seattle’s chicken wars should end on a happy note – the more, the better. But the true battle behind the city’s – and, famously, Oprah Winfrey’s – favorite crisp birds, fluffy rolls, and creamy mashed potatoes happened well before the split and went on much longer. The break-up registers as a mere blip in the shadow of what should be a blaring alarm about how the racist policies in banking and zoning consistently blocked Lewis Rudd, his sister Faye Stephens, and Faye’s husband Ezell from spreading their beloved birds yet farther.

Since opening in 1984, they used only fresh chicken, battering it by hand, and frying it in vegetable oil to put out a product with all the crunch of other shops, but a less greasy feel. The ethereally light muffin-shaped rolls that accompanied the fried chicken account for nearly as much of Ezells’ reputation as the meat. “Each location makes the same bread,” says Rudd. “You can go in the store and the bread’s coming out the oven like it did when I was at Brown’s Fried Chicken in Marshall, Texas.” Then and now, they peel, boil, and mash the potatoes daily at every shop – the type of commitment to quality that has kept them in business for 37 years, despite the challenges they faced as Black business owners.

Big dreams at Brown’s Fried Chicken

Even the original idea for what became Ezell’s stemmed from discrimination: as teenagers, Stephens and Rudd worked together at Brown’s in Marshall – where the population was mostly Black, but the business owners all white.

With a KFC to the east and a Church’s to the west, everyone passing through still made sure to stop in between at Brown’s for the best fried chicken around. When Brown’s expanded to a second location an hour away in Atlanta, Texas, the owner asked Stephens to go run the restaurant – but hired someone else as the manager, telling her if anything came up, Stephens knew what to do.

 “If I know everything, why’s she going to be in charge?” Stephens asked Rudd. Someday, he told his friend, “We’ll have our own business, our own chicken place.” The two men talked about “the Chicken Place” for years, even as Stephens joined the Coast Guard and Rudd the Army. Stephens came back to Texas, married Faye – his childhood sweetheart and Rudd’s sister – and the couple moved to Seattle. When Rudd followed them there in 1977, Stephens immediately drove him around to look at potential locations for the Chicken Place.

Failure to launch

Faye and Stephens scraped together $4,500 for a down payment to buy the building at the corner of 23rd and Jefferson in 1979. They had the knowledge, the experience, and the space to start frying. What they didn’t have – and couldn’t get for five more years – was the financing to remodel the kitchen and buy equipment. While the space sat boarded up, no bank would loan them money, and they battled the Small Business Association for half a decade before securing any.

“The topic of red-lining is in the open now,” Rudd says, but even so, he sees that a lot of people don’t understand the impact it had on Black people and communities, like the Central District. “We experienced it first-hand.”

In 1984, Faye, Stephens and his brother Samuel, and Rudd and his brother Darnell finally opened the Chicken Place they had dreamed of for so long. The day they opened, Garfield High School, across the street, hosted the Bubblin Brown Sugar dance competition, bringing in huge crowds – and a whopping $1300 of chicken sales.

Early attempts at expansion

Within a few blocks sat the same fast-food chains Brown’s battled in Texas, Church’s and KFC. The assistant manager of a nearby Church’s got off the bus in front of Ezell’s and stopped by as they mended a fence before opening to let them know they’d only be there a short time, because the school kids would keep them open for a little while, he explained. “But after that, we'd be history, like the other places that came and went in that building,” Rudd remembers. “Take it from me,” the man said, “The number one assistant manager of Church’s Fried Chicken.”

While the guy from Church’s was right about the support from Garfield students, he was wrong about them being history. Beyond the original store, Ezell’s started a convenience store program and by 1987, supplied 28 stores around the city, including a Downtown 7-Eleven that sold 300 pieces each day. They stocked the Seahawk’s plane with 110 three-piece box lunches before it left for every away game. In total, they sold 5,500 pounds of chicken each week from the single kitchen. “If Harland Sanders is a Kentucky colonel, everybody at Ezell's is at least a major general,” wrote the Seattle Times in 1988.

“We had a great plan in place, so we decided to move out to the U District,” says Rudd. The loan officer told them it would be no problem – they had great credit and a bank account with money in it – so they signed a lease. They were grossing $750,000 annually (equal to about $1.7 million today). But when the time came for the check to be signed, the red-line policies struck again. “It took a call to Olympia, and the state representative to call the vice-president of the bank to get the loan approved,” says Rudd. By then, the annual May street fair was over and school was out. Ezell’s had to pay the $5,000 a month rent multiple times before they could even open and more before they could build an audience. “It set us back about 10 years,” Rudd says of the financial catastrophe.

Enter Oprah

Their accountants and lawyers recommended they throw in the towel. “But we were determined not to stay back,” says Rudd, and soon their “Angel of hope,” arrived. In 1989, Oprah Winfrey came to town to film a children’s program and a production assistant suggested Ezell’s for dinner. She stayed in the car in the parking lot while he ran in to grab the food.

The next night, manager David Jones answered the phone and informed the caller that they don’t deliver on Saturdays. Then he heard a voice in the background, “What do you mean, you don’t deliver on Saturdays, this is Oprah Winfrey! I want some of that chicken and I want it now!” He asked how he could know it was really Oprah, and she said, “Bring the chicken and you’ll see.” He did – and it was. It was also the beginning of an ongoing relationship. Rudd and Stephens flew to Chicago to cater the star’s birthday party, and during a conversation on her show about foods people absolutely cannot resist, Oprah announced to her audience, “It’s the best fried chicken I’ve ever had.”

Flush with fame, they shuttered the convenience store business to focus on the expansion they had always planned for. Ezell’s opened concession stands inside the Kingdome, feeding the hungry hordes there and at their two stores, where people waited up to three hours to get Oprah’s favorite chicken. But the debt burden of the U District store meant they still struggled to stay financially solvent, even after it closed in 1994.

Fire and frustration

In the summer of 1999, just after they opened a store in Lynnwood, the dream went up in flames, literally, when an electric fire charred the original location. It took time to get the building back into code, and the delay brought to a head another relic of the red-lining in the neighborhood.

“We were operating on what was called a conditional permit by the city,” Rudd explains. But since the business stayed closed for more than a year after the fire, the permit expired, reverting the zoning back to residential. The city rejected their applications for new permits, and Rudd had to get back on the phone with Olympia and appeal to his city councilmembers to get it reinstated, further delaying the reopening. Over the next decade, Ezell’s dabbled in franchising with a former employee in Tacoma, then opened in Woodinville and Renton as they pressed for growth. But as is so often the case, with growth came growing pains: Stephens, now divorced from Faye, differed from Rudd in his vision of how the company should expand and split off on his own.

“We reached a fork in the road,” Rudd says diplomatically, despite the undiplomatic break up that tore open lifelong friendships, families, and the beloved business. Stephens opened two Ezell’s locations of his own, in Everett and Lake City, “without getting proper permission to use the company's recipes and the name,” per a King 5 News report. Stephens claimed that “all that intellectual property is his to begin with,” that he had founded the company, and the others were always his employees. The feud resulted in a prolonged court case.

After nearly two years, Rudd, as CEO of Ezell’s, paid an undisclosed settlement to Stephens and got to keep the rights to the Ezell’s name, while both parties retained the right to use the recipes. Stephens’ Lake City and Everett locations had to change their name, becoming Heaven Sent Fried Chicken, “The Home of Ezell Stephens’s original fried chicken.” Stephens dabbled in expansion, opening in the Rainier Valley and Renton before scaling back to the original two. Heaven Sent and Ezell’s cook the same food, the recipes nearly indistinguishable, and both lay claim to the same history. “Making the best fried chicken since 1984,” says Heaven Sent’s marketing, while the website tells the Oprah story – but crediting “Ezell,” rather than “Ezell’s.”

Ezell’s without Ezell

Rudd and Faye still run Ezell’s without the namesake. It’s still a family operation, with his wife doing the catering, his brother Wayne running the original location, a daughter and niece running the food truck, and extended family peppered throughout the 350 employees. They also brought on a co-owner and president, Dennis Waldron, who previously worked at large chains, including as CEO of Cinnabon – a Northwest chain that reached the kinds of national growth Rudd still dreams of.

It all builds up to the obvious question: who makes better fried chicken? In a 2018 Wall Street Journal story, Oprah sidesteps the question, redirecting the conversation to the chicken her partner’s cousin makes, a move Seattleites would be smart to imitate. The Renton location of Heaven Sent closed not long after Ezell’s moved in nearby, so the two chains share no territory, making the easy answer that the better chicken is whichever is closest – and that we should celebrate all fried chicken with the enthusiasm of Oprah flying a chef across the country to make it for her birthday party.

The harder answer comes in the form of a question: How much more great fried chicken could Rudd and Stephens have set up across the city if racism and red-lining policies hadn’t stymied them at every turn? What other businesses did the city deprive itself of?

Overcoming the legacy of discrimination

“A lot of the business owners that were mentors for me when I started out, that were displaced because of the gentrification,” says Rudd. They couldn’t get the financing to keep their business going, or to pay the rapidly rising property taxes on their homes. It’s personal to him when he sees the long lines outside neon-signed cannabis shops in the same place he watched young Black men arrested and taken away for conducting the same business. The sadness and anger he expresses in discussing this seems to fuel his desire to expand, not as revenge but to show what should have been and maybe pave the way for others to follow.

Former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice once described the company as “the best of what you want a small businessman to be,” in the Seattle Times, and “an integral part of the lifeblood of the Central Area." Both Ezell’s and Heaven Sent pride themselves on community involvement, hiring folks in need of a second chance in life, sticking by neighborhoods, people, and even their own businesses in times when anyone else might have given up.

In 1988, even as the company worked toward opening the U District shop, the Times’s food critic, John Hinterberger wrote, “Ezell's is one of those local institutions that do what they do so well, that each visit I am afraid I'm going to see some stretch limos out front and a team of investment bankers huddled inside. If I have a prayer, it is that Rudd and the Stephens get wildly rich – and refuse to franchise.” Unfortunately, he didn’t ask Rudd his opinion. “From the beginning,” he says, “the plan was to build nationwide.”

Now that he has found the resources and partner to make it happen, he is seizing the opportunity, growing aggressively and still aiming for the that chicken place to become a national brand. Despite recently crossing into retirement age, Rudd has no plans to step down or slow down. He’s ready to take advantage of all the opportunities once denied him.

When people ask Rudd how many stores he wants to open, how big his plans are, he always answers with a joke – which, in his retelling, clearly holds more truth than he admits – “We're gonna have a spicy chicken breast available anywhere you can get a Big Mac. That’s the goal.”