‘It’s our number one’: After 45 years, Lizard’s Thicket’s fried chicken still reigns supreme

It’s late on a Tuesday morning at the Lizard’s Thicket on Augusta Road in Lexington, and the kitchen is veritably bustling.

It’s that time of the day when breakfast is beginning to wind down and the staff in the kitchen is deep in the throes of preparation for lunch. Large pans are filled with the mixture for cornbread muffins, just as they get ready to go in the oven. Beef stew bubbles in a large pot on the stove, and the telltale “thwack” of a knife hitting a cutting board sets a staccato rhythm in the kitchen as heads of lettuce and other veggies are chopped.

Cooks scoot around in long established motions, brushing past one another as they hustle to the walk-in cooler or stock room to grab more supplies. All the while, wait staffers zip across the front of the kitchen scooping up plates and carrying them out to the dining room, while others box up orders for the seemingly ever-flowing line of cars in the drive-thru.

And in the midst of this controlled whirlwind, Lizard’s Thicket operations manager Robert Williams — a member of the Williams family that started the long-running restaurant chain 45 years ago — is tending to a particularly critical part of the kitchen’s ecosystem.

In fact, Williams is at the nerve center. He’s busy prepping the restaurant’s bedrock menu item: fried chicken.

Lizard’s Thicket is in the midst of celebrating its 45th anniversary. Founded in 1977 by Bob and Anna Williams with a restaurant on Broad River Road, Lizard’s Thicket has become a Midlands institution across more than four decades. It now has 13 restaurants, most of which are in the Columbia and Lexington area, though there is a Florence location. The company is planning a new restaurant later this year that will be in the 1700 block of South Lake Drive in Red Bank.

And while the restaurant has a host of country cooking favorites on the menu — macaroni and cheese, collards, black-eyed peas, pork chops, candied yams, country fried steak, pork chops and more — its fried chicken has proved to be an enduringly popular choice. Company officials said Lizard’s Thicket serves more than 600,000 pounds of fried chicken every year.

“It is our number one meat, across the board,” Williams said, with a broad smile.

‘People eat with their eyes’

Prepping the chicken is an intensive, hands-on process.

Lizard’s Thicket peels all of its chicken in-house. Pieces of chicken are first coated in a flour mixture that is made with locally milled Adluh Flour. They are then dipped in what Williams calls a milk bath, which is half Hickory Hill milk (also local to South Carolina), half water. Then, after some of the moisture from the milk bath has wicked off, the chicken gets tossed back in the flour once more, before heading off to the deep fryer.

Williams notes it’s important to follow the steps closely, so that the breading will stick to the chicken when it’s cooked and come out with that perfect golden brown crunch.

“They say people eat with their eyes,” Williams said. “So you want it to be as presentable as possible when it comes to the table.”

Lizard’s Thicket serves more than 4.2 million customers annually, per company statistics. And for many of those folks, the fried chicken is a hallmark. And it’s important for those customers to know exactly what they are going to get when they place their order.

“That’s one of the key parts of our success, the consistency,” said Sara Krisnow, Lizard’s Thicket’s community relations manager and the granddaughter of restaurant founders Bob and Anna Williams. “We started with our grandparents’ recipes, my grandmother’s recipes. We use the same exact recipes, even though we now cook in larger quantities. ... It’s still small batches, it’s just more batches, continuously throughout the day.

“Having a consistent recipe that everyone is using in all the stores is what’s key.”

‘They give people chances’

While the ownership and corporate leadership of the restaurant is a Williams family affair, Lizard’s Thicket relies on an army of nearly 600 employees to keep its 13 stores running. Many of those The State met during a recent visit to the Augusta Road location had been with the company for years, some for nearly two decades.

Jarod Amaker was just one of the employees working in the kitchen when a reporter stopped by. The North, S.C., resident said he had been at the Augusta Road restaurant for five years. He’s spent those years back in the kitchen, regularly preparing everything from baked chicken to mac and cheese to cornbread dressing to mashed potatoes and beyond.

Amaker said he can deeply feel what Lizard’s Thicket means to the community and its employees.

“It means a whole lot,” Amaker said. “My hat’s off to Robert (Williams) and them because they give people chances and they look out for the community. A lot of folks love to come to this store, right here. Over my five years, I’ve seen a whole lot of people enjoy this restaurant.”

For Krisnow, who has been working in her family’s business since she was a kid, that connection to the community is what helps make Lizard’s Thicket such an intrinsic part of the Midlands’ culinary scene. She said Lizard’s Thicket is ready for the next four decades.

“For the community to open their arms and welcome us for 45 years — and we want to continue it for another 45 years — it’s a great feeling,” Krisnow said. “It’s a great feeling to wake up knowing that we go to work where the community wants us to be there and we can continue to do what we love, which is put out fresh food so people can feed their families. We are just carrying on the tradition.”