KFC opened its Open House prototype restaurant on September 26 in McKinney, Texas — a 3,400-square-foot, 52-seat concept designed to serve as a live laboratory for the brand's next chapter across its 3,500-plus U.S. locations.
The unit at 8751 El Dorado Parkway operates daily from 6 a.m. to midnight, spanning dayparts the chain has never formally owned in the U.S. KFC U.S. President Catherine Tan-Gillespie framed the site explicitly as a system-wide learning tool. "It gives guests a reason to try us, or try us again, while giving us a real restaurant where we can learn what works for guests, our teams and the business, and scale the strongest ideas across the system," she said.
Menu Expansion
The Open House menu extends well beyond fried chicken on the bone. A new breakfast lineup includes Breakfast Sandwiches, Original Recipe Tenders, Hashbrown Sticks, Mini Cronuts, brewed coffee and iced lattes — a daypart the brand has not pursued at scale in the U.S. Late-night hours round out the clock. A sauce-forward "Dipped" and "Drizzled" architecture lets guests customize across tenders, wings, sandwiches and fries using options ranging from classic Kentucky BBQ and Ranch to Jalapeño Ranch, Sweet Heat Ranch and Garlic Parmesan. On the beverage side, Open House debuts a format drawn from KFC's global playbook: lemonades, boba refreshers and "Krunch" shakes position the drink menu as a traffic driver in its own right — a strategy that quick-service beverage innovation has shown can meaningfully lift check averages and visit frequency.
Design and Service Model
The physical space draws on mid-century modern design — a nod to the brand's 1950s origins — with warm timber accents, oversized windows and flexible indoor, outdoor and breezeway seating. The service model is built around what the brand describes as "digital where it helps, human where it matters": table service runs alongside self-order kiosks, digital menu boards, dual drive-thru lanes and a dedicated mobile pick-up lane for third-party and app orders. A "Celebration Booth" photo experience and an in-store branded merchandise bar round out the experiential layer.
For the broader QSR industry, Open House is a notable stress test of how far a legacy fried-chicken brand can stretch its daypart coverage and service formats without diluting operational simplicity. The breakfast push in particular puts KFC in more direct competition with McDonald's, Chick-fil-A and fast-casual breakfast entrants — a crowded segment where execution consistency across a franchised network is the central challenge. Operators tracking fast-casual and QSR format evolution will want to watch which elements KFC chooses to roll out systemwide after gathering data from McKinney.
A public grand opening celebration is scheduled for September 27 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. CT, open free to the Dallas-Fort Worth community.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
