Photo by Shelby Tauber
La Bodega, the rotisserie chicken-and-fries restaurant that Oak Cliff neighbor Skye McDaniel launched in July, is closed on Fridays and Saturdays.
That’s unusual in the restaurant industry, but McDaniel says it makes sense for her concept, geared to neighbors who want to pick up weeknight meals for their families.
Besides chicken and fries, sandwiches and salads are made to order with the cleanest ingredients possible, McDaniel says.
“I eat a salad every day of my life. It’s my favorite food,” she says. “These are things that I eat every day.”
McDaniel grew up in Winnetka Heights and planned a career in food starting at age 10, but a catalyst for La Bodega came as a stroke of luck in day trading.
Her livelihood came to a halt because of the pandemic in 2020, and she’d put her mortgage in forbearance.
Stock-trading became “normalized” for her because of a former boyfriend who did that full time, and she decided to open a Robinhood account and gamble with $5,000.
She wound up making more money on one trade of stock in a fuel-cell company that year than she’d earned in all of 2019.
“But I didn’t want to do it anymore because it’s really stressful, and it’s totally gambling,” she says. “It’s not repeatable, and I would never advise it. It’s pure dumb luck.”
The windfall took the financial pressure off.
She pitched the idea for a chicken-and-fries place, inspired by one she’d experienced in Sevilla, Spain, to her friend Javier García del Moral, who owns the adjacent Sketches of Spain and the Wild Detectives.
García suggested the location, and his original idea was to also sell Spanish imports like fish and seafood conservas, cheeses, jamón and wine.
He wound up having to pull out of their agreement but encouraged McDaniel to keep going, and she still wants to do the Spanish imports idea eventually.
The tiny storefront serves organic rotisserie chicken from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5-8 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 3-7 p.m. Sunday.
