Months before snow blanketed Kansas City, Todd Johnson transformed a weed-filled, unusable portion of parking lot at his Lenexa restaurant into a flourishing garden that serves up fresh produce used in kitchens at all three of his Strips Chicken and Brewing locations in Johnson County.
In its first season, Moonglow Gardens — as Johnson calls it — produced heirloom tomatoes, lettuce, red onions, potatoes, spinach, kale, cabbage, sweet corn, zucchini, okra, Brussels sprouts, herbs and cucumbers that became items like pickles and superfood slaw at his Lenexa, Olathe and Merriam restaurants.
“I just absolutely love it,” the restaurant chain founder said of the garden. “It’s been incredibly productive.”
Johnson — who boasts a degree in agronomy and a background in banking, hotel management, and restaurant and bar consulting — grew up on a farm in southeast Kansas. There, he spent a lot of time helping his mom, grandmother and great-grandmothers, who cultivated extensive gardens and raised chickens, cattle and pigs.
“They taught me the art of crafting exceptional meals from scratch,” he notes on the front of Strips’ menus.
Launched in 2016 with its Olathe location, Strips is known for its crispy chicken strips with a crushed-pretzel breading and other made-from-scratch menu items, including wings, pork burgers, pulled pork and pork tenderloin sandwiches, and mac and cheese and smashed potato bowls, plus ice cream and creme brulee cheesecake for dessert.
“We’re not using tenders because tenders have a tendon in them,” Johnson said about what sets his chicken strips apart. “They’re not tender. This is a marketing scheme. They’re thicker on one end. So if you want to fry a chicken tender, it’ll be impossible for you to fry correctly because you can only fry it in the center of the thickest part correctly. So you’ve overcooked everything else after five minutes.”
“What we do is we take the whole boneless, skinless chicken breast and then we slice it,” he added.
With the national trend of franchise chicken strip restaurants — like Zaxby’s and Raising Cain’s — on the rise when he first started Strips, coupled with his knowledge from time working in consulting, Johnson knew he couldn’t go wrong with his signature item, he said.
“As I was working with these sports bars, I realized that burgers and chicken strips are the most important things that people order,” he said. “If you want to have a steakhouse, you better not have chicken strips or burgers on the menu or you won’t sell very many steaks. Those take over menus because they’re extremely popular.”
His Merriam and Lenexa locations offer nine signature beers on tap, brewed in collaboration with five local breweries. Johnson also brews root beer and ginger beer and has a menu of signature “clucktails.”
“There’s so many breweries and they’re now closing faster than our opening,” he noted. “I decided collaborations would be great for everybody.”
Johnson, who moved to the Kansas City area in 2011, has always wanted a garden here.
The backyard at his Lenexa home is on a bluff, making it less than feasible there, so when he took a garden tour at Legarde Vineyard in Argentina — from where he imports the restaurant’s organic malbec and rose — he was inspired to start the garden at his newest Strips location in Lenexa. It opened in 2024, the same year he closed his Waldo location because of break-ins, Johnson said.
“It was cool to walk through,” he recalled of the vineyard. “Part of the tour was pointing out some things they used in the garden (for their Michelin-starred restaurant). So that was just in the back of my mind like, ‘I would love to have a garden at my restaurant someday.’”
So when the city of Lenexa told Johnson he needed to seed the weed- and trash-filled part of the parking lot at his new location and paving it was not an option, he got creative; the garden dream sprouted from there, he said.
“Grass is not going to grow there,” he said. “There’s no dirt and anything. There’s no water down there. So I found these raised beds. They’re self-irrigated planters.”
The system has worked out well during the garden’s first season, said Johnson, who planned a free Monday buffet for a couple of weeks to help community members during this fall’s government shutdown and who regularly supports foster children through Strips’ round-up program.
“We’ve done probably 75 gallons of tomatoes and we’ve done easily 150 gallons of kale,” he said.
He’s also organized garden tours for customers and even encouraged them to come and pick the excess cherry tomatoes. Next season, Johnson hopes to use the produce to make a line of frozen soups to sell by the pint and to host multiple-course tasting menus.
“I always love doing those,” he added.
This story was originally published by Startland News.
