Depot 303 is easy to miss. There’s barely any signage on the Mulberry food hall. Its building is tucked away from the main roads, with nothing but a white walled, black steel beam exterior. It’s a simple, inconspicuous, and modest building—just the kind of place Joe Dodd wanted for this new food concept, Chicken and Pig.
Best known for his Nashville hot chicken brand King of the Coop, Dodd now takes up residence about an hour away from the Seminole Heights spot that brought him to local fame years ago.
Even though he’s still serving fried chicken in familiar cardboard boxes with a slice of potato bread, the product is vastly different from the unapologetically spicy tenders he was known for. With a new recipe completely reworked, Dodd said this is his best fried chicken ever.
“It’s completely different from everything we ever did before. Like it’s not even close,” he told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay. “If I was going to be done with King of the Coop, I wanted something completely different than what it was.”
The rebrand, which officially happened on Dec. 29, is a fusion between the well-known Coop brand and the recently created Italian sandwich concept, Bottega Porchetta. After years of drama with King of the Coop, marred by location closures, failed business attempts, and feuds with keyboard warriors on Reddit, Dodd went back to the drawing board, not for his brand, but for himself—as a chef and as a person. It’s a new start for Dodd, who wants to return to the aspects of restaurateurship that he originally fell in love with, and he wants to keep it simple on purpose, separating himself from the face of the brand in the process.
Working out of a tiny stall in a food hall in rural Polk County is a far cry from the hole-in-the-wall chicken joint in the bustling Tampa neighborhood that Dodd started at in 2019. But after years of emotions—good, bad, and ugly—there is a sense of ease and therapy in the quieter halls of Depot 303.
Rather than focusing solely on spicy tenders, Chicken and Pig hopes to return to the basics of “simple, relatable, really good food,” as Dodd puts it. He still offers the same Nashville hot spice blend as an option, but it’s not the star of the show. There’s a revamped batter which ditches the gluten-free one used at King of the Coop; Dodd is back to using flour and cornstarch. The new wet batter technique makes for a delicately-crispy chicken, with traditional country seasoning that pairs well with new sides such as the gumbo, collard greens and gouda mac and cheese.
The tenders get a coating of a sweet rosemary honey glaze, served alongside fries drizzled with rendered fat from the porchetta that goes in the sandwiches. It’s a labor of love that takes three days to prepare. On day one, Dodd seasons pork bellies, drying them overnight, roasting them the next day, cooling them again overnight before they are ready to be sliced on the third day and packed thick into a crunchy, toasted focaccia-style bread.
Bottega Porchetta started last September, shortly after he arrived at Depot 303. At the same time, Dodd opened a King of the Coop location at the original site of Nebraska Mini-Mart, but tragically, that location lasted six short months. That was his seventh attempt at a rebirth of his chicken brand, and after that failure, he pivoted to porchetta sandwiches.
“Food is so subjective, taste is so subjective. These porchetta sandwiches that we do are one of the best sandwiches I’ve ever made in my life,” Dodd said. “But you could come try it and be like, I don’t like this, and that’s OK. My thing now is if somebody doesn’t like what we make, I don’t really care, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, but there are a lot of lessons that I have learned.”
The idea came when he acquired a rotisserie that Dodd said costs $50,000 but that he miraculously got at an auction for $765. It’s radically different from what Dodd was known for, but it’s exactly what he needed to distance himself from his fried chicken past.
Credit: Adrian O'Farrill / Creative Loafing Tampa Bay
‘I wasn’t Joe…’
A few years ago, during a phone call with his previous business partners, Dodd began to feel his body was off, but he chalked it up to stress.
“I remember the way I felt during the phone call, and I was like, something doesn’t feel right… like, I do not feel fantastic,” said Dodd.
He was in the midst of cutting ties with those business partners after having blown through a $130,000 loan in a month-and-a-half, trying to pay off past dues. It wasn’t until a routine check-up with his doctor some days later that Dodd would find out he had had a heart attack during the whole ordeal.
That was near the end of the food hall concept FLocale, which included Dodd’s Nashville hot chicken brand, King of the Coop, along with Westshore Pizza and Rock Brothers Brewing. It was a short-lived venture, only lasting a year-and-a-half, but it was around the time Dodd began to question whether franchising his beloved hot chicken brand was a good idea. And after departing from the FLocale group, he tried to save the King of the Coop brand, opening new locations. But they all ended with closures, and six years later, Dodd said he was left with nothing but “lessons and bills.”
“What we had in Seminole Heights was fantastic, and I knew how to run a restaurant, but I did not know how to run two restaurants,” Dodd said. “So you hire and trust, and that’s when things start to slip in the idea of quality and consistency.”
Back in the early days of King of the Coop, Dodd said the Seminole Heights location was raking in $40,000 a week. But the success meant that Dodd had outgrown the tiny space on Florida Ave. Pretty soon, he had his eyes set on expansion through franchising; that is the moment that he describes as the start of the end.
After moving out of his original location, Dodd co-launched FLocale in 2022. Simultaneously, he was opening up King of the Coop locations in Wesley Chapel, South Tampa, and St. Petersburg. He was also trying to get Westchase operational, which was never able to open, cursed by delays and empty promises from a contractor.
In an unpredictable series of events, Dodd said a contractor he hired to work on the Westchase location went “off the rails.”
“He didn’t do well, and he disappeared,” said Dodd. He and his business partner decided to cut the plug on Westchase, all to show for it was a location that never saw the light of day and $210,000 of total investment, which Dodd said his business partner did not recoup.
“I think he just made the attempt to try to grow too quickly before having a solid foundation and team in place, and it just kind of bit him in the ass,” said Danielle Miranda, who ran King of the Coop’s social channels from 2019-2023.
“But I definitely feel like the nail in the coffin was when he opened that third and fourth location in St. Pete and SoHo,” Miranda told CL. “Now, he just wants to get back to cooking good chicken and good food. And honestly, it’s probably the smartest thing to do.”
It was also an abrupt ending to FLocale as the staff was let go without notice, including Miranda. But the internet pointed fingers at Dodd, and he took it to heart. On Reddit, he replied to the people who he said were calling out his reputation and for not caring about his employees. And it made him sick, to the point where he said his wife worried she would find him dead of a heart attack from how much it affected him.
“Other business owners and I were reiterating to him, you’re running a business page,” Miranda said. “You have to separate it, you have to know in the back of your mind you have a good product. You’re a good person, love what you do, you’re not going to be able to please everyone. People know business owner Joe, but not chef Joe. And that’s what he wanted to get back to his just love and joy for cooking.”
“I wasn’t Joe, I was the King of the Coop guy,” said Dodd.
He needed a transformation, and it came from a conversation with Zack Gross, who owned Z Grille in St. Pete and now runs Uncle Funz Provisions. Dodd said that his inner circle kept nudging him to stop replying to people online, but it took a sit-down with Gross, who Dodd respected highly, to change his approach not just online, but in the kitchen.
“He told me, ‘Bro, you’re f’ing blacklisted, you’re very outspoken,’” Dodd said. Gross had long separated his personal presence from his business pages on social media.
“When somebody that’s not in your immediate circle, who you look up to that has been in your shoes, tells you something, then it’s like, ‘Huh, all right, now it makes sense,’” said Dodd.
And that’s all Dodd needed to kickstart his metamorphosis; he went home that day after meeting with Gross and purged his social media. He made sure his personal profile was unrecognizable and removed himself from the King of the Coop and Bottega Porchetta pages. He was done being the face of a brand. Dodd said he was no longer pursuing food competitions like the Tampa Bay Wine & Food Fest, which he won three years in a row, or being considered for best fried chicken in Tampa, which he won seven years in a row. He already had all the accolades he needed. What he didn’t have was peace.
“I’m not worried about other people anymore,” said Dodd. “I’m focused on those around me, and what they need from me.”
Dodd still hopes to open up Chicken and Pig pop-ups every once in a while, closer to Tampa. But it’s on his terms. In the meantime, he’ll be frying chicken and slicing porchetta in his new Mulberry refuge. Whether anyone braves the long trek or if any of those daring enough actually like his food are no longer his biggest concerns. He’s having fun cooking again, and more importantly, he’s just happy being Joe again.
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This article appears in Feb. 19 – 25, 2026.