Nakia Holmes could hear raucous laughter in the hair salon when she arrived for her weekly appointment. An introvert, she greeted her stylist then quietly took her seat and waited for her appointment. After a few minutes, it was clear who the source of laughter was. A man sat in the styling chair getting his long locs retwisted and let out a quip that, once again, was met with loud laughter from everyone. “He’s funny,” Holmes thought dismissively. She thought nothing of it.
So much so that when the salon owner later told her that the man asked that his number be passed along to her, she was shocked. But again, she thought nothing of it.
It wasn’t until she began seeing him more often around Almeda, a sleepy area in Houston, did she take notice. It was hard not to. He commanded attention everywhere he went. After some time, he finally approached her at her son’s little league football practice where they exchanged numbers. He told her his name was Lyndell Price. His charm was impossible to ignore. Holmes and Price fell into a friendship, then a romance that resulted in them getting married and starting a business together called The Turkey Leg Hut.
The idea came from a dream Holmes had. In it, she was running an operation of barbecue trucks serving savory turkey legs. While at her son’s football games, she’d always notice the throngs of people flanking the food stands, and thought “I’m going to recreate that, but better.”
After bringing the idea to her husband, they pooled money together from their full-time jobs to organize their first turkey leg stand in a large parking lot behind a popular restaurant. It was during the 2016 rodeo season, which is typically 28 days long so the foot traffic would be constant. It was an instant hit, unsurprisingly since Holmes took the beloved fair food and added her own spin: sausage on a stick, gourmet boudin, tender turkey legs stuffed with mouth watering seasonings and sauteed vegetables.
It wasn’t long before Holmes realized she had to quit her role as a junior project manager at a litigation firm to handle the operations for the burgeoning business.
Less than a year later in December 2017, they opened their brick and mortar location, a small but homey restaurant in the town where it all started, Almeda. Because of Price’s larger-than-life personality both in-person and on social media, the word got out around town and scores of people flocked to the location to enjoy the turkey-themed dishes. On a daily basis, the restaurant raked in tens of thousands of dollars and the celeb-approved restaurant was considered a bastion of Houston’s Black culture. Life was good, for a little while. However, in less than ten years, despite raking in millions, Turkey Leg Hut is now closed and has been riddled with controversies that include health code violations, millions in debt, arson, in-fighting, lawsuits, divorce filings and abuse, namely toward Holmes at the hands of Price. Where did it all go wrong?
The Turning Point
“We had the restaurant for six months and then things slowly started to come crashing down,” Holmes tells ESSENCE. This is the first time she’s spoken out publicly about the restaurant’s origins and eventual closure in late 2024.
But before jumping there, Holmes says it’s important to look at where the trouble first began.
On October 31, 2016 Price went to federal prison for his role in an IRS fraud scheme. He was sentenced to 48 months. This was mere months before the then-couple was set to open their first brick-and-mortar location of Turkey Leg Hut. According to Holmes, she had no idea any of this was coming.
“What he was incarcerated for was something that happened prior to me even knowing him,” she said. “It hit me like a ton of bricks.”
While Price was away, Holmes said she took on the leadership role for the restaurant and kept it for another six months. She then said “it was just a lot going on with that particular owner and all of that, and I shut it down.”
She then rebuilt and acquired a building in August 2017, reopening the restaurant that same year. She said the intimate structure was easier for her to run, and her team of about 25 five staff members felt like family to her. In less than two years that number doubled to 180 staffers. Holmes took it all in stride.
“I had four partners at the time,” Holmes explained. “Because {Price} was away and technically he couldn’t be on anything, like any of the paperwork, the liquor license, any of that. And so I assumed sole responsibility for the business at that time.”
That process worked well until Price returned home on October 4, 2018.
“We differed on everything,” Holmes tells ESSENCE. “We have different management styles.” She says she never likes to micromanage. Price would often dictate. Despite not being a part of the day-to-day operations for two years, he had his hands in everything, particularly the finances, Holmes tells ESSENCE. She also says this was the beginning of the brand’s demise.
The Beginning Of The End
By 2021, at any given moment The Turkey Leg Hut was flooded with excited customers waiting to get their hands on the famous stuffed turkey legs everyone couldn’t seem to get enough of. But soon, Price noticed that the restaurant’s patrons didn’t quite look the way he wanted them to. On July 2, 2021, just ahead of the busy July 4 holiday, a post on the restaurant’s social media page indicated a new dress code would be enforced. The post read:
No excessively revealing clothing; including distressed or ripped clothing that is revealing, and shorts must cover your entire bottom
No house attire. This includes wave caps, durags, house shoes or shower caps.
No exposed undergarments including sports bras, bras, panties or any other garments resembling these items
No obscene language or baggy clothing. No inappropriate graphics or language. No excessively baggy, saggy pants.
No swimwear of any kind is allowed.
“It was all his idea,” Holmes says, making it clear that all of the brand’s marketing and external communications was run by him at the time. The dress code, according to Price, was to reinforce the restaurant’s family-friendly atmosphere.
The message met with mixed reactions and sparked a national conversation about respectability politics that often play out in Black-owned businesses. Some onlookers even took to social media to express their discontent, namely because of the brand’s hypocrisy, pointing out that it boasted a club-like atmosphere because of the elaborate alcoholic drinks and loud music. There were also some suggestions that the new dress code discriminated against the restaurant’s Black patrons.
Holmes later released a separate message on social media to mitigate some of the controversy, stating that the “dress code policy is not meant to target or offend anyone but rather provide our guests with an acceptable clothing guide, so that all guests and staff will feel comfortable.”
This was the start of a pattern, Holmes suggests, in which Price would make a unilateral decision, it implodes and she would have to run over and clean it up.
Legal Woes
In 2022, US Foods, a food distributor, sued the Turkey Leg Hut to the tune of $1.2M for unpaid goods and services. According to Holmes, this stemmed from Price’s explosive temper.
“We had a great partnership with them,” Holmes says of their then food vendor. She goes on to explain that the restaurant was on a 30-day net term meaning that their monthly bill wasn’t due until 30 days after they received the product. “We ordered from them twice a week and we paid them twice a week.” On a monthly basis, she says the restaurant would in a rears with the vendor anywhere from $300,000 to $400,000. But considering the friendly relationship between the two entities, the debt would be “frozen” until Holmes and Price were able to pay it, and food supplies would continue to be provided despite the overdue balance.
However, she says that unbeknownst to her, their on-staff accountant was ‘splitting up invoices’ and not paying them in full which furthered the debt. Once this was discovered, Holmes and Price worked out an installment plan to pay the six-figure debt over the course of the year. This arrangement worked well until Price got into a heated exchange with a US Foods rep, which, as Holmes put it, ended up with Price ‘cursing the person out.’ Shortly thereafter, the company filed suit against the restaurant to collect on the debt in full.
Financial Challenges
In 2023, reports of financial difficulties started circulating, which was shocking since the popular eatery and its spin-offs raked in droves of customers daily.
According to Houston outlets, the restaurant had been haunted by outstanding debt for almost a year at that point and dozens of health code violations. In early 2023, the Turkey Leg Hut’s limited liability company filed for bankruptcy, with documents showing the restaurant would no longer occupy its original location. By November 2023, the building’s landlord terminated the lease.
Personal Difficulties
Amid the drama, Holmes remained quiet and largely stood by her husband as a dutiful wife.
“That’s all I know,” she tells ESSENCE when asked why she didn’t leave despite trouble rearing it early on in their marriage. Coming from a family where her parents had been married for more than 47 years and her grandparents for 60, Holmes said she was wired to stick through tough times. She also says it was hard to see through the gaslighting and manipulation from Price.
“Have you ever met a narcissist?,” she says.
The Abuse
In November 2023, Holmes announced that the Prices were going their separate ways in an Instagram post that she posted, deleted, then re-uploaded. In the post she claimed Price was “abusive emotionally and mentally.” She also filed for a temporary restraining order against Price.
A self-described introvert, she said she struggled with making the news public, hence the phantom posting.
“I’ve always been the quiet one in our relationship,” Holmes tells ESSENCE.
She said this was exacerbated by her being “checked out of the relationship” years before actually filing due to verbal and mental abuse as well infidelity.
“The day that I put that statement out that I was leaving, that was a time for me where I knew I couldn’t continue to wait,” she says. “I knew what I had to do. If I do not leave today, somebody’s going to get hurt. I got to go. And I didn’t think anything of it. I just knew that because of the type of person that he is, I knew it was going to be a fight. I didn’t know everything that I was going to endure. I didn’t know what was coming my way. I just said to myself, whatever comes my way, I’m going to be ready, and I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to fight.”
Not long after divorce announcement, Holmes fired Price from the restaurant per reports. In February 2024, Holmes terminated Price and other staff members including the business’s accountant who Holmes claimed was working closely with Price,the restaurant via email. In a statement to CW 39, Holmes shared that the layoffs stemmed from “‘financial misconduct” concerns.
On March 9, 2024, an early morning fire damaged the restaurant’s business offices. Shortly after, a court ruling was found in Steve Rogers’ favor, one of Turkey Leg Hut’s early partners. This resulted in Holmes and Price being found liable in paying Rogers $931,111.12 of what he claimed he was owed in invested funding for the business. On March 26, Holmes and the Turkey Leg Hut filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The End…?
In November 2024, it was reported that the restaurant was officially closed. And mere months after being removed from his post at the Turkey Leg Hut, Price opened a grilled oyster pop-up directly across the street from the Turkey Leg Hut. Despite this obviously “petty move” Holmes says she is not paying attention to any negativity.
“I’m focused on the future,” she says, sharing that the divorce should be finalized sometime in January of this year.
As far as her personal life, she says she’s firming up her social circle after learning that she had a tendency of putting faith in the wrong people. She said she experienced this recently when a friend of hers took to social media to share how Holmes owed her money.
“That really, really hurt me because my friendships mean the world to me,” she shares. At one point she pauses to collect herself after getting emotional. “{This friend} knows me, she knows my character. That was something that was orchestrated, both that situation and the situation with the fortunes that was orchestrated by my ex-husband to tarnish my image. She was like a mentor.”
Holmes shared that she repaid by way of a barter, in which the party was allowed to the Turkey Leg Hut Express brand for a partnership to “recoup their money.”
As far as future business ventures, she says she’s working on some things, but she ‘doesn’t want to speak too much about that other than to say, stay tuned.‘ ”
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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For Education and discussion purposes. Please note no copyright infringement is intended, was recorded on BlkCosmo’s own equipment, and we do not own nor claim to own any of the original recordings used in this video and intend to use this as ‘fair use’.
