This paper is concerned with well-posedness and energy decay rates to a class of nonlinear viscoelastic Kirchhoff plates. The problem corresponds to a class of fourth order viscoelastic equations of p-Laplacian type which is not locally Lipschitz. The only damping effect is given by the memory component. We show that no additional damping is needed to obtain uniqueness in the presence of rotational forces. Then, we show that the general rates of energy decay are similar to ones given by the memory kernel, but generally not with the same speed, mainly when we consider the nonlinear problem with large initial data.