With Boston Market on the cusp of collapse, a North Carolina-based company appears poised to feed the nation’s appetite for corporatized meat-and-three meals.
Golden Corral—which since launching as a Fayetteville steakhouse in 1973 has grown into a national chain with more than 500 locations—recently opened its first Homeward Kitchen in Southern Pines. According to Restaurant Business, which covered the December debut, execs in the company’s Raleigh headquarters nixed a plan to assign the name “Homeward Kitchen by Golden Corral” to the new counter-service format.
“If it had ‘Golden Corral’ in the name, people expected a buffet,” CEO Lance Trenary told the trade publication. “They couldn’t get past it.”
Representatives from Golden Corral didn’t respond to multiple messages from The Food Section, but press releases make clear the company wants to ensure prospective Homeward Kitchen customers don’t get bogged down by buffet associations when they’re in the mood for meatloaf.
Specifically, Homeward Kitchen is stressing to-go orders and drive-thru windows. As its website puts it, “With life moving faster than ever, we take our time cooking, so you don’t have to.”
It’s obvious how Golden Corral benefits from shifting to a streamlined model. In addition to ameliorating the perpetual problem of food waste, a Homeward Kitchen store requires roughly one-third of the land and cash investment it takes to open a Golden Corral.
But should eaters share the honchos’ Homeward Kitchen enthusiasm? Since I rarely have the chance to experience the first-ever instance of a soon-to-be ubiquitous brand, I recently went to Southern Pines to lunch at Homeward Kitchen.
While it was quiet on the Saturday I visited, the employee who brought our trays to the table characterized the prior few weeks as bustling. “There is no restaurant like this,” she explained.
Well, maybe not now. For customers who remember Boston Market in its immediate post-Boston Chicken heyday of the mid-1990s, though, the parallels are unmistakable.
The core of Homeward’s menu is fried shrimp, fried chicken, pot roast, and meatloaf, all of which can be paired with scoopable sides such as mashed potatoes, mac-and-cheese, pork-enhanced green beans, and cream-based coleslaw. (Folks in an acute rush can order the meatloaf as a sandwich, or the pot roast in a bowl, topped with mashed potatoes and mac-and-cheese.)
Yet Boston Market’s current situation is dire. A federal court judge on January 29 ordered the chain to pay $11.9 million in unpaid bills and related costs to US Foods. The distributor is now seeking an additional $30 million from Boston Market to cover other debts, The Takeout reported.
As for Boston Market, which is down from 1,200 locations to about 100 holdouts, it’s on a desperate hunt for franchisees to open a buy-in-free Boston Market “within your restaurant, deli, gas station, or any suitable establishment.”
In other words, there’s plenty of room in the Americana-on-the-quick sector for Homeward’s value-priced plates. Apparently, the chain is still tinkering with portion sizes, but the amount of saucy pot roast I was served for $11.79 could have covered two meals.
And in most cases, the food’s flavor is as impressive as its immensity. While nothing was better than a tender chocolate chip cookie, pulled from the warmer in apology for yeast rolls not being ready at the same time as our entrees, vegetables were robust, and the mac-and-cheese was rich. Homeward Kitchen may not want to flaunt its Golden Corral connection, but its standout gravy is a beneficiary of decades of experience with meat drippings.
Which led me to wonder how Homeward Kitchen compares to Golden Corral, a restaurant I hadn’t patronized since I was a cub reporter in Columbus, Mississippi. If I was scientifically minded, I could have driven on to Sanford, home to the location closest to Southern Pines, but I instead went to the Golden Corral in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Not surprisingly, the food at Golden Corral isn’t as fresh and pretty as what’s plated at Homeward Kitchen: Fried liver doesn’t fare well under a heat lamp. There’s also a weird payment system at Golden Corral under which customers using credit cards can charge their buffet entrance fee, but then are required to return to the host stand for a separate gratuity transaction when they leave.
Still, Golden Corral has distinct advantages. First, in keeping with its buffet status, it offers roughly a zillion times as many menu items as Homeward Kitchen. Even if I’d asked nicely at Homeward’s drive-thru speaker, I couldn’t have gotten a plate of fried chicken, white rice with brown gravy, black-eyed peas, and turnip greens. Those greens, in particular, were fantastic, since greens don’t suffer from sitting.
Second, what’s special about buffets—beyond their very American manifestation of abundance—is their appeal to an incredibly diverse clientele. Immigrants who don’t feel like speaking English, eaters who prefer not to share their dietary choices with a stranger, young families with impatient children, and older people who’d rather not deal with surprises at mealtime all congregate at buffets. Across the South, buffet dining rooms are uniformly interracial and intergenerational.
Fortunately, the buffet seems to have survived the pandemic, despite grim prophesies to the contrary. Even Sweet Tomatoes, one of the first buffet chains to declare the genre dead, announced this month that it would reopen a location in Tucson, Arizona. Golden Corral has pledged to keep opening buffets, pointing to a double-digit percentage uptick in annual same-store sales.
Even so, it’s easy to imagine top brass enthralled by statistics such as an early return showing Homeward Kitchen doing 10 times as much to-go business as Golden Corral.
Granted, it’s not Golden Corral’s responsibility to prop up society. The company is supposed to turn a profit, which is why its CEO told Restaurant Business that he’s identified 500 potential markets for its spinoff brand. “It’s blue sky for Homeward Kitchen,” Trenary said.
I believe it. But I also plan to stick with Golden Corral for as long as I can.
Those rolls remind me so much of Quincys. Such a similar vibe to Golden Corral as well. Shout-out to Shoney’s as well!