The Rise and Fall of the Old Country Buffet
Plus, a potential new path for the newsletter.
Note: Apparently some (not Google) search engines are picking up this piece. I hope you’ll find it interesting. If you wish to further reminisce about other random ’90s topics, you can see what I wrote about O.J. Simpson here, or the other Simpsons here.
Childhood memories of places that are no more: Is there anything that so effectively demonstrates the passage of time? When the proverbial inexorable march of the fourth dimension isn’t noticeable enough, sometimes the effect is intensified by the loss of the three-dimensional space associated with our most distant moments in time.
And while all of my schools and homes are still standing, the one restaurant chain I probably spent the most time in for the first 18 years of my life—yes, I’m pretty sure even more than McDonald’s—is out of business. On life support before the pandemic, the whole covid mess pulled the plug.
Golden Corral may be the older franchise—and is definitely the more durable—but the Old Country Buffet is where my family went for countless meals in the 1990s and 2000s. Children from ages 3–12 ate for just 50 cents per year of age, so say you had a 10-, 8-, and 5-year-old; they ate for a combined $11.50. Now, that barely buys you a fast food meal. Good times.
We mainly went to two, one in York, Pennsylvania when visiting my grandparents and the other in Gaithersburg, Maryland when it was just the nuclear family. The one in Gaithersburg shut down around 2016 and became an AutoZone. The one in York lasted until 2019; it is now an Aldi. We had been to neither of them in years.
So what happened to the Old Country Buffet? Why did it die when Golden Corral survived?
What Happened
That’s sort of like asking why Circuit City died when Best Buy survived, or why Borders died and Barnes & Noble survived. Sometimes the market for a chain of all-you-can-eat restaurants or the sale of consumer electronics or of books shrinks, and only the best company in the market remains standing nationally. Companies that don’t “get it”—Blockbuster being the classic example—go under. The same may eventually happen in office supplies.
Everyone else? They lose their customers to the better company, or to a sell-all retailer like Amazon, Walmart, Costco, etc.
The case of Old Country Buffet (or Country Buffet, or Hometown Buffet, depending where you lived) was classic mismanagement and lack of quality control. The parent company filed for bankruptcy three times (coincidentally, in three straight election years: 2008, 2012 and 2016). In 2021, the company officially died when the same company that runs Famous Dave’s purchased it and killed it.
As for quality control? Well, even when a location closes, you can still find its reviews on Yelp, and good luck finding any Old Country Buffet location above 3 stars.
But I also have some anecdotal evidence.
One More Time
The last time we went to the Old Country Buffet as a family was not in York or Gaithersburg. I don’t remember the exact year, sometime between 2013 and 2015, and it had been a long time since a trip to any “OCB.” But we were together and just for the hell of it, decided to try the one in Fairfax, Virginia, which is now a Korean barbecue.1
Boy howdy was it a disaster. It was very obvious why the chain was going under, and not just in the food, pricing, or lack of any wait.
The only good news was, not all was lost in anecdote-land. At one point, we asked when more roast beef would be served, and were told 45 minutes. We checked 45 minutes later and were told… 45 minutes. It sure seemed that was simply a stock answer, and that more roast beef was never coming; it was forever 45 minutes away. As if the staff picked the longest amount of time to not be bothered that still sounded reasonable.
That location shut down in 2016, not a moment too soon.
The last OCB that I saw is not the same one I went to. There was one in Woodbridge, Virginia that lasted until the pandemic, but no longer. It’s the only one of the four locations that remained an all-you-can-eat restaurant, so it does have that going for it.2
So Where Was The Rise Exactly?
I titled this piece “The Rise and Fall of Old Country Buffet.” Where was the “rise” exactly?
Well, at one point, there were 650 locations in the chain. Compare that to the about 400 Golden Corrals there are currently. There are 650 fewer than that now, of course, but this wasn’t some nothing chain. It was big enough that South Park even mocked it at one point (calling it the “Country Kitchen Buffet”).
Despite the parody, if the food was bad, I didn’t know any better. Most of my experiences with the restaurant come more than 20 years ago, after all.
Of course, the point of all buffets is to get as much food as you want for a rather reasonable price. The $6.59 dinner price in this 1993 commercial (I still remember those lamps!) is $14.25 in 2024 dollars, but inflation is a story for another day.
From six locations in a single television market to none in the entire country. Almost 30 years were needed, but entropy took its course yet again. Now, the place lives on in internet-land mainly for this out-of-context edit of a training video:
No one’s actual experience was really that awkward, of course. (For completeness only, here is the actual training spot.) At least, it wasn’t that awkward until the end of days when, instead of empty chatter, you got empty promises every 45 minutes.
Poll of the Day
Before we get to the poll, some context. As I wrote in my introductory post, this is a rather catch-all Substack, which isn’t necessarily ideal.
However, I have noticed that all but two of my posts—the introduction, and the one about John Clarke and Bryan Dawe (although even that one touches on what I’m about to mention)—have been thematic in at least one way.
They are all in a sense about either times gone by or, in the case of last week, the passage of time itself (or lack thereof). Hopefully with enough “other stuff’ to keep it relevant, rather than a nostalgia-fest, which I’d like to avoid.
That all being said, which of these names and descriptions and would make you more likely to check out this Substack if you didn’t know the author personally, while still being an accurate enough description?
Nate’s Notes: Weekly Essays on Interesting Topics
Green River: Present-ing Our Past Experiences
As CCR fans know, “Green River” is borrowed from the name of a 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival album and song. It also happens to contain my surname, and the song is about “coming on home” to a place from times gone by, so I think it would be apropos.
Your Turn
So, what is your “Old Country Buffet”—your place in time where both the place and time no longer exist?
The specific address, not Fairfax.
Caddyshack kinda sucks (yeah I said it), but clearly I was setting up to link this scene.
For me, the beloved hangout place of yesteryear that is all but gone is the classic arcade. Yes there are still a few scattered arcades here and there, and Dave and Busters is thriving, but almost nobody leaves their house to play video games anymore. Not that I blame anyone for that, as we can now play thousands of games with people across the world from the comfort of our couches.
But there was something different about playing games in an arcade. The bright, colorful flashing lights, the cacophony of sound effects and music blaring from the machines, the oddly satisfying act of feeding those machines tokens and watching them spit out tickets in return, sitting in a makeshift cockpit and holding a plastic gun or rubber steering wheel. The whole environment was a fun, exciting place to be. It was a place for young men to hang out and avoid doing their homework. But most of all the neighborhood arcades felt like part of the community in a way that modern stay-at-home gaming could never replicate.