Open for Business

The Drive Thru Buffet

The Drive Thru Buffet opened today in the old KFC building. Owner Don Bowling owned and operated the Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) on US 68 at the south end of town for twenty years before he decided to shut it down due to problems with the KFC parent corporation.

"This place was a goldmine," Bowling told the Blog in a Sept., 2009 interview. "People think I shut it down because it was losing money. That couldn't be farther from the truth."

According to Bowling, who owned six other KFCs around the region at the time, the corporation wanted him to make $250,000 in improvements to continue operating the restaurant. He just didn't want to do it, he said. So he shut down and, for more than a year, had been trying to rent the building as something other than a restaurant with no success.

For that one year, Bowling was legally bound by his contract with KFC not to operate on the premises as a restaurant. When the year was up he leased the building to local men Jim Zehner and Carl Moore who tried their hand running CJ's Southern Cooking there. CJ's opened in July, 2010 and closed recently, so Bowling is now back in business at the location as the Drive Thru Buffet.

"It's a shame to have it sitting here vacant," he told the Blog back in 2009.

Fried chicken is on the menu.

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Photo by Virgil Hervey (click on it to enlarge)

Addendum from Mary M Morgan:

Good news for those of us who don't cook (and even some who do): The new restaurant in Yellow Springs, the drive-thru Buffet, opened today, Tuesday, Dec. 27th! The transformed KFC is bright and sparkling with a surprising number of food offerings. The hours are 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. except on January 1 when it will open at 12 noon with a greeting to the New year of a one-day-special of pork and saurkraut. The daily lower lunch price is good until 4 p.m. and in addition there is a further discount to Seniors between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m.

The vegetable beef soup is exceptionally good and the stewed tomatoes need a name as interesting as the dish really is. The original famous KFC seasoning returns the fried chicken to its well earned prestige.

The understaffed Health Department okay has resulted in a wintry opening date. So it is up to villagers to jump in and give the Buffet a boost.