I did a lot of K&W in my 20s. It was a big deal to go to the one in Cameron Village back when I was at State. You could get a pretty decent meal for about $4 back then. $6 got you a fancy one.
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K&S is gone, too. The only old-style cafeteria I’m aware of anywhere near Raleigh that’s still in business is Bestfood in Siler City. I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat there.
During my second degree (engineering) in my 30’s I had a weekday (married) room in someone’s close-to-campus house just a couple of blocks from Cameron Village.
Very fond memories of various K&W meals that were just a short walk away. Ate there most every evening and had my favorites.with one cheat night devoted to Chargrill.
Location was where The Oberlin hotel is now rising. And now I once again live just a couple of blocks away in the Village District.
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It is real. My 90 year old mother and 85 year old aunt loved it but have not been in a while. I always thought their fried chicken and salads were good and the desserts were really good. It is the end of an era and places like Golden Corral helped speed their demise. They just could not attract a younger crowd.
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now what can be done to speed the demise of the Golden Feeding Trough?
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I went to a Golden Corral once.
ONCE.
Explosive diarrhea within an hour after eating. Never again. NEVER again.
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TMI I am trying to eat lunch here
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Two of my core memories were both in the serving line. 1) The woman whose line was “serve you meat”, and 2) The woman who just said “sal-it” for salad over and over and over.
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When I was in college in Greenville I considered buffet restaurants like Golden Corral a BIG treat
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I think she got promoted to meat duty a few years later and it was either “WANT MEAT?” or “WHAT MEAT?” or some combination of the two.
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I went there ironically with a group from work maybe a decade ago. Terrible place, and barely found anything to eat that wasn’t gross. Glad I didn’t get food poisoning, but it was on my mind for sure.
In the late 1980s, GC began to pivot from the 1970s-style low-end steakhouse to a buffet that still offered steaks for the minority of customers who wanted them. At one point they had over 500 locations, but the chain is smaller now.
The legacy GC locations that were too small to accommodate the buffet were being changed to Ragazzi’s, but that fizzled out.
Most other AYCE chains like Old Country Buffet have come and gone. Likewise, the quasi-Chinese buffets that were everywhere in the 1990s and 2000s.
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Salem Va closed a few years back…Roanoke VA closed Dec 1st. i ate there with my 80 plus yo folks pretty regulary. it seemed to me that their quality had noticibly improved over the past 7 months or so and upped their game. odd.
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I miss the capital room inside Crabtree mall!
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That was the fancy cafeteria!
At Crabtree, there was also Piccadilly Cafeteria!
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It could be nothing but the lights are on at the New Bern Cookout and people were moving boxes inside.
I wonder if they’re seeing less success with the bland and confusing dual concept next door, or if this was always just a temporary move to upfit the older building.
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The number of rumors that have come out of those two buildings and their potential ventures (Roos Chicken? Taco Joint? A morning Cookout plus a nighttime cookout?) could fill so many pages.
On a side note, it looks like Church’s Chicken down the block is getting renovated. So….there’s that. 
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If I know what’s good for me, my gut, and my cholesterol, I’ll never darken the window of Cookout again… but even so I was never even tempted to try Roo’s for whatever reason (perhaps in part because I kept forgetting it existed…)
Really though, Cookout is an iconic look, no clue why they’d try to shove it into a building that looks purposefully designed to seamlessly host 5+ other rotating fast food franchises in the coming years after it shutters, unless the existing spot was suffering some ailments in need of major abatement.
Edit: looks open this morning. Saw a food supply truck unloading and people at the window.
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