Golden Corral is building restaurants again.
The national buffet chain announced six new locations in development this spring, with restaurants already under construction in Knoxville, Tennessee, and Kissimmee, Florida, and four more in pre-construction in Baytown, Texas; St. Petersburg, Florida; Spanish Fort, Alabama; and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In Kissimmee, this is not simply another restaurant moving into an old buffet box. Construction plans for the new Golden Corral at 7602 W. Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway describe the project as new construction, with demolition, foundations, framing, roofing and the rest of the work involved in putting up an entirely new restaurant.
The address has its own place in local buffet memory. Sizzler once operated there, and the building had already closed by the time plans for Golden Corral first surfaced publicly in 2022.
For all-you-can-eat diners along this stretch of West 192, there has been an unusual consolation as familiar names have disappeared: the abundance has been finding its way back.
Immediately next door, the Ponderosa Steakhouse at 7598 W. Irlo Bronson closed after decades of serving tourists and locals. Its building did not stay outside the buffet universe for long. Osaka Bay Buffet moved in, filling the former Ponderosa with sushi, hibachi, seafood, dim sum and other Asian buffet offerings.
Now the old Sizzler address beside it is becoming a newly built Golden Corral.
Two departed steakhouse-buffet names. Two addresses remaining firmly in the all-you-can-eat business.
The Kissimmee construction also arrives as Golden Corral is changing the way it grows. Traditional ground-up Golden Corrals have generally occupied about 9,000 to 11,000 square feet. A new prototype can bring that down to roughly 7,700 to 9,200 square feet while, the company says, preserving the variety and value of the full buffet.
The new design uses what Golden Corral calls a “kit-of-parts” approach that can be adapted to ground-up construction, former restaurants, retail conversions and nontraditional locations. It includes more efficient kitchen layouts, production areas closer to the food bars, a dedicated entrance and pickup area for To Go and Weigh & Pay orders, and a two-sided self-service beverage island before the registers.
Golden Corral has specifically identified the upcoming Baytown ground-up restaurant and a former Hooters conversion in St. Petersburg as early uses of the new prototype. The company has not publicly confirmed that the Kissimmee restaurant will use that exact layout, so the new building on West 192 should not yet be treated as a prototype restaurant.
More important to buffet regulars may be what Golden Corral says it is not shrinking: the buffet itself.
The current menu at Golden Corral’s existing Kissimmee restaurant still reads like a roll call of the reasons generations of diners have wandered back to the line. Bourbon Street Chicken, in other words, has not been evicted from Central Florida. The pot roast remains the sort of thing for which a serving spoon feels like sufficient cutlery. And those who remember when Golden Corral’s fried chicken carried the old Aunt B’s Fried Chicken name can continue the small but important ritual of inspecting the pan for the perfect drumstick.
Long live the salad bar.
And surely, somewhere in all this newly engineered efficiency, there will remain sufficient real estate for trays and trays of those soft, slightly sweet yeast rolls and honey butter.
Golden Corral’s six announced restaurants represent only the visible portion of a broader development push. The company says it is pursuing additional ground-up restaurants, conversions, smaller formats and nontraditional locations as it looks for ways to expand without requiring every franchisee to find a massive traditional buffet site.
That makes Kissimmee more than another pin on the Golden Corral map. A long-vacant Sizzler site is being cleared for a brand-new restaurant from one of the country’s surviving national buffet institutions, while the former Ponderosa next door has already begun another life as an Asian buffet.
In this particular corner of Kissimmee, at least, abundance keeps finding the next address.
