Old Country Buffet
Pay at the door, grab a tray, and hit the islands: mashed potatoes, stuffing, sliced ham, a salad bar, and a dessert station a kid could visit four times. Old Country Buffet opened in a Minneapolis-area strip mall in 1984, hit its stride in the 1990s with hundreds of locations across the Midwest and beyond, and spent the next two decades in and out of bankruptcy until the pandemic closed the last of them.