The end of Lancaster's Family-Style Dining

An iconic restaurant concept disappears in Amish Country

Earlier this week I had piece over The Spectator World, following a February trip with my wife to Pennsylvania Amish Country. On that trip we learned, sadly, that neither of the Lancaster area’s iconic family-style dining establishments—Good ’N Plenty, and Plain & Fancy—were still operating.

It’s kind of incredible to me that, as far as I’ve seen, nobody has noticed this or written about it. It’s just two restaurants, yes, but it’s also a sort of end-of-an-era story.

I wrote:

During our latest visit, just this February, we discovered that yet another Amish Country experience had bit the dust: the all-you-can-eat, family-style restaurant. I’m not talking about Amish-themed self-serve buffets — known in the area as smorgasbords — of which the Lancaster area has quite a few. I’m talking about family-style dining, typified by two landmark Lancaster-area establishments: Good ’N Plenty and Plain & Fancy. These are the places where you sit at long tables with bench seats, with fellow tourists (i.e. strangers) and dine on communal trays of Amish classics.

Here’s a 2014 photo of Good ’N Plenty:

If you’ve never been to or heard of a place like this, that’s basically it. It’s an all-you-can-eat arrangement where parties are more or less randomly seated at long tables together. The servers bring out large trays of whatever the restaurant is serving that night (they had rotating menus) and you pass them around the table. They’ll bring as many as you want, but unlike a self-serve buffet, the table generally discusses and agrees what they’d like another tray of. If little 11-year-old me in 2004 wanted more buttered egg noodles but nobody else did, no dice.

It could be awkward at times, especially at the beginning, and in terms of negotiating the trays you wanted. It was fun and exciting, too. It got you out of your comfort zone, and in a very low-stakes kind of way.

On that note, I wrote:

I love the anonymity and freedom of the all-you-can-eat buffet. But I still remember sitting down with other families at those long tables, the stilted initial conversation giving way to what felt like friendship by the time the shoo-fly pie came out. As a child, it was like one of those Christmas or Thanksgiving dinners with so much food and company, the kind you anticipated all year long. That discomfort that gave way to familiarity introduced some good friction: “Excuse me, could you please pass the buttered noodles?”; “Sorry, we aren’t serving roast beef tonight.” It was an important lesson — in manners, in patience, in not always getting exactly what you want exactly when and how you want it.

Yes, I love buffets a lot (which you can’t help but have noticed if you’ve been reading me for awhile). There really is something deeply satisfying, an activation of some memory of being a kid who for that one meal gets to eat whatever you want, that I still feel today when I go to a buffet.

But those old family-style restaurant dinners are things I still remember too. Nearing the age of 30, I can look back and see that going to these places as a kid taught me something (and forced me to behave better than I might have at a table just with my parents). As a Catholic, I think of it as something like Lent—you impose a little bit of discomfort or discipline on yourself. Everybody says “no pain, no gain,” but that’s still something of a countercultural message.

Now you might wonder why these places closed. As I note with some surprise in the piece, it was not COVID that killed these restaurants. Plain & Fancy ditched the family-style concept all the way back in 2017, and Good ’N Plenty went up for sale just a couple of months ago. The latter cited “changing customer tastes and the lack of younger family members interested in taking over the restaurant.” An old review following Plain & Fancy’s rebranding recounts a manager explaining that customers increasingly didn’t like sitting with strangers. I think that change in social attitudes is probably the definitive factor.

Part of this, perhaps, is people having fewer kids (although there were plenty of kids running around the Shady Maple Smorgasbord, where we ended up dining). Perhaps family-style dining was something of a novelty, and the concept is just sort of played out.

There are also more choices now. Back in the 2000s, and certainly in the 1980s, there weren’t that many restaurants, and even fewer good ones, except for the Amish or Amish-themed places. (In our 2004 visit, I begged my parents to take us to a Chinese buffet—Lancaster had three of them, and we picked the one with the highest ratings. It was still very bad.)

Today, however, the Lancaster/Amish Country area has a couple of much larger and better Chinese buffets. It also has Thai and Vietnamese food and sushi. There’s a Wegmans and a Whole Foods. It’s undergoing the same transformation now that middle suburbs, like much of the D.C. area, underwent decades ago.

Here’s the Amish Farm and House, once surrounded by farm fields:

I’m working on a piece exploring new development in Lancaster, both in the city itself and the surrounding Amish Country. There’s a lot going on here, and I’ll save that for now.

But I’ll note that while you might read me as pro-development, I’m aghast by this. I’m pro development in the right places. I’d like cities to be cities, countryside two or three hours from a city to be countryside, and suburbs to be in between. I think the landmarks and existing culture of a truly unique place like this are worth something, and that continuity with that history is valuable. You can’t stop change, but you can help direct it, and when New York and Philadelphia exurban sprawl are paving over Amish Country, we’re failing to do that, or doing it wrong.

Now I am supposedly writing more about restaurants here, so I’ll note again that Good N’ Plenty is for sale, not straight-up out of business. Given its iconic status, it’s likely that it will survive in some form. Perhaps, with some modern touches, it will return to its old shared trays and long benches. I really hope so.

Image credit bossco/Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

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