Smitty's Hole-in-the-Wall

The Morrison's Cafeteria in Duluth, Georgia, was in the Gwinnett Place Mall, and on Sundays after church it was the best deal in the northern suburbs for a family with small children. Country-fried steak under heat lamps. Squash casserole. Turnip greens. Macaroni and cheese — which in Georgia counts as a vegetable — spooned onto a plate by a woman who had been spooning it onto plates since before you were born. A carrot-raisin salad that nobody made at home. Coconut cream pie. For what it cost to feed five people at Morrison's you could not have fed three at the Applebee's down the road, and besides, the children could see what they were getting before it arrived, which eliminated the particular agony of a four-year-old confronted by a menu.

The Pledge

We were white Baptists in suburban Atlanta in the 1980s, and Morrison's on Sunday was simply what you did. It was not a destination. It was the ordinary next thing — church, then lunch, then home, where changing out of your Sunday best was relief to the ritual of dressing it on. Morrison's had a hundred and fifty-one locations across thirteen states in 1976. By the time the Duluth one closed, the chain was already contracting. In 1998, Morrison's sold its remaining hundred and forty-two locations to Piccadilly Cafeterias of Baton Rouge for forty-six million dollars. Today, one Morrison's remains. It is in Mobile, Alabama, where J. A. Morrison opened the first one in 1920. It is owned by Piccadilly. It still uses the name.

Years later, in Charleston, the suggestion from the older generation was S&S Cafeteria on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard. The far side of West Ashley. Past the Piggly Wiggly. There were protests — mild ones, the kind you lodge in the car when you are an adult being taken to lunch by your parents as though you were still ten. A cafeteria. In Charleston, of all places, a city whose restaurants are written about as though the act of eating there were a form of literary criticism.

Then you walked in and the tray was in your hand and it was the same meal you had been eating at Morrison's thirty years earlier — the steam rising from the tables, the squash casserole, the mid-century pudding-meets-Jell-O inventions that no home kitchen would attempt, the sweet potato pie. The room was not fashionable and did not aspire to be. The light was the same, the noise, the families, the older couples who came alone on weekdays and sat near the window. S&S has been in Charleston since the 1950s, when it opened on St. Philip Street downtown before moving to Sam Rittenberg. It has five locations left. The founding family, the Smiths, are in their fourth generation. The chain has never been public, never been acquired, never filed for bankruptcy. It peaked at twenty-two locations around 1980.

Twenty-two. Morrison's had a hundred and fifty-one. Piccadilly, after buying Morrison's, had two hundred and seventy. S&S was never big enough to be worth acquiring. But it is contracting. The last Atlanta location closed in 2018. Macon Riverside caught fire in September 2024. Knoxville — gone. The format is thinning, the way a fishing town thins, not all at once but by a person here and a building there, until one day you look up and the arithmetic has changed.

The Turn

On December 1, 2025, K&W Cafeterias of Winston-Salem, North Carolina — eighty-eight years in business, five locations in the Triad alone — shut every remaining restaurant without notice. No WARN filing. No advance word to staff. Hundreds of employees arrived for their shifts and found locked doors and a sign on the glass. K&W had been acquired by Piccadilly's parent company in 2022. It lasted three years under new ownership.

K&W is not a special case. It is the latest in a pattern so consistent it constitutes a rule.

Twelve cafeteria chains operated across the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Eight are now dead. The four that survive hold a combined seventy-six locations — down from a collective peak that exceeded a thousand. Normalize each chain to its own peak and the curves are nearly indistinguishable: a slow climb, a crest somewhere between 1955 and 1998, and a steep fall that is still falling. Horn & Hardart's Automats served eight hundred thousand people a day in 1950s New York and Philadelphia — the last one closed in 1991. Wyatt's Cafeterias of Dallas, a hundred and seventeen locations in 1984, was absorbed by Luby's and ceased to exist by 2003. Furr's of Hobbs, New Mexico, filed for bankruptcy and closed every restaurant in April 2021. Bishop's Buffet of Waterloo, Iowa — thirty-five locations across seven midwestern states — was bought by Kmart, sold, resold, and finally buried in 2012.

The shape is the argument. Twelve chains, five decades, every region. This is not twelve business failures. It is the death of a form.

The form scaled on two engines, and both are broken.

The first was the shopping mall. Morrison's, Piccadilly, Bishop's, Furr's — every chain that grew beyond a regional footprint did so by anchoring enclosed suburban malls, and the enclosed American mall peaked at roughly fifteen hundred in the mid-1990s. About seven hundred remain. No new indoor megamall has been built in the United States since 2014. The hours Americans spent in a mall each month dropped from twelve in 1980 to four in 1990, before the internet existed — the malls were already emptying when the cafeterias started to close. Every chain that anchored to a mall died with the mall or ahead of it.

The second engine was Sunday. The cafeteria's highest-volume day, everywhere, depended on a synchronized rush — families arriving between twelve and one, still in their church clothes, filing through the tray line together. In San Antonio, the saying went that you had to beat the Baptists out of church to get a seat at Luby's. It was barely a joke.

The geographic overlap between the cafeteria chains and the Southern Baptist Convention is nearly total, and not coincidental — the cafeteria format depended on the Convention's rhythms. The ten states with at least half a million Southern Baptists — Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi — are the same states in which these chains operated, and the timing tracks as closely as the geography. The SBC doubled from six million members in 1946 to twelve million in 1972, the exact years the cafeterias were scaling. By 1980, fourteen million Southern Baptists were attending services on a predictable weekly schedule, releasing into parking lots at noon, arriving at cafeterias in a synchronized wave that no other day of the week could replicate. Sunday did not merely contribute the most revenue. It structured the entire operation — staffing, food preparation, purchasing — around a single ninety-minute window that depended on church letting out on time. Membership peaked at sixteen point three million in 2006 and has fallen every year since — eighteen consecutive years of decline, roughly four hundred thousand members lost annually, a number equal to the population of Miami. Weekly church attendance nationally has dropped from forty-two percent in 2000 to thirty percent today, and the definition of a regular attender has shifted from every Sunday to twice a month. The cafeterias did not decline because the Baptists left. They declined because the Baptists stopped coming every week, and a format built on a weekly wave cannot survive on a fortnightly trickle.

Into the gap came Applebee's, founded in Decatur, Georgia — Morrison's territory — in 1980. A thousand locations by 1998. Chili's went from one Dallas bar to sixteen hundred restaurants. Cracker Barrel, out of Lebanon, Tennessee, grew from twenty-seven locations in 1983 to more than six hundred and sixty, serving the same food — biscuits, fried chicken, catfish, turnip greens — at the same price point, with table service and a gift shop. It is the only line on the chart that has not started to fall.

From below came the all-you-can-eat buffet. Golden Corral had more than five hundred restaurants by 1987. Shoney's reached a thousand by 1991. These offered the cafeteria's steam table without its constraint — one price, eat until you stop. The cafeteria, with its single trip through the line, could not compete on perceived abundance.

And what accelerated everything was acquisition. Piccadilly bought Morrison's and doubled overnight to two hundred and seventy — then bankrupted twice. Kmart bought Furr's and Bishop's — both dead. Wyatt's was absorbed by Luby's — both nearly vanished. K&W was acquired in 2022 and lasted three years. The rule is simple: every cafeteria chain that was bought died faster than it would have on its own. The chains that remain — S&S with its five, MCL with its eleven, Luby's with its thirty-two — are the ones nobody wanted.

S&S does not advertise. It has no app, no loyalty program. It serves a hundred and fifteen items daily and has never been in a mall.

The Charleston location is on Sam Rittenberg Boulevard. Macon is freestanding on Riverside Drive and Bloomfield Road. Augusta is on Walton Way. These are buildings in neighborhoods, not anchor tenants leashed to a dying shopping center, and the distinction may be the most important structural fact in the whole story.

On a recent weekday at the Sam Rittenberg location, the room held a handful of people. A Black man eating alone. A Latino family with children. The food was good and the bill was low enough that it was hard to believe the economics worked — hard to see how a kitchen producing a hundred and fifteen scratch-made items daily could sustain itself on a room this quiet. It was not a Sunday. The Sunday crowd still comes. But the weekday room tells you what the format is actually running on, and it is not volume.

The founding is its own argument for smallness. James A. "Smitty" Smith opened a sandwich shop on Cherry Street in Macon at the end of World War I and called it Smitty's Hole-in-the-Wall because his customers had to turn sideways in the door to get around the counter and had to eat standing up. He delivered orders to offices in baskets lowered from second- and third-story windows. He moved to Miami in 1924, opened a restaurant and a drugstore, and a hurricane destroyed both two years later. He came back to Macon, opened Smitty's Barbecue and Luncheonette, and looked out his front window. Across Cherry Street, the Macon Cafeteria always seemed to have paying customers. He convinced the owner to sell, and turned it into Smith & Sons Cafeteria in 1936. His son, J. A. Smith III, grew up in the business. Six or seven of the fifteen daily entrees are still family recipes. Rick Pogue, the current CEO, is rebuilding the Macon Riverside location after the fire. "We want to put some new nuances in," he told a local reporter, "while keeping the same history and the charm."

After the fire, the Bloomfield location saw a fifty percent increase in sales. The demand was there — it had just been invisible, distributed across two locations. On Sundays at Bloomfield, the line wraps around and out the door. Five locations is not twenty-two. But five is five, and five is more than K&W has, which is none.

The Prestige

For most of the twentieth century, Rich's Department Store in downtown Atlanta had a dining room called the Magnolia Room. White-tablecloth, elegant in the old way — the room where Atlantans took their mothers and their daughters for occasions that required cloth napkins but not a reservation. In 1975, Nathalie Dupree, who would become arguably the most influential figure in modern Southern cooking, founded a cooking school inside that same Rich's. She taught more than ten thousand students. Julia Child was a guest instructor. Jacques Pépin. Paul Prudhomme. Pat Conroy took classes there. Dupree and the Magnolia Room shared a building — the department store as a place where Southern food was served and taught and passed on, all under one roof.

Rich's was acquired by Federated in 1976. In 2003 it became Rich's-Macy's. In 2005 it became Macy's. The Magnolia Room disappeared with the name. Dupree, who had moved to Charleston and become an advocate for its food culture — a co-founder of Les Dames d'Escoffier in both cities and of the Charleston Wine + Food Festival — died on January 13, 2025, at eighty-five.

By then, the Magnolia Room and the cooking school and the woman who built it were all gone from the same building. What remained was a name, and one man who remembered what it meant.

Louis Squires is a North Carolina native who spent decades as a retail executive — a vice president at Macy's in Atlanta, the store that had been Rich's, the store that had the Magnolia Room, the store where Dupree had taught ten thousand people to break bread. He had no background in restaurants. What he had was seventeen years of eating at the S&S Cafeteria on Chamblee-Tucker Road in Atlanta, five or six times a week, until the staff knew his order before he said it and he knew their children's names. "Everybody was like family," he has said.

In 2016, the Tucker S&S lost its lease. The word spread, and Squires was heartbroken. Friends told him he had lost his mind. He bought the restaurant's equipment — including the fifty-foot stainless steel serving line, the whole gleaming body of it, dismantled and carried seven miles east to Tucker — and hired twenty-four of the S&S employees, including Chef Debra Tardieff. He insisted on keeping ninety-nine percent of the original recipes. Springer Mountain Farms chicken. Delta Pride catfish from Mississippi, fresh, never frozen. Vegetables from Tucker's own Sherry's Produce. "We didn't want to modernize it too much," he has said. "We just wanted the best version of what it already was."

He named it the Magnolia Room. After the dining room of the department store where he used to work. The one that was gone.

But it is not enough to make a thing disappear. You have to bring it back.

The Magnolia Room Cafeteria opened in 2016 at 4450 Hugh Howell Road in Tucker, Georgia. It is open seven days a week. The serving line — the same line — runs the length of the room, and behind it the food is what it always was: fried chicken, catfish, country steak with rice and gravy, squash casserole, creamed corn, turnip greens, sweet potato pie. Twenty-four employees followed the line to its new home, and over time the old regulars found it too, and then a younger generation that had never known the S&S. "The table is the one thing that brings everybody together," Squires has said. "Fried catfish, pork chop — our great equalizer."

He is seventy years old. He recently signed a seven-year lease. It is his fourth.

Twelve cafeteria chains traced the same arc across the American twentieth century. Eight are gone. The rooms emptied, the lines dismantled and sold for scrap or left to rust in dead malls from Philadelphia to Hobbs, New Mexico. But in Tucker, Georgia, a former department store executive keeps a fifty-foot serving line warm, and the old regulars who followed it there have been joined by new ones who never knew the S&S — who came for the food, and stayed because the food put them at a table with strangers, and the strangers became familiar, and the familiar became something close to faith. The cafeteria begins with the ordinary thing — a plate, a serving line, a stranger beside you. From that ordinary thing, fellowship. From fellowship, something close to faith. A magnolia blooms where it is planted. This one, planted in a strip mall on Hugh Howell Road by a man who remembered what the name meant, is, at least for now, doing so in full.