Transcription
This is the biggest buffet in America, serving over 1.5 million guests every year. But it's not in Vegas or New York. It's in Pennsylvania's Amish country.
With rising food costs, eating habits changing, and all you can eat buffets shutting down across the country. How is this place in the middle of nowhere managed to stay open for over 40 years?
I'm in Earl, Pennsylvania at Shady Maple Sport to find out how the biggest buffet in America runs, what type of cuisine they sell, and what makes this place so special. I'm going to head inside.
The scale of this place is hard to wrap your head around. It has the energy of a casino floor and moves a volume of food that seems almost impossible. I wanted to understand how they actually pull this off. So, I met up with Summer, the director of food services, to see where it all starts, the kitchen.
"I always say it's the biggest, smallest kitchen."
"Yeah."
"Pretty big, but we still need more room."
"Yeah."
"It's amazing how you guys are able to put out so much stuff so efficiently like all day long."
"Yes."
"How like how do you guys do that? like what does the setup look like?"
"So this setup here, this aisle here, this is what we call the prep kitchen, the prep aisle."
"Okay."
"So we have these big kettles here. Cooks stew, tomatoes, butter, noodles, macaroni and cheese, soups. This is bacon that we're baking for the buffet right now. And Helen is loading more for when that comes out. She'll take it off and put it in these pans here. On Saturday, we'll go around through about 750 lbs of bacon."
"So one day 750 lbs."
"For Saturday. Yeah."
"Wow."
"Yeah."
"So how do you know like how much to cook and when and how to stagger it?"
"We actually keep records of year to year of days to dates of what we use. So we know what we did last year,"
"Okay,"
"numbers wise, food wise, and it all stays in sync. And if even if we have bad weather, we'll write on our book that we keep stuff like it snowed today, it was cold today. So we can keep track of that."
As I was walking around, I saw them putting a bunch of stuff on the griddle. There was one thing that I had never seen before, and I asked Summer what it was.
"So, this is Tamara. She's going to be putting some scrapple down right now. She is making uh home fries and the Dutch fries. And An Helina right there, she is making French toast."
"So, what is scrapple?"
"So, scrapple, our scrapple is pork scrapple."
"Okay."
"So, it's pork and liver and it has starch in it to bring it together. We slice it and then we fry it up. It's a Lancaster County favorite."
To understand this food, you first have to understand the Pennsylvania Dutch, a group that isn't actually Dutch at all. They were 18th century German-speaking immigrants. The name itself came from a mispronunciation of their own word for themselves, Deutsch. Fleeing religious persecution in Europe, they landed here in Lancaster County. Drawn by the fertile limestone-rich soil that promised the kind of quiet, self-sufficient life they were looking for.
Over time, this community split. The Amish rejected the modern world entirely. No grid, no compromises, and the Mennonites found a middle path, using industrial logistics to scale a traditional way of life without abandoning it. Their food reflects where they came from. Built on a strict no-waste philosophy, it's calorie dense and deeply comforting, as it needs to be for long work days on the farm. Nothing's thrown away. Everything has a purpose. And that's how you get scrapple. A dish born from scraps that became a staple and it's cherished here today.
But Pennsylvania Dutch food, that's just the beginning of what Shady Maple puts on the table. And we're still only talking about breakfast.
"And then all your pancakes. You guys are doing this to order or"
"So we have two kinds. We have a made-to-order pancake on the grill. These are the plain ones that are on the buffet and she is making them to order. We have an ordering system. They'll order it. They'll make it and put it on the table and it'll go to the buffet."
Every corner of the kitchen has a purpose. Engineered to keep fresh food moving all day without stopping. Even getting the dishes done is a massive undertaking. I assumed a place this size had to be corporate owned. I was shocked when I found out that I was wrong. Shady Maple has been family-owned for over 40 years.
So, how does a business like this stay family-owned for so long? Well, I met with Len, the CEO, and one of two brothers who run Shady Maple to find out.
"Most part most things here are completely scratched with literally my parents and grandparents recipes. It's it's a lot of authentic local PA Dutch recipes. Donuts is something that we're super known for."
"These look incredible."
"Our donuts are all made literally from scratch. They're made in a fryer. They're flipped by hand with chopsticks. It's"
"The old-fashioned way."
"And last year we made 4.5 million donuts."
"Like"
"Yeah."
"I mean, you would pay six bucks for one of those donuts at a"
"At Manhattan all day long."
"100%."
"Yeah, we sell these for a little over a dollar in a grocery store. You ever hear of shoefly pie?"
"No. What's this?"
"Uh, that's something another thing that's famous in this area. Um, it's literally like a a molasses, maple syrup on the bottom, a cake topping. You should eat that before you eat your hot food. It's that good."
"Really? All right."
"It's that good."
Looking at this food, I didn't even know where to start. There were plenty of familiar staples, but some of these dishes I've never even heard of before. I wanted to focus on things I've never tried. So, I grabbed some scrapple, a dish called mush and pudding, and homemade biscuits with chip beef gravy. But, I couldn't walk past the grill without picking up some eggs Benedict and eggs Florentine. And then there was the donut and shoefly pie.
Len had to get going, but his brother Phil agreed to sit down with Summer and me.
"Okay, so kind of give me like the history on mush with pudding."
"Ever since I was a little kid, I just know that we always for breakfast had mush and pudding. It's one of the old-time favorites of Lancaster County that goes back hundreds of years. It's a little bit like the idea of scrapple, I tell people, but the taste is quite a bit different. Where scrapple is more set that we can cut it and fry it where the pudding is it's it's looser."
"It's good. The cornmeal is really crunchy, too. It doesn't have like an aggressive livery taste."
"It's just a very slight liver taste. I tell people if they don't know what it is, if they absolutely do not like liver, which I understand some people don't, don't even try it. But personally, I like I like liver, so I like it."
"All right. And then the scrapple."
"Our scrapple is all made with 100% fresh ingredients. It's basically half cornmeal with also uh there's pork in there. There is a touch of liver in there. Also, we sell a lot of scrapple."
"This is really good. It's the first time I've ever had it. I was honestly surprised by how much I liked the scrapple. The more familiar dishes were cooked perfectly, and the donuts, those are something you'd pay top dollar for at a high-end bakery. There's a level of detail here that sets them apart from what you'd expect at a buffet. But sitting here eating, looking around at all these people, I kept thinking about how restaurants and buffets were closing everywhere. And somehow this place made it through. I couldn't stop thinking about what that must have been like for them."
"We had it closed for a period of time unfortunately like everybody else and we didn't know what's going to happen. I heard people say that you'll never be a buffet again and you know in the United States like there was before. The stress levels were quite high. Fortunately for us, we have a grocery store across the parking lot that did extra well over that time. So that really was a big help for the family. And a lot of our Shady Maple employees got the option that they could work at the farm market. It was tough, but I actually never had any fear in me. I just to me, I let it up to God. To me, God is in control. And we'll see what happens. And I always think there's a light at the end of the tunnel. You got to be optimistic about things. Things go away. Things change. Sure enough, it took a little while, maybe about a year and a half or so. But yes,"
"That's a great way. That's a good perspective, too. Like, can't control things. Just let it be and just do the do the best you can."
As I was finishing up, Phil offered to take us somewhere that's rarely ever been captured on camera. And as far as I know, I'm the first YouTuber that's ever gotten this kind of access. We headed across the street to see where they smoke their own meats and get a look inside their bakery.
"This is the farm market. This building here was started in 1970."
"Okay. And this was started by your dad,"
"Right. It was about a tenth of the size that it is today."
All of this started with a single farm stand that Phil's grandfather created. And that's actually where the name Shady Maple comes from. Since his original stand in the 1960s was placed under the shade of a maple tree. That little stand has since grown into a 120,000 sq ft store, but they still keep a replica of it inside.
We worked our way through the aisles into the back where they smoke the meats that they sell both in the restaurant and in the store.
"Oh, it smells so good."
"So, I every time I come over here, I walk through here just because I love to smell them."
"Yeah, it smells awesome. I just love to smell the smell of the smoked product."
I was blown away that a buffet would even try to smoke their own meats, but that was only part of it. Phil took us next door where we met Ron, the meat manager, who showed us something I genuinely couldn't believe they were doing in-house.
"This is a double unit."
"Oh, wow. Is that all pork butts?"
"Yeah, this is for ham."
"Oh, nice. Ham."
"That's more ham, too."
"More ham. This is ham."
"So, what style of ham is this? Would you call it like country?"
"It's not country ham, right?"
"No, this this is actually this is Shady Maple ham. It's"
"It's like your own thing."
With their own style of hams comes their own unique process for making them. I asked Ron to walk me through it.
"It goes through this guy. I mean, we This is loaded up 800 lb at shot. Goes through the injectors. So, it the needles go in every every 2 and a half in. It's speeding up the process of having to brine it for a really long time."
"Yeah."
"So then this is our tumbler."
"What does the tumbling do for it?"
"It actually helps impact the the moisture,"
"Compresses it. That way that injection gets pounded into the muscle"
"Instead of just kind of like working its way out."
"Yes. Correct."
"Smart."
This meat room not only supplies the restaurant, but you can also buy most of it in-store. Like this 5 lb brick of scrapple or some of the ham that they just carved. But there was another spot I was excited to see, and that's the bakery. This spot has such high quality standards that even though Phil is an owner, he still had to ask permission from the chef for us to be able to come in. So, we didn't disturb the sterile environment.
"Oh my gosh, it smells so good."
"So, these are doughnuts that could very easily some of these could be a disorgos tomorrow."
"So, who uh who comes up with all the doughnut recipes and ideas?"
"Uh that's 50 years. I mean, like we had cream-filled and custard-filled doughnuts for years, but they glazed, but Long John's only came on the scene, I'm talk, I'm saying 10 to 15 years ago, maybe, maybe longer."
"Is that what you call those things?"
"That would be a Long John. Yes."
"Long John. Okay."
"And then she is putting cream filling in there. So, she has to know a little bit how much to put in. And she don't put enough in there, it's not enough. But if she puts too much in, they'll blow out the other side."
"Gotcha. So, it's something that you got to like kind of learn the skill over time."
"Like here's a rack of the apple fritters."
"Wow. So good."
"They've been dropped in the glaze and now they're letting the probably the glaze to drip down a little bit."
There's so much care that goes into something as simple as a donut. Instead of cutting corners and outsourcing, they're doing the opposite. Hand-frying and filling each one. And most of these recipes have been passed down for generations. You can taste the difference, and clearly other people can, too, because the line never stops.
After seeing the bakery, it was time to head back to the restaurant. Lunch was about to start.
"So you have grilled chicken. How many different types of chicken you guys cook?"
"So we do fried chicken. We do marinated chicken thighs. Sometimes we do jerk chicken. They're making crispy herb chicken. Sometimes we'll do barbecue chicken."
I was curious to know how do they handle making this much chicken at scale.
"So on a Saturday we will have two people on chicken. Somebody's rolling. Somebody's always putting it in, taking out."
"So you're just kind of all day"
"All day long. All day long."
"That just kind of slaps the little extra grease out of it."
"Yep. Then he'll take it whatever side. This is going to the east buffet. We just put the ticket in like that and they put it on the table. Then the food runner will get it and take it out to the buffet attendants."
"Can I try a piece?"
"Yes. Pick which one you want."
"Cool. All right."
"Yeah. I really like"
"That guy at the end coming. We call him the chicken man because he's usually the one that's all day long doing chicken when he's here."
"Yeah."
"Well, my name handsome man."
"Yeah. And he calls handsome man."
"Handsome man. I love it. No one calls me that."
Watching all the prep that everyone was doing to prepare for lunch. It hit me. We've been walking around all morning and I haven't seen a single fridge. Where are they?
"We have a big freezer and we also have three other coolers. One cooler we put milk and dairy. One cooler is just all meats and one is the prep stuff that we're bringing up to put in the oven."
"So there's almost like a little underground city under here where"
After trying the food, I wanted to see what the buffet fully offered. I walked out with Summer so she could guide me through it.
"We always try to have a big fish of some cod time. Cod are usually haddock are our top two. And then every now and like we tried to have fried fish, especially during Lent right now, fried shrimp. We tried to have more."
The buffet had so much to offer, it was almost overwhelming. And there were other really interesting Pennsylvania Dutch items on the menu, like their ham balls, which is a mixture of fresh pork and ham, creating an interesting meatball texture that tastes like ham. There's slow-cooked roast beef and pork and sauerkraut. There were multiple soups that are made from scratch daily. A full salad bar. Tons of different types of vegetables, even pickled eggs, which low-key I love. And I was only halfway through the line.
"So, this week we're running our wing and appetizer bar, which we have sweet chili wings, which we make our own sweet chili sauce in-house. We make our own house dressing, and that's the base for the sweet chili wings, and garlic parmesan, and barbecue, and hot. And we get pretzel bites with cheese sauce and mozzarella sticks and marinara."
"Man, I would just post up right here."
The rest of the buffet was packed with seafood, fried chicken, and honestly, too much to take in all at once. But walking through it all, I kept coming back to the same thought. This whole thing started with one person in a farm stand. You don't build something like this alone. There are hundreds of employees working at any given time. And I found out there's actually one person who's been here since the very first day of the original store back in the 1970s.
"It's been so much fun. I don't even don't even seem that long."
"That's awesome. Room. So, you've seen this place grow from buffet into what it is now."
"Oh, yeah. First Saturday we were open, we served 350 people all day long. We were there almost midnight. We didn't know what we were doing. Get one little mixer for the mashed potatoes, the chocolate pudding, everything."
"In 2023, I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer."
"Oh, it's okay. I'm in remission now."
"Oh, good."
"And do you know what Phil, the owner, and Summer? This lady here when I got the call, they were right there with me. And Phil even put his hand on my shoulder and prayed for me. His wife took me to a chemo treatment. She took me to chemo treatment. Yeah. It's like a family hero."
"What does this place mean to you?"
"There's no words to describe it. It's like I'm not even don't even come to work. Sometimes I run through the parking lot to get in. Don't you do that too? You can hardly wait to get in. I couldn't wait to get in today. I'm making noodles over there and making rice and blah blah blah."
"That's so amazing. So, it's still exciting to you every day."
"Oh my goodness. Yes. Yeah."
As lunch turned into dinner, the kitchen never slowed down. The salad station was peeling fresh vegetables, chicken was getting fried, and the team was working through the final push before service. Tonight, they had grilled steaks to order, salmon, catfish, hot dogs, and burgers all on the menu.
Walking through all this, it hit me. Summer's running this entire operation. It's a lot of stress.
"Yeah. I never think of it that way until somebody says, 'Do you realize what all that you guys do in there?' Like everybody like Shady Maple as a"
"Yeah. As a whole."
"As a whole."
"Yeah. You've been so chill this whole time. If I had to take"
"I would be like so stressed just thinking about my day-to-day. Never mind being in a YouTube video. So, thank you very much."
"Yes. You're welcome."
After seeing everything that goes into this place, the smoking of the meats, the baking, the prep that never seems to stop, I wanted to finally experience the dinner for myself. There's so much to try. I don't think you could ever taste everything in one sitting. But I wanted to put together a proper feast for me and the crew. We had steaks cooked to order, pizza, mac and cheese, fried chicken, fried seafood, brisket. Honestly, I lost count of everything I grabbed. I was happy to finally sit down with my cameraman and good friend Corey to help me eat this food we've watched them prepare all day.
"You've been staring at this all day."
"I've been watching you eat all day, so I'm ready to eat."
Everything we ate was delicious. You can tell they put a lot of thought and care into every dish that they make, even though they're doing it at such high volume. As I was looking around, I could see how much this place brings people together. I think that's what makes Shady Maple so special. It might be the biggest buffet in America, but it's the family recipes and the hardworking people here that make it a destination. And to think that all of this came from a small roadside farm stand, it's incredible what the family and the staff have been able to build.
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