The place was packed. In the back, a cook hovered over a deep fryer as hot oil crisped chicken skin to an auburn brown. Just to the cook’s right, a grill was cool to the touch, but there was so much heat in the Bronx Golden Corral that night.
A few steps ahead, Zack Fox, an actor and D.J., had transformed a buffet into a D.J. booth. The turntables and the crowd were illuminated by blue and pink strobe lights. People danced, whooped, twerked and fanned themselves.
There are more than 350 Golden Corral restaurants across the country, but there is only one in New York City, and it’s in the Bronx. And the rave that Saturday night in January was one of those only-in-New York, you-had-to-be-there, moments.
The function was so outside the scope of a typical Golden Corral that miles away, at the franchise headquarters in Raleigh, N.C., executives were shocked. But it also raised the profile of the Bronx Golden Corral and put a spotlight on the family who has intentionally shaped their restaurant to be authentic to the borough.
“I think there was always a sense of pride of being from the Bronx,” Niroopa Harpaul, one of the owners of the restaurant, said. “I feel very fortunate that we’re able to build a name for ourselves within such a large corporation and really stand out.”
The Bronx restaurant is still rooted in the Golden Corral tradition of the all-you-can-eat buffet. But it’s become known for adding its own cultural flavor, catering Cardi B’s baby shower and drawing fans to its social media posts with dances, skits and memes conceived by staff members. In short, they keep it Corral, but make it cool.
Some staff members, like Yvette Washington, have become Insta-famous. Ms. Washington, 35, who has worked at the Golden Corral since 2020, recalled how a stranger recently recognized her from one of the Corral’s social media skits. “Was you the girl that jumped over the car?” Ms. Washington remembers being asked. “I was like ‘Yes.’ They were like I told you it was her!”
Ronnie, the Oldsmobile Site and the Sizzler
The restaurant wasn’t always this hip, and it wasn’t always a Golden Corral.
Chandradutta Harpaul, known as Ronnie, arrived on a student visa in New York from Guyana in the 1970s. Instead of attending class, Mr. Harpaul looked for work to send money back to Guyana. He got a job as a manager of a Sizzler in Queens, and in 1976, by the time he was 28, he and his brother pooled their money to buy the property at 2375 East Tremont Avenue, Ms. Harpaul said.
The lot, where they built their own Sizzler, had once been the home of an Oldsmobile dealership. The operations were a family affair from the beginning, and the Harpaul brothers did everything, from cook to count the register tills at the end of the night. Years later, Mr. Harpaul met his future wife, Chandra, and his family grew. They had three daughters: Niroopa, Nadia and Priya, and a son, Davendra or Dave.
Nadia, Dave and Priya were too young to work at the restaurant for most of the time that it was open, but Niroopa was able to cut her teeth in the hospitality business while working with her father.
“Two days out of the week, I was there with Dad, and I would work open to close as a waitress,” Niroopa said. “He wasn’t easy on me. There was no special or preferential treatment. Everything that a server had to do, I did.”
During the busy season, Ms. Harpaul and the other siblings would pitch in. They would fold napkins or help refill beverages. “Whatever we could help at, we would do,” Ms. Harpaul said. “We would even have my aunts and uncles come and help because the lines used to go out the door around the block when it was a Sizzler, especially on Mother’s Day and Easter.”
The business waned, tied to the corporate restrictions and the troubles of Sizzler, which was losing its sizzle nationwide. In 2010, Sizzler left the Northeast market and pulled the Bronx location’s franchisee license.
“All of the locations that were in this area were given a time period to change or close,” Ms. Harpaul said.
Representatives of Sizzler did not respond to requests for comment.
The Harpauls renamed their restaurant the Bronx Grill “to keep things going,” said Niroopa, 40. “We took all the proprietary items away, and the focus then became on sustaining and taking care of my dad, who became sick at the time.”
With the name change came a drop in sales, she said. At the urging of her father, Ms. Harpaul began looking into licensing the restaurant to become a Golden Corral franchisee. In 2014, Mr. Harpaul died, and she later put her father’s advice into action.
“He gave us a gift,” Ms. Harpaul said. “We grew up with this. It’s kept my siblings and us very close. We’ve created our own sense of family within the restaurant, with our staff, and with our customers, and it’s been very therapeutic for me because we still get people coming into the restaurant giving us stories about Dad. I kind of like that.”
$12.99 on a Rainy Thursday
Today Ms. Harpaul owns the restaurant, alongside her mother. Nadia is her co-manager; Priya, who works as a mental health therapist, helps out at the restaurant on holidays; and Dave works as a cook. (He was frying the chicken the night of the rave.)
Each day, customers fill their plates with popcorn shrimp, beef stew, barbecued meats, macaroni and cheese, white or yellow rice, Hush Puppies. At its worst, or best, depending on your point of view, a Golden Corral can be a temple to gluttony, a place where an impulse to get your money’s worth overrides any biological mechanism signaling fullness, no matter how loud the alarm.
In a city where even the affordable options are becoming unaffordable, the restaurant’s buffet — for $13.99 — is a welcome feature. Most people don’t stuff themselves silly.
“Yesterday, I went to Popeye’s and it was $19.99 — the fries, the whole meal,” Sheryl Wilk, 62, who was having lunch at the Golden Corral, said on a rainy Thursday. “The price point is excellent. We pay $12.99 because we are seniors, and we ate. We had dessert too.”
In the community’s collective memory, the location remains a Sizzler, regardless of what the sign on the building said.
“Even up to today people call it the Sizzler,” Ms. Harpaul said.
In fact, the Bronx Grill officially became the Golden Corral in 2020. The renaming and the plan to return to a buffet-style restaurant energized the family, but starting the change in the middle of the pandemic forced them to improvise.
“We didn’t open up with the traditional buffet concept,” Ms. Harpaul said. “Everything was takeout. It felt like it was a vacation outside, which was nice for the community. I feel like that is what we needed at the time.”
The following year the restaurant opened as a buffet.
‘Pushed the Boundaries’
In late 2023, as Ms. Harpaul tells it, a cohort of staffers, who were employed at the Bronx Golden Corral through New York’s Summer Youth Employment Program, had an idea.
The staff created some dances for TikTok and Instagram, and their posts went viral. One post now has more than 10 million views.
“I edit the videos; my sister Nadia directs them,” Ms. Harpaul said. “My brother, we push him in front of the camera because we don’t want to. Then the kids come up with content.”
It is a social media strategy that has worked, according to Lance Trenary, Golden Corral’s president and chief executive.
“We probably don’t have the kind of dancing or things of that nature in some of the other restaurants, but that’s because that doesn’t fit that community,” Mr. Trenary said in a phone interview. “In the Bronx, it absolutely fits the personality of that restaurant and the community that we serve. So we’re all for it.
“Now, do their social media sites look different than what we have, say, down in Texas? Yes, absolutely,” he continued. “They were one of the first in our country to do that for our company. We really wanted to recognize it and celebrate it in a way that would encourage other franchisees to learn from them.”
Golden Corral was founded in 1973 in Raleigh. It took 53 years for one of the independently owned and operated franchisees to throw a rave.
While the franchiser has applauded the Bronx restaurant’s creativity, the rave went a bit too far, said Mr. Trenary, who first began working with Golden Corral in 1986 as a partner manager and understands what it is like to run a family business. Like Ms. Harpaul, he worked in his father’s restaurant at a young age. “I can’t do anything that’s going to put anyone at risk or allow something that will be detrimental to our brand’s identity,” said Mr. Trenary.
Ms. Harpaul, he said, “pushed the boundaries” with the rave. “We are not a nightclub. We are not a bar. We are a family restaurant. But at the end of the day, we like to have fun, and we want to represent the communities that we serve.”
The day after the rave, the all-you-can-eat buffet was open as usual, the Golden Corral way. The hot bar was no longer a makeshift D.J. booth but a place where the beef stew and pulled pork stayed warm for customers. The dessert bar wasn’t a corner for dancing but a spot to display the cupcakes and banana pudding.
But on social media, there was proof — photos and videos and memes — of the only-in-the-Bronx bash. Word circulated far and wide about how the Bronx runs a Golden Corral.
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Sandra E. Garcia is a Times reporter covering style and culture.
The post Saturday Night at the Golden Corral, the Bronx Way appeared first on New York Times.
