If I’d known it would be my last meal at K&W CafeteriaI would have ordered both kinds of okrafried and stewed, said yes to the chocolate cream pieand dragged my hush puppies through gravy until the plate shone clean.

There was always going to be a next time at my favorite chain restaurant, its tenure as endless as its sweet tea refills, as inevitable as the battalion of tennis-ball-baffled walkers advancing upon the restaurant’s front door within minutes of the pastor’s last “Amen!” on any given Sunday morning since 1937.

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There is no such thing as “always.” Especially after the last six years, I should know that, and still the news shook me like a cream-dolloped jewel block of Jell-O on a septuagenarian porter’s tray. The remaining nine K&W outposts shut their doors forever, effective that same accursed day, December 1, 2025. “We thank you for your support throughout our years in business,” said a message on the company’s website, which is now offline.

That’s 88 years. Ninety if you consider the genesis to be Thanksgiving Day 1935, when founder Grady T. Allred, Sr. started working at the Carolinian Coffee Shop on Cherry Street in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. It was owned by brothers Thomas, Kenneth, and William Wilson, along with their brother-in-law T.K. Knight, who redubbed the enterprise K&W a couple of years later, then sold part and eventually all of their stake to Allred by 1941.

Newspaper clippings show the standard fare of the era — a “Special Sunday Chicken Dinner” served from 11:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., consisting of chilled tomato juice, a choice of chicken gumbo or cream of mushroom soup, roast chickencelery dressing, cranberry sauce, snowflake potatoes, buttered brussels sprouts, pineapple and cottage cheese salad, chocolate nut sundae, hot rolls and butter, and served with coffee, tea, or milk was the princely sum of 50 cents. For just 15 cents , a swell could upgrade to a turkey supper with an extra course of Lynnhurst or Blue Point oysters on the half shell.

“It’s a BIG dinner that you get at the K&W for a small sum,” crowed a 1937 ad in theWinston-Salem Journal. “Whether your appetite requires a deep monotone of substantial food or a silhouette of fragrant dainties, the K&W Restaurant can abundantly satisfy it.” (A 2014 receipt that I just found on my camera roll shows that five of us feasted heartily for just $41.49, so inflation wise, that’s pretty much a 77-year brand promise kept.) Allred’s appeal to the senses, stomach, and purse strings proved so popular that he opened a second location in nearby High Point, North Carolina, which fortunately for him was able to handle the influx of extra customers when a fire took the Cherry Street restaurant out of commission for nearly a year.

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Just as it reopened in 1952, cafeteria service was coming into vogue across the country. Allred attempted a hybrid cafe/cafeteria model before going all-in on the latter and sealing the deal with a name change to K&W Cafeteria at both locations. Per a July 27, 1952 profile of “luncheon and dinner food checker” Marie Brown in theWinston-Salem Journala single cashier was expected to glance at 1,800 to 1,900 trays a day — 17 or 18 a minute at peak meal times — tally the cost, and present the customer with a bill.

“This might be easier if the menu remained the same,” wrote George Thomas, “but every day most of the eight or nine desserts, seven or eight vegetables, five or six meat dishes, six or seven salads are changed. Then there are bread, butter, rolls, beverages.”

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Over those 20 years, my orders started out somewhat whim-based as I opted for items that surely were not the lingua franca of my chosen home of Brooklyn or my suburban Northern Kentucky upbringing, but eventually I settled on chicken liver and onions, collard greenssome sort of okra, the theft of at least one of my husband’s hush puppies (reader, I married him), and a vegetable congeal if it happened to be on offer. I have seriously considered having that litany tattooed on my arm like a sacred text should I someday lose the power of speech and simply need to gesture.

When I meet someone from the Carolinas, especially North, and ask them their K&W order, the vast majority of the time they’ll rattle it off as easily as their own birth date or the list of at-home names they call their cat or dog. Chapel Hill-raised F&W Editor in Chief Hunter Lewis says he’s “equal opportunity K&W’er, but now that I think about it, fried chicken, butter beans, Jell-O, and always chocolate cream pie.” My friend Bill Smith, the longtime chef of the legendary and lamentedly shuttered Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill had the same K&W order as me. I took it as a benediction.

My former colleague and Rocky Mount native Sarah LeTrent was a baked spaghetti devotee in early childhood, but eventually she settled into a rhythm of chopped steak, fried okra, and sweet potato piewith the occasional grace note of cabbage, Jell-O, or even a second okra.

On the podcast I host,Tinfoil Swansformer Greensboro resident and Peloton instructor Cody Rigsby — who wavers between baked spaghetti or fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, along with Jell-O and whipped cream or lemon meringue pie, and a sweet tea the size of the Haw River — called mine “quite possibly the most country-ass order I have ever heard in my life.”

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Yessir, it is. Or was.

Order your vegetable congeal and cream pie while ye may. You never know when the gravy train will reach its final destination, but it always does.

Love Letters to Restaurants