Bubba’s Cooks Country, a longtime fried chicken institution in the Dallas-Fort Worth region, recently shuttered its Frisco location on Preston Road amid financial difficulties.
Loyal patrons will be glad to know that the brand’s flagship restaurant on Hillcrest Avenue in Highland Park will remain open, as the institution confirmed on its Facebook page.
It was from this location opposite Southern Methodist University in Dallas that Bubba’s Cooks Country began its journey serving up country food fare in North Texas in 1981.
Owned and operated by Paul and Mary Beth Vinyard, the restaurant was built into a former gas station erected in 1927.
Its menu boasts authentic Texas cuisine, with classics like chicken-fried steak, catfish, green beans, yeast rolls, black-eyed peas, and, of course, fried chicken featured front and center.
In 1993, the Vinyards launched another restaurant called Babe’s Chicken Dinner House. It is still serving customers from a converted 1908 warehouse in Roanoke.
Yet the expansion of Bubba’s took decades to come to fruition.
After “looking for the right kind of location for a long time,” Joel Vinyard, the company president, said his family finally settled on a large site in Frisco to expand the brand in 2019, according to The Dallas Morning News (DMN).
The Frisco branch’s lifespan spanned a challenging four years, marked by the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We really tried to make it work. We all live in Frisco, so having it as our back door — we loved it,” Tiffany Vinyard Wheeless, co-owner of Bubba’s, explained to the DMN.
Replying to a customer on Facebook, Bubba’s explained why the Frisco location had to close, “We were unable to achieve our sales goals and therefore profitability objectives.”
Wheeless suggested that another attempt to expand Bubba’s might be in the cards once the family had time to “sit back and look” at what happened in Frisco to see what could have been done differently, according to the DMN.
Bubba’s has very good reviews on Tripadvisor, where the Dallas location has been awarded 4.5 out of 5 stars.
Alongside Bubba’s and Babe’s, the family also owns Sweetie Pie’s Ribeyes in Decatur and North Richland Hills.