Maple Street Biscuit Company is known for its creative takes on comfort food, delicious coffee,
and friendly faces. It's been expanding across the American South and grabbing people's attention
with its signature buttermilk biscuits. Keep watching for everything you need to know.
Maple Street Biscuit Company has been making a name for itself for nearly a decade. It was
founded by two friends in Jacksonville, Florida: Scott Moore and Gus Evans. They decided to go
into business together after falling on some hard times that might've discouraged other potential
business owners. The idea for Maple Street Biscuit Company took shape after Moore, who's now the CEO,
lost his job as an executive with the supermarket chain Winn-Dixie.
He took a big risk by investing a large part of his life savings into building the restaurant.
But thankfully for Moore and other stakeholders in the venture, the gamble
paid off. Maple Street Biscuit Company opened its doors in November 2012, serving up scratch-made
comfort food "to a community with open arms and hungry tummies," as the owners put it. A second
and third location soon followed, leading Moore to develop a business plan with an eye towards
an even greater expansion that sought to spread the chain throughout the southern United States.
One word you'll hear over and over again at Maple Street Biscuit Company is "community."
"I hereby pronounce you a community."
It's one of the restaurant's guiding principles, and it's clearly one of the major reasons why
the increasingly popular company has become what it is today. In fact, even the name of
the establishment was a community effort. In a somewhat unusual move, Evans and Moore came up
with a list of names that might work and let a wider audience help decide what fit best.
As recounted by Homewood Life magazine, Moore's neighbors suggested using the
word "maple" somewhere in the name, since so many of the recipes featured the ingredient.
Other potential names included "Maple Way" and "White Wood Biscuits," while friends, family,
and local community members also helped to develop the comforting biscuit-focused menu
that customers have since come to love. For several months during this development process,
Moore would host "food throwdowns" at his home, inviting dozens of people over for mass taste
tests, complete with spreadsheets to help everyone rank the recipes.
The spirit of community that helped create Maple Street Biscuit Company
is still present in every aspect of the business,
and customers can feel it as soon as they walk in the doors. When you arrive, you're first
greeted by friendly staff members, who are themselves managed by a "community leader."
Instead of giving their names for their orders, customers answer a question of the month that
focuses on things like their favorite movie or TV show. Their unique answers are then called out
when their orders are ready. This fun quirk can help spark a conversation among diners,
which is one of the company's main goals for creating the atmosphere inside its locations.
"You come in, and you can talk to people. You enjoy other people's presence, and it's fun."
Those conversations can take place easily at the huge communal tables found at every Maple Street
location, gently encouraging strangers to sit together and hopefully get to know each other.
And when they've finished their meals and their chats, guests are asked to
kindly clean up after themselves to help welcome the next set of diners.
What started out as a local restaurant in Jacksonville, Florida has since spread its
biscuit-making prowess all over the American South. After the first Maple Street Biscuit
Company opened, the owners quickly added a second and third location to see if their new restaurant
concept was worth a larger investment. After seeing continued success at all three locations,
Evans and Moore went all in and started to expand even further, all the while keeping
their strong community focus in mind. That has included some surprising business moves.
For instance, the company doesn't look for profitable locations to open new restaurants.
Instead, as they told Nation's Restaurant News, they look for the next "community
leader," focusing on finding the right person to carry out Maple Street's people-focused mission.
It's a strategy that continues to work for them. Currently,
you can find Maple Street Biscuit Company all over Florida, where there are 21 locations,
as well as in seven other states across the South, including Alabama, Georgia,
Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas.
There are currently a total of 45 locations, with more openings planned in the future.
It's certainly no secret what Maple Street Biscuit Company is known for.
It's right there in the name, after all. So they'd better be serving up the best of the best.
That's why the chain puts a lot of love and effort into making their biscuits from scratch
in-house every single day that they're open. The ingredients include real butter, artisanal flour,
fresh buttermilk, and a special ingredient. That last one isn't really a surprise if you've been
paying attention to some of the details, but it is unique in the world of biscuit-making.
Co-founder Gus Evans was experimenting with recipes before the first restaurant ever opened,
and he developed a winning biscuit dough that was made with real maple syrup instead
of sugar. This unique ingredient adds a touch of natural sweetness while lending a distinct
flavor that still stays perfectly true to the Maple Street Biscuit Company brand.
Once all the ingredients are mixed together, the biscuits are hand-kneaded and rolled before being
baked to fluffy perfection, then served up hot and fresh to salivating customers.
"When it comes to biscuits, there's lots of different biscuits."
Maple Street Biscuit Company bills itself as "comfort food with a modern twist." And when
they say "twist," they really mean it, especially when it comes to their biscuits. The menu at Maple
Street is undeniably packed full of creative biscuit sandwiches and platters. For example,
there's the Farmer sandwich, which comes piled high with fried chicken, cheddar cheese, pecan
wood smoked bacon, and homemade apple butter. Or you might order the Garden Bird sandwich,
which is made with a fresh fried egg, house-made collard greens, and a splash of hot sauce.
You can also fork and knife it with a classic biscuit and gravy platter,
where those maple-infused biscuits are smothered with house-made sausage or shiitake mushroom gravy
and topped with perfectly runny, over-easy eggs. If you're craving something sweet,
there's also the signature iced cinnamon pecan biscuit, drizzled with a sugary glaze. And that's
just scratching the surface of Maple Street's full slate of delectable offerings! So you better get
around to making this place a part of your regular routine if you want to conquer the entire menu.
If biscuits aren't your thing, Maple Street Biscuit Company still wants you to feel welcome.
And they've got so much more on their menu to prove that sentiment. For those who like to go
classic with their breakfast foods, there's a selection of waffle platters that have
their own twists. The signature waffle is made with vanilla and has cheddar cheese and bacon
baked right into it for the perfect salty-sweet combo. There's also The Sweet Grace, a homemade
chocolate chip waffle piled up with strawberries, powdered sugar, whipped cream, and maple syrup.
"Waffles! Tasty waffles! With lots of syrup!"
"Waffles! Buy waffles!"
"Waffles! Waffles! Waffles!"
If you want to go savory all the way, you can opt for the Bluegrass Grits Bowl, which is served up
with bacon, eggs, cheddar cheese, and hot sauce. There's also the Sunshine in the Garden Bowl,
which comes with two eggs swimming in a tomato sauce with shallots and green peppers,
then finally topped with feta cheese and fresh basil. And don't forget to check out
the whole list of side dishes, which include things like Smoky Mountain Mac and Cheese,
fried green tomatoes, and cheesy hash brown cakes.
As a restaurant that's primarily open in the earlier hours of the day,
it's an unspoken requirement that Maple Street Biscuit Company needs to offer delicious cups
of fresh coffee to its customers. To make sure that the quality of the brew is up to snuff,
Maple Street actually makes its own coffee to serve in all of its locations. The chain
has a whole team of coffee roasters, who are tasked with finding the best Arabica beans
sourced from countries in Central and South America. Those beans are freshly roasted
each week at the company's dedicated roasting house in Jacksonville, Florida. They're then
delivered to each Maple Street location, where the beans are then ground fresh every single day.
You can rest easy that you won't be getting a stale cup of coffee whenever you're eating here.
"You know, no big whoop, just coffee talk."
Customers can fill their cup with the signature dark roast known as Dark Bark,
the Light Amber blend, the Maple Tap that comes infused with real maple syrup,
or a totally pure, water-washed decaf blend. And assuming you love Maple Street's coffee
as much as they think you will, you're in luck, as they also sell it in 16-ounce bags
and in a convenient K-cup form for those with Keurig machines.
Maple Street Biscuit Company has made it clear from day one that it's dedicated to
being more than just a good place to eat. As they put it on their website,
"There lies a heartbeat behind Maple Street before it ever opened its doors, and it wasn't
out to just make a profit. It was out to make a difference, and to be a part of the community."
To that end, Maple Street is always looking for ways to give back and to be more than
just another breakfast joint. Examples include opening their doors early for
civic and church groups to use as a meeting place or donating meals in times of need.
And for the past two years, Maple Street has started a new tradition called the
"Day of Good" during which all of the company's locations close early. Store team members then
go out into their respective communities to complete different service projects. In 2021,
COO Alex Hill estimated that team members would contribute more than 400 hours of volunteer time.
As Maple Street detailed on its Facebook page the day after 2021's Day of Good,
"We served animal shelters, cleaned up beaches, put together bouquets with an assisted living
facility, cleaned local schools, put together care packages for families at Ronald McDonald House,
wrote notes of gratitude to healthcare workers, put together school supplies,
fed public school staff and local firefighters. We’re so grateful
for the opportunity to serve and we can’t wait until next year!"
If chowing down on a huge, hearty breakfast filled with flaky biscuits and freshly roasted
coffee sounds like the perfect Sunday morning to you, then you're in luck,
as Maple Street Biscuit Company is open for breakfast and lunch seven days a week at all
of its locations. But it's worth noting that that wasn't always the case. In early 2020,
the company announced that it was making a big change to its standard schedule,
after previously being closed to the public on Sundays. CEO Scott Moore said that the
decision came in response to customer demand. As he put it in an announcement,
"In listening to our guests and creating a
store leadership model that gives our Community Leaders even more resources,
we are now able to take that step and are here to serve you every day of the week."
But it's also worth noting that the change was enacted just a few months after the company
was acquired by Cracker Barrel in 2019. As reported by the Jacksonville Daily Record,
adding a seventh day of business was also a strategy to meet some
of the target profit goals set by the parent company.
Either way, this change means that hungry customers can get their biscuits and gravy
whenever they want them, just so long as it's in the morning or early afternoon.
Most Maple Street locations are open every day from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. and
are then closed in the evenings, which should be spent digesting all those hearty biscuits.
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