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tesg's guide to big chain road food consumption
CHAIN -- Pizza
Ranch My first exposure to the Pizza Ranch, then a knock-about chain found in rural Iowa communities, was in 2001 while working for a radio station that had a co-promotion going on with a seedy local basement bar. The bar had Pizza Ranch pizza brought in from a location in a nearby town while we did remotes. We ended up severing ties due to concerns that something bad was going to happen at that bar. Sure enough, an underage waitress was found dead at the bottom of the cement stairs. I think they assumed she fell in a drunken stupor, but they were considering charges against the guy we were working with at the promtions, who it turned out was already in jail for some other offense at the time. This had nothing to do with the Pizza Ranch itself, aside from it was the only place I actually ate their pizza. But recently, I've noticed new Pizza Ranch locations in larger towns with interstate exposure. These locations are modern buildings with a clear Western motif. They are marked on the interstate "food" signs and on billboards, which seem to focus on their buffet. So I stopped for lunch. And since one opened in my town, I've become a regular. Pizza Ranch was co-founded by Lawrence Vander Esch and 19-year old Adrie Groeneweg in Hull, Iowa in 1981. Groeneweg's mother is said to be responsible for the original recipes. Vander Esch's involvement in the Pizza Ranch's history has basically been erased after he was arrested on four counts of third-degree sexual abuse in 2001. Vander Esch removed himself from the Pizza Ranch operations and resigned his political posts (he was on the Hull city council and was chairman of the county Republican party at the time). Vander Esch plead guilty and served four years of a ten-year sentence before being released on good behavior. His record was later cleared thanks to an Iowa Supreme Court ruling about sexual consent in a non-related case. Groeneweg is still the chain's president today. There's no sign that Vander Esch has any involvement with the chain anymore. For years, the business model restricted growth to rural communities typically with a population base of 5,000 or less. But now they're going into larger cities, and doing so successfully. The buffet only came to be in recent years after trying it out on a single night of the week. The idea proved so popular that the buffet was expanded eventually to a daily operation, though at limited lunch and dinner hours only. The success of the buffet operation and the new restaurant format has significantly picked up franchise interest and subsuquent expansion. The new Pizza Ranch stores are done up in a Western motif to the extreme with wood, cowboy, and ranch related stuff everywhere. The surprisingly professional marketing propaganda is just as in-your-face. The "mile long buffet" (no, not even close) typically operates around 11am-1:30pm for lunch and 5pm-8pm for dinner at most locations, but check the specific location on their website to be sure. Some locations only do the buffet at lunch, some only offer it a couple days a week during dinner hours. The buffet at new locations features a pizza station with about six to ten pizzas, a nice salad bar, a third area with chicken, potatoes (even MASHED potatoes) and what not, and a dessert pizza area with two or three selections. If you don't see your favorite pizza, ask for it. It's as serious a buffet as Cici's, but with a higher quality product and selection. Older locations may not offer as much variety. There's a full regular menu too for non-buffet hours and take-out. They even have a drive-up window. The pizzas are pretty good. There's three crusts...original, thin, and skillet. The specialty pizzas all have western themed names..."Roundup" (beef, pepperoni, sausage, onion, mushroom, black olive), "Texan" (a taco pizza), "Prairie" (a veggie pizza), "Bronco", "Stampede", "Trailblazer"...well, you get the idea. Chicken is every bit as important to the Pizza Ranch menu as pizza. And it's pretty good chicken. Particularly the barbecue chicken, which is drowned in a barbecue sauce. Messy on the fingers. OOH it's good. How well the buffet is maintained depends on location. Some do very well. Others might have one or two half-empty pizza pans out for the entire duration of your meal. I once sat there baffled as a packed house of families fresh from some sporting event came and went from the buffet for twenty minutes while I watched the same four pizzas...pepperoni, sausage, sausage, and beef...remain the only choices. And none of it seemed to be going anywhere. I guess they were all just eating salads and chicken. My local Pizza Ranch actually has both the original Mr. Pibb as well as Pibb XTRA on tap. I didn't even know they still made original Pibb. If you want to sort of replicate the buffet variety at home, there's "Ranch Pack" family meals, which combines popular menu items in one price. Pizza and breadsticks, pizza and chicken, pizza and breadsticks and chicken... Yeah, it'll do. Click here to return to tesg's guide to big chain road food consumption |
