Shady Maple Smorgasbord is the country’s biggest buffet, feeding up to 7,000 daily diners in Lancaster County

Shady Maple Smorgasbord looks more like a megachurch than a buffet, a beacon for the hungry coming in by bus and horse-drawn buggy for brisket and bacon.

The Weaver family didn’t set out to create the largest buffet in America, according to Food & Wine, let alone in Lancaster County. They just kept building and adding seats over the decades and the lines got longer.

“No one has told us we’re not the biggest, so there’s that,” owner Phil Weaver told The Inquirer recently.

The Weavers began feeding people in the early ‘80s by adding a cafeteria to their adjacent farmers market, which was, of course, enormous and still is. The Shady Maple Smorgasbord opened, officially, in 1985 with a modest 250 seats and today, if it was fully staffed and all the banquet rooms were open, the buffet could seat close to 2,000 people. That’s about the capacity for Sunday Mass at the Cathedral Basilica of SS. Peter and Paul on the Ben Franklin Parkway.

Saturdays are the busiest days, so hectic that Weaver offers an extra $3 per hour for anyone who works them. The smorgasbord has 350 employees and another 20 on Saturdays.

“On an average Saturday, we’ll serve about 7,000 people,” Weaver said.

On a recent Saturday morning, lines were stretched out the multiple front doors but moving quickly for the $14.99 breakfast. Inside, Shady Maple was humming like a bee’s nest, with diners and employees buzzing around a buffet that’s as long as an ice hockey rink (200 feet). They scooped up the famous cornmeal mush and other Pennsylvania Dutch favorites like scrapple and shoofly pie. Shady Maple can go through 600 pounds of bacon on a Saturday.

“It takes about 14 strips of bacon to make a pound,” Weaver said.

Heavy plates hit the tables while empty ones get ferried back to the kitchen to be cleaned by 20-foot-long dishwashers. Shady Maple would need a buffet-traffic controller there to prevent the occasional collisions.

“Yes, that happens from time to time,” said Sumer Smith, the buffet’s food quality manager.

Tourism has long been an economic driver for Lancaster County, with families and bus trips coming in from Philly, New York City, and Baltimore every weekend for shopping, Amish heritage tours, amusements like Dutch Wonderland, and entertainment. Weaver said some of the biggest pipelines are venues like the American Music Theatre and Sight & Sound Theatres, particularly around the holidays.

“During the last two months of the year, we get pounded,” Weaver said. “We don’t even take bus trip reservations on Saturdays because it’s just too busy.”

The best day at Shady Maple, according to the customers The Inquirer spoke to, is seafood night on Tuesdays. It costs $28.99. There’s shrimp, both steamed and fried, scallops, salmon, and mussels too. Weaver said he hasn’t figured out a way to offer crab legs at a reasonable rate.

Donna Kay, 63, and her mother, Lorraine, 81, drove 50 miles west from Manayunk for breakfast. They planned on going to the nearby shopping outlets afterward. They even contemplated coming back to Shady Maple later that afternoon, for dinner.

“I’d say we’ve probably been here at least 40 times,” Donna said.

The smorgasbord has its own built-in shopping downstairs, in a massive gift shop where customers can buy wind chimes, Amish-made quilts and coffee tables, and candles. All told, the smorgasbord and gift shop encompass 110,000 square feet.

James Fortune, of Coatesville, celebrated his 84th birthday at the Shady Maple with his family, a tradition for many longtime customers. Birthday meals are free at Shady Maple, as long as you’re with one paying customer.

Fortune said the draw of a buffet is that you can have a bit of everything. Still, he doesn’t make mountains out of mashed potatoes or home fries.

“I mean, folks can only eat so much,” Fortune said.

Weaver said his father told him not to sweat the big eaters. “My dad said for every big guy who can eat a lot, there’s a skinny fella that eats like a bird,” he said.

Wasted food does irk Weaver, the plates with barely bitten doughnuts and full glasses of orange juice. Shady Maple can donate some food that isn’t placed on the buffet line, but health laws are strict.

“Once it hits a plate, we have to throw it out,” Weaver said.

Shady Maple customers can’t load up a third serving to take home, either, unless they pay for a separate take-out meal that’s charged by the pound.

“If I let people take food home, I’d be out of business,” he said.

As the breakfast rush ebbed, and workers prepped for lunch, Smith strolled through the cavernous kitchen, showing off soup cauldrons you could take a bath in, and long rows of slow cookers making beef brisket, one of Shady Maple’s specialties. They go through 1,800 pounds of it per week.

“There’s five fryers making fried chicken right now for lunch,” she said.

Soon, a public address system would announce last call for breakfast, Smith said, prompting a rush to the doughnut bar or pleas for one last omelet on the grill.

Smith, a Punxsutawney native, has worked at Shady Maple for 17 years. She said it hasn’t changed all that much.

“I mean, it’s definitely gotten bigger,” she said. “Everything’s just gotten bigger.”