Not your parents’ Piccadilly

Don’t be fooled by the nod to nostalgia inside Piccadilly’s four Baton Rouge restaurants.
Change has been thrust upon this iconic brand that simultaneously clings to its roots of providing Southern comfort food cafeteria-style while also evolving to remain relevant—and profitable—in a restaurant world undergoing seismic disruption, as Business Reports writes in its latest cover package.
Some of the chaos has been self-inflicted, like the ill-fated decision to acquire a branch of Morrison’s Cafeterias in the late 1990s, but most of the upheaval can be traced to changing customer habits and lifestyles.
The company, after twice filing for bankruptcy in the early 2000s, has stabilized its finances and is now embarking on an aggressive expansion and growth strategy.
Perhaps its most successful decision to date has been the launching of a food service division that partners with schools, hospitals and governmental organizations to provide meals and cater events, with annual sales growing at roughly a 9% clip.
Piccadilly has also added all-you-can-eat breakfast buffets at its traditional restaurants as well as an emergency services division that’s provided more than 625,000 meals to victims of natural disasters.

What Piccadilly Restaurants—the corporate group that owns and operates 40 restaurant locations in seven Southern states—is betting on now is customers wanting the food they grew up within a setting outside of its restaurant dining room. The company is debuting its Piccadilly To Go standalone concept in Baton Rouge later this year after an earlier rollout in Memphis, Tennessee.

“Today, consumers want convenience, they want speed,” says Max Jordan, Piccadilly’s vice president of marketing. “They don’t always want to go into a restaurant and sit down and spend an hour making a meal.”
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