Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant

Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant Still Serves 1,000 People a Day | Eater LA

"Perched outside a long-running theme park and operating for nearly 84 years, this iconic, admission-not-required restaurant began as a 1920s farm stand and tea room and grew into the longest-standing theme park restaurant in history after the owners added Cornelia’s homemade fried chicken in 1934. The menu has changed little: the all-day $21.99 chicken dinner remains the signature offering (three pieces with salad, rhubarb, vegetables, mashed potatoes, pie, and unlimited biscuits), the original recipe only having been tweaked to remove lard. The spot is steeped in regional lore — from its role in popularizing the hybrid boysenberry (which flavors pies, cocktails, dressings and preserves) to a famous nearby encounter that altered Walt Disney’s land purchase — and still draws crowds with a farmhouse-style redesign that seats up to 1,000 guests, serves roughly 1,000 birds a day, and claims over a million pounds of chicken annually, according to the Orange County Register. Though chain expansions in the 1990s closed, the restaurant remains a historic centerpiece tied to the park’s Western ghost-town origins and family-friendly attractions." - Carlye Wisel