Midway through the career that earned him this year’s prestigious Legends Award from the National Restaurant Association, Ted Fowler remarked to a gathering of fellow industry leaders that he felt like the turtle who finds itself perched atop a fence post.
“I don’t know how I got here,” the then-CEO of Golden Corral told fellow directors of the Association back in the 1990s, “but I know I had help.”
Anyone familiar with Fowler’s five decades in the business can attest that the lifelong restaurateur hoisted many a turtle himself during that stretch. Most of his long career was spent at Golden Corral, where his influence is still evident.
Fowler was only the second individual in the chain’s 52-year history to serve as CEO. He spent years mentoring his successor, Lance Trenary, who took the CEO position in 2015. Trenary is no slouch himself, he won a Gold Plate Award in 2022.
“I finally told him, ‘There’s nothing more I can teach you,’” recalls Fowler, who won his own Gold Plate in 2003. “’You have my number.’”
“That was the way Ted ran the company,” says James Maynard, Golden Corral’s co-founder and first CEO. “He allowed people to be the best they could be. If he was working with someone, he wanted them to be successful. He really cared about the people, and they knew it.”
CEOs #1 and #3 contend that his people-first stamp on the culture is a key reason for the extraordinary longevity Golden Corral enjoys in its executive ranks. Trenary, for instance, is a 40-year veteran, yet still refers to himself as the c-suite's rookie.
By all accounts, Fowler pushed hard to keep the business growing and succeeding. But that drive was tempered by a sense of humor that left many a fellow traveler chuckling. “I sincerely believe he could have made it as a standup comic,” says Maynard. “He made it fun for all of us.”
The quips known within the chain as Fowlerisms would be a solid foundation for any stage act. Take for example his caution against complacency in keeping a brand out in front: “Today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster.”
The corporate staff once even gathered the most memorable of those lines into a book, recalls Trenary.
The humor softened what even Fowler himself characterizes as an impatience for the ages. “I like to get things done quickly,” he deadpans.
His Fowlerism for that go-go mindset: “The heck with the horse. Load up the wagon.”
Fowler recounts the story of a restaurant’s construction being interrupted by bad weather. Once it passed, he leaned hard on the crew to make up the lost time so the store could open on schedule.
The pressure was so intense that the builder finally told him, “Ted, it takes nine months for a baby to grow. You’d like to speed up the process by somehow getting two women involved.”
Promoting opportunity industrywide
A commitment to helping others succeed is also evident in Fowler’s extensive work outside of Golden Corral. In addition to serving for decades on the boards of the National Restaurant Association and the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (NRAEF), he was a founding father of ProStart, working beside such fellow industry luminaries as Ted Balestreri, Richard Marriott, and John Farquharson.
ProStart provides an alternate career path for high school students who aren’t interested in traditional forms of higher education. It fits Fowler’s philosophy that the restaurant industry is a great place to work whether it be “for a year or a career.”
Fowler himself entered the business at age 16. A family friend ran a licensed Sambo’s family dining restaurant in Fowler’s home state of California, and he took a job washing dishes. (Sambo’s was eventually absorbed into the Bakers Square family restaurant chain.)
Because of an interest in becoming a veterinarian, he enrolled in Palo Alto College. But Fowler also kept his restaurant job.
“I was making $2.50 an hour,” he recalls. The pay was enough to cover what the young Fowler saw at the time as life’s essential C’s: clothes, a car, Coors, and chicks.
He also loved the work, which he found to be outright fun. So now he had to make a career choice.
"I thought, if I go into the vet business, I’d bury my mistakes,” he recalls. “If I go into the restaurant business, I can eat my mistakes. And I make a lot of mistakes.”
He stuck with Sambo’s, ending up as a partner in a Dallas restaurant.
One of his managers was hired away by a North Carolina upstart called Golden Corral, a pioneer of what would come to be known as the budget-steak segment. Golden Corral was all about value. It offered a steak dinner (but little else but steak) for under $2, and it was a hit.
When chain co-founders and owners Maynard and Bill Carl had parlayed the business into a 16-unit chain concentrated in the Southeast, they were feeling the need for a deeper infrastructure. In particular, they needed someone with the operational savvy and financial discipline to oversee multiple units.
Their Sambo’s hire had spoken glowingly to the pair about his former boss, simultaneously telling Fowler about all the potential he saw at Golden Corral. Carl met with Fowler and liked what he found.
“Ted really measured up,” Maynard recalls. “He had all the attributes we were looking for. More importantly, he had the integrity, the forthrightness, the aptitude to be a good leader.”
Fowler was hired as an Area Manager, with oversight of three restaurants.
Fowler had a clear knack for operations, which propelled him up the ladder. He became District Manager, then General Manager of Operations and, by the mid-1980s, President. He would add the CEO title when Maynard moved up to Chairman and split his time between Golden Corral and its parent company, Investors Management Corp.
By the time Trenary joined the chain in the 1980s, “Ted was already a legend inside of Golden Corral,” says the current CEO. “James had the vision. Ted built the foundation of the company. We had to hammer out a lot of brand standards so we could stay on the right path as we expanded.”
“Just watching him then was phenomenal,” says Maynard. “He’s such a hard charger. An iron fist in a velvet glove.”
“He had a grit that was unlike anything I’ve ever seen,” adds Trenary. Added to that was “tenacity and an over-the-top commitment to execution.”
But things didn’t always run as smoothly as Golden Corral’s signature fountain of molten chocolate. The brand’s high sales volumes and profitability brought more competition, particularly from a then-new challenger called Ryan’s. Their menu was much wider than Golden Corral’s, and its salad bar was a veritable buffet, an accommodation the upstart could make because its stores were larger. The older chain saw its customers switching allegiance.
“We had 500 of the smaller stores,” recalls Fowler. “As I said to someone at the time, we’re making slide rules and the pocket calculator was out there.”
“Competitors were beating our brains out,” remarks Maynard.
Fowler sums up his approach to competition as punching back twice as often and with double the force of each blow a rival might land. If challengers were getting traction with bigger stores offering a much wider array of choices, the best response was to out-do them at their own game.
The solution Fowler envisioned was opening big-box restaurants known inhouse as “metro stores,” a reference to their need for a larger market than the smallish trade areas Golden Corral had deliberately chosen for its small stores.
The metros featured a food bar that was a true buffet, with enough options for every member of the largest family to find some delight—and as much of it as they wanted. Each metro unit, for instance, sported a bakery and an extensive dessert array.
The venture took off, in part through franchising, another endeavor Fowler championed.
“Greatness was thrust upon us,” quips Maynard.
Fowler would continue to run the chain until he turned 65, relinquishing day-to-day leadership to Trenary in 2015.
He stayed active in the management of Investors Management until earlier this year, though he remains a major stakeholder, like Maynard. Former boss and employee are now partners.
Along the way, Fowler served as Chairman of the National Restaurant Association. He was in that role, a one-year post, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks put the economy on hold. The restaurant business was one of the industries that suffered the most, a victim of the public’s fear that more turmoil and attacks were ahead.
Fowler led the association team that convinced government figures and industry leaders to reassure the public it was safe to dine out again.
“Ted Fowler is a true legend in every sense of the word, with a legacy that exemplifies the power of hard work and a drive to give back in service to others,” says Michelle Korsmo, President & CEO of the National Restaurant Association. “Ted’s extraordinary career, visionary leadership, and unwavering dedication to our industry makes him a perfect recipient of this year’s Legends Award.”
The honor is bestowed on individuals who have shown a lifelong dedication to the restaurant industry.
Now retired, the 2025 winner spends much of his time hunting, fishing and kicking back with his family, including multiple grandkids and his wife of more than 40 years. His son has followed him into the restaurant business, albeit at the fine-dining end of the spectrum.
Fowler is still in touch with many of the big-name restaurateurs with whom he built the modern industry. Many will be on hand to see him receive his Legends Award at the awards gala hosted by IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, May 17 in the Great Hall of Chicago’s landmark Union Station.
In the meantime, he continues to visit restaurants on occasion for a true read on how the business he helped shape is evolving today. Headquarters visits just don’t do it for an operations specialist.
As the Fowlerism holds, "There’s no cashier in the home office.”
For more information on about attending the gala, click here.
As Managing Editor for IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, Romeo is responsible for generating the group's news and feature content. He brings more than 40 years of experience in covering restaurants to the position.