Let’s start with some website criticism:

Let me set the scene: My last stop before I got to North Carolina two decades ago was a 3 ½ year stint at a TV station in West Virginia, where my family has roots. Part of the local food lore there, other than pepperoni rolls, was Tudor’s Biscuit World, a regional breakfast chain which is often paired with a Gino’s Pizza (much like the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell). It was born in Charleston in 1980, not far from the state capitol and my old apartment. It now has 74 locations across West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky (and one in Panama City, Florida for some reason). Some of the biscuits are named after original Tudor’s customers—hence, you can confidently stride up to the counter there to order a Ron, Dottie, or a Tootie. As someone who is (Stephen A. Smith voice) very familiar with West Virginia, my heart grows a little bit whenever the timing is right for me and my family to stop at a Tudor’s during a road trip up to Ohio. Of course, that could be the cholesterol talking.

That said, the Biscuitville and Biscuit World websites don’t really look that much alike, except for the luscious biscuit photography. However! They do have a much deeper connection: Tudor’s may have been born in West Virginia, but it was conceived in North Carolina. Here’s a bit from a 2016 Eater article entitled “Tudor’s Biscuit World Is the Best Thing About West Virginia":

Foreshadowing! This is akin to a movie scene in which, say, a world-famous musician walks past a music store as a kid and sees a guitar in the window. Except for biscuits.

So who were the Tudors? Bill was born deep In the coalfields of McDowell County, West Virginia, served as a private in the army during World War II, then moved to Charleston and worked as a soap salesman. He married his wife, Mae, in 1955 and then decamped to Greensboro in 1961 where they built a house in the Rolling Roads neighborhood. Bill first worked for the Jergens soap company before landing at a small chain of restaurants called Pizzaville. There, he became the manager and “idea guy” and, fatefully, started making biscuits. From Eater:

You know why you don’t see any Pizzavilles anymore? Because they all became Biscuitvilles, that’s why.

The timeline gets a little fuzzy, but Tudor at one point was making biscuits for Arby’s, and eventually bought Country Kitchen in Greensboro, which specialized in biscuit sandwiches. In 1980, the Tudors sold their home and moved up to the Charleston area, close to where Mae had grown up and where her parents still lived. They thought that West Virginia’s capital city was primed for a good breakfast restaurant, and people up there weren’t making a big deal about biscuits. They saw the opportunity. “It just took right off,” the Tudors’ son Louis said in a newspaper story in 2002. “It was perfect timing.”

The Tudor kids got involved in the family business. Both swam in college—John at East Carolina and Louis at UNC-Chapel Hill—and later ran Biscuit World locations in Huntington, West Virginia and Roanoke, Virginia, respectively. Bill Tudor died in 1986. His wife, Mae, ran several restaurants until her death in 2002. Louis Tudor died in 2020, early on in the pandemic. I tried to contact John Tudor to get more insight as to why his dad split from Pizzaville, and why his parents moved back to the Charleston area. I didn’t hear back, but in my experience, when a native West Virginian moves back to the state later in life, it’s often to be closer to family or to take care of a sick parent.

That said, the numbers generally show that North Carolina imports West Virginians, not the other way around. Although! Side note! This is not the first time that someone moved away from North Carolina to have a major impact in West Virginia. Robert C. Byrd, the longest serving senator in United States history, was born in North Wilkesboro but was shipped out to southern West Virginia before his first birthday, not long after his mother died during the 1918 flu pandemic. Byrd’s legacy is still visible today in both Congress (his “Byrd Rule” was just invoked this week to stop the Senate from passing a bill to provide $1 billion in funding for President Trump’s White House ballroom) and in his home state, where dozens of things are named after him. Just as visible? Tudor’s Biscuit World, which you can find along highway exits and in small towns across West Virginia. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, you’re at least curious after passing at least three or four of them while you’re driving through.

So if Tudor’s and Biscuitville can both trace themselves back to one couple: Bill and Mae Tudor, are they really the same restaurant in disguise? Like Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.? I mean, they both close at 2 p.m. Plus, their regional empires are also roughly the same size: There are more than 70 Tudor’s locations and 80 Biscuitvilles. Both have secret biscuit recipes. And both tried to keep at least part of the business in their own, separate families.

Past that, they don’t really overlap. They have different owners. Tudor’s doesn’t run any of its own restaurants, choosing to franchise them individually. Biscuitville corporate runs each location, and seems to have embraced the new ways: Both with online ordering and a “Biscuit Theater” viewing window which was later co-opted by a much bigger competitor: Bojangles. Tudor’s Biscuit Worlds still do most everything by hand. And they’ve both staked out their own distinct fiefdoms. Most Tudor’s locations are in West Virginia, with others in Ohio and Kentucky. Biscuitville has its heaviest presence in the Triad area where it was born, but the rest are spread out around South Carolina and Virginia. The only Tudor’s in Biscuitville territory was in Roanoke, and it closed more than a decade ago. It’s also hard to find more of a direct connection. Official Biscuitville lore only mentions Maurice Jennings, the founder, and not the Tudors. Bill and Mae don’t come up in any old stories about Pizzaville or Biscuitville, but the pizza chain is mentioned in their obituaries.

Look, there are a lot of people out there, and you’d think that, statistically, different folks would independently come up with, I don’t know, ideas for drive-thru breakfast spots. But I’m just in awe of the fact that Greensboro is responsible for not one but three different beloved fast food chains. Around the time that the Tudors were leaving North Carolina to go back to West Virginia, a guy named Morris Reaves was selling a bunch of Wendy’s franchises in the Greensboro area. He later tried his hand at running a small family restaurant, then struck out and opened the very first Cook Out on Randleman Road nearly a decade later.

Of course, the origin story isn’t why Biscuitville and Tudor’s Biscuit World have persisted over the last 50ish years. It’s the biscuits (duh). But there is one mystery that remains: What mom-and-pop biscuit joint near Mt. Airy was the one that set all of this into motion? The only clues: The Tudors would have stopped at this place sometime between 1961 and the mid 1970s, when they came up with the biscuit idea, and it probably would have been somewhere off of Highway 52, which was the route north before Interstate 77 was finished. So for a list of suspects, here’s the restaurants page from the 1974 Surry County phone book:

Now look. I don’t know Mt. Airy like some of you all do. Maybe some of you old-timers know which of these places were family-owned country ham biscuit joints. But the one name that jumps off of the page to me (other than the decidedly not mom-and-pop Hardee’s) is Snappy Lunch, which is much more famous for its pork chop sandwich and for its enduring connection to The Andy Griffith Show (it’s the only existing business in Mt. Airy that was ever mentioned by name during the entire eight-season run). But the place also serves country ham biscuits for breakfast, and its hours are almost identical to those of Tudor’s and Biscuitville: 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.

So, did Snappy Lunch inspire both Mayberry lore and two beloved biscuit chains? I can’t say for sure. All I can say is thank you to all of the people who made it possible for me to grab a quick and decent breakfast across several states. You might be fast food, but you’ve slowly found a place in my heart—and my arteries.