BY HANNAH LESTER
HLESTER@
OPELIKAOBSERVER.COM
Tiger Town will have a new breakfast restaurant soon — The Flying Biscuit Cafe.
The Flying Biscuit first opened in Atlanta in 1993 and has since expanded to Alabama, Florida, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina.
“[The restaurant] grew a big following in Atlanta and you know, they saw it as a brand that could grow and kind of go to other communities,” said Greg Yund, franchise owner of Birmingham’s location.
The Birmingham location opened in 2019, Yund said, three months before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The restaurant closed for six weeks but re-opened and survived the pandemic that killed many small businesses.
“The brand itself is southern comfort food, you know a lot of just great, southern dishes,” Yund said. “We have scrambles, one of our best ones is a southern scramble. It’s got collard greens in it, onions, bacon. And customers are like ‘collards and eggs?’ And it’s like, you’ve just got to give it a chance.”
The Auburn/Opelika location will open in Tiger Town, hopefully by the end of summer, Yund said.
Other menu items, outside of the scramble, include traditional breakfast foods like waffles, (but imagine with peaches and cream), French toast (but stuffed with cream cheese or topped with raspberries), pancakes, hash, steak and eggs, chicken and waffles and some other options such as sandwiches and burgers.
Yund said The Flying Biscuit has “the best grits in town and I’ll go against anyone on that.”
The menu also caters to those who need to, or prefer to, eat gluten-free or vegan.
“Our collard greens are vegan so it adds another element that we can serve different parts of the community with all different dietary restrictions,” Yund said. “… Our menu is very diverse in that sense.”
Yund said that the cafe’s business partners who will run the Tiger Town location live just outside of Opelika.
“They love the community, they love Opelika, they love Auburn, their family lives there, they have their kids there, their kids went to Auburn and they love the town,” Yund said. “… The moment we went up there and looked around and saw everything that’s going on in Opelika, we just really felt like it was a good community, kind of like the community we’re in now that, it just felt like a community we want to be involved in.
And they’re growing so much and we want to be involved in that growth as well.”
The decision to open the Auburn/Opelika location was made over a year ago, Yund said.
“We were just very careful in picking our spot and Tiger Town definitely seems like the kind of area we were going for, where it’s very family-oriented, community-oriented with a lot of traffic and lot of good, just central location that can pull the college students but also pull the families out of the residential areas,” he said.
“… We wanted to be in a place where we could get the whole community to come and be available for everyone.”
When the restaurant opens there may be some sort of promotional contest, Yund said, like a certain number of ‘first’ guests will receive a t-shirt, or something akin to that.
The restaurant is bright and colorful and there will be a mural inside that represents Auburn.
“What kind of suggestions would y’all like to see on our mural at the location,” Yund asked. “What is Auburn? What is really behind Auburn and what can we include on that wall to show Auburn as it is, represented the correct way?”
Anyone who has ideas for the mural in The Flying Biscuit can let the business know at its email, tigertown@flyingbiscuit.com, or messaging the Facebook page for the Tiger Town location, www.facebook.com/Flying-Biscuit-Cafe-Auburn-109479378097413
“We love letting the community know that we’re coming,” Yund said.