On November 17, 2020, the shareholders of Luby’s approved a plan to liquidate the company and dissolve it. More than 99 percent of the shares that voted said yes. This was the chain that sold $495 million of food in its 1997 fiscal year. The vote did not close a single cafeteria that day, but it put a price on all of them, and the prices came out backward.

The cafeteria business, the restaurants with the Luby’s name over the door, went for about $28 million, and almost none of it was cash. The property under just 26 of those cafeterias went to a real estate investor for $88 million, about three times what the restaurants themselves brought. Getting from that tray line to that rent check took a chain that raised its earnings per share 28 years in a row and then could not. It took a board that voted to take its own company apart and a new buyer picked out of more than 235 candidates whose family feeds airline passengers.

Springfield, Missouri, 1911. A man named Harry Luby opened a lunch counter there called the New England Dairy Lunch and made the people who ran his cafeterias an offer: each manager kept 40 percent of the net profit from his own cafeteria every year, and the owners took the other 60. Carol Dawson, who wrote the history of Luby’s, called that split unheard of in any kind of food operation. She also noted the whole idea of eating off an assembly line was brand new.

If you wanted to eat out in many American towns in 1911, you had two choices: a very expensive hotel dining room or a saloon. As she put it, you could not take your mother-in-law to a saloon. A cafeteria fixed that. Nobody waited on you, so prices stayed low, and a whole family could walk in, pick what it wanted, and pay for what was on the trays.

She called it a democratizing way for everybody to eat out. Harry wanted a business where everybody did well. According to Dawson, even the tea ladies who pushed carts around the dining room got stock options, and so did the dishwashers. The men running the company knew every job in the kitchen, down to how each vegetable got cooked and how each salad dressing got made, and they would roll up their sleeves and clean out the grease traps themselves.

A manager with that kind of stake had a reason to watch every pan and every plate, and that was the point. Harry followed the oil money through the boom towns of Oklahoma and into Texas, where oil workers and middle-class families both needed somewhere decent to eat. In 1947, his son Bob Luby and cousin Charles Johnston opened the cafeteria the modern company counts as its beginning, downtown in the basement of a San Antonio building. Every Luby’s after that needed a manager who would run it like it was partly his, because it partly was.

The chain never sold a single franchise. It grew one manager at a time, and becoming one took years. By the mid-1970s, Luby’s ran a formal training program its own corporate history describes as boot camp. Trainees learned how to break down a side of beef, how to make a lemon meringue pie, and how to mop the floor.

Then they spent 7 to 10 years working up from assistant manager to associate manager to manager. About 85 percent of unit managers stayed 10 years or longer. Harry’s rule was short: share the work, share the risks, share the profits. By 1959 there were nine Luby’s, enough to incorporate under the name Cafeterias Incorporated, though the sign out front still said Luby’s.

By 1987, the hundredth location was opening in Round Rock, Texas. The experience was the point. You picked up a tray and slid it along the steel rails. There was Jell-O cut into little cubes, some of it blue.

There was square fried fish, macaroni and cheese, beets, and pecan and coconut cream pie behind the glass, and you had to decide early whether you were the kind of person who would leave room. Andrea Valdez, writing in the Texas Observer, remembered the trays coming hot and wet from the dishwasher, the real cloth napkins in a dark army green, and the tea ladies coming around to top off your glass. When Texas Public Radio asked for Luby’s memories in 2021, the details came in the same way. Reed Hartman remembered a piano player at the Blanco and Loop 1604 location who took requests and kept a trunk of hats beside the piano.

Alicia remembered her grandmother at a Houston Luby’s getting extra fried okra by showing the server where her thumb sat on the bowl. Elizabeth Botello remembered cash registers where your change came rolling down the side on a little slide. At that counter, one order came up more than any other: half a portion of an entree, two sides, and a roll. That order needed a name, so Luby’s polled its own managers.

The company filed for a trademark in 1974 and it came through in 1976: the Lu Ann. A story claims the plate was named after a doll belonging to one of the family’s daughters, but nobody has ever confirmed it. What is certain is that the Lu Ann became the order you did not have to explain. You said it at the entrees, and the person behind the glass knew the rest.

Fifteen years after that trademark, Luby’s had the worst day in its history. On October 16, 1991, around 150 people were eating lunch at the Luby’s in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. It was Boss’s Day. A man came into the dining room and opened fire, killing 23 people.

At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. That Luby’s reopened in March 1992 with a redesigned dining room, and a memorial carrying the names of the 23 stands near where it was. The rest of the chain kept growing. By 1996 there were more than 200 Luby’s cafeterias in 11 states, 147 of them in Texas.

In January 1997, the cartoon King of the Hill went on the air, and its creator Mike Judge named a member of Hank Hill’s family Luanne Platter after the plate. The cafeteria the Hills ate at on the show was called Luly’s. That 1997 record year had a problem buried in it. For the first time in 28 years, Luby’s earnings per share went down, from $1.

66 to $1. 22, while net income fell from $39. 2 million to $28. 4 million on record sales.

In March 1997 the chain lost its new chief executive suddenly, two months after he took the job, and the chairman stepped down within days. In October the board hired Barry Parker, who had been running a clothing chain called County Seat. Under Parker, pay packages for cafeteria managers were cut and tied to hitting sales targets, replacing Harry’s 1911 deal where each manager kept 40 percent of net profit. The experienced managers who had come up under the old split started to leave.

Something happened to the food too. According to Dawson, a lot of the cooking from scratch was replaced with cheaper pre-made and frozen food, and many old recipes customers had loved for 50 years got jettisoned. She called it a huge mistake. Parker walked into a company whose earnings had just dropped for the first time in a generation, and he did what many retail executives did in the 1990s: he went after sales.

Along the way, the deal Harry had built the whole company on got changed. Shortly after Parker took over, Luby’s shares hit $21. 25. On the day he resigned, they closed at $5.

44, down nearly 75 percent. A little over a month before he left, the company announced it would close 15 of its 231 restaurants and suspended its dividend for the first time in its history. Parker resigned that fall. After he left, the company brought the old profit-sharing plan back.

The people who stepped in next were restaurant people from Houston, and one of them had already worked inside a Luby’s. Chris Pappas and his brother Harris Pappas, whose family runs Pappas Restaurants, bought about 6 percent of the company around the turn of 2001. Harris had worked at a Luby’s as a young man in the early 1970s. In March 2001, Chris became chief executive and Harris chief operating officer, and the brothers agreed to buy up to $10 million of the company’s debt.

“Everything starts and stops at the store level,” Chris said. They took over a company owing more than $100 million, closed about 50 cafeterias, and over the next few years cut the debt by about 90 percent, down to $29. 8 million. Dawson gave them credit, saying they had improved the menu a lot.

One thing had gone away: the tea ladies had been replaced by servers with gratuity cards on the tables, and Dawson said the reaction from regulars was simple. “Everybody just said nah. ”

In 2006 Dawson’s history came out under the title House of Plenty: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Luby’s Cafeterias. The revival in that title was the brothers’ turnaround, and in 2006 it looked like a happy ending.

In 2010, Luby’s bought the bankrupt Fuddruckers burger chain for $61 million in cash, and a couple of years later added Cheeseburger in Paradise. Starting in 2012, the company built restaurants with both brands under one roof. The number of Luby’s cafeterias slipped from 93 in August 2015 to 78 by 2019, and in one quarter of 2018 Luby’s lost $14. 1 million.

Chris Pappas said costs had gone up faster than the company could grow sales, so Luby’s started selling buildings. It lost money again in 2019. That is when a hedge fund showed up. Bandera Partners, run by investor Jeff Gram, owned about 9.

8 percent of Luby’s and went after board seats in December 2018, with one candidate being Gram’s father, former U. S. Senator Phil Gram. Luby’s fought back hard, telling shareholders the fund would push to break the company up and sell off its real estate.

The shareholders went with Luby’s, and on January 25, 2019, after 43 days, the company kept every seat on its board. Twenty months later, the board would vote to take the company apart and sell the land itself. When the end came, much of the news coverage pointed at the pandemic, and the pandemic was real enough. In March 2020, Luby’s closed dozens of locations and furloughed most of its headquarters staff.

But Luby’s had posted losses in 2018 and 2019 before the pandemic ever started, and it had been selling buildings since 2018. The pandemic sped up something already underway. On June 3, 2020, Luby’s announced it would sell everything to pay off about $35 million in debt. In early September, the board approved a plan to liquidate and dissolve the company, estimating shareholders would get between $92 million and $123 million, roughly three to four dollars a share.

That same September, the Pappas brothers signed an agreement allowing them to examine Luby’s confidential numbers while considering an offer of their own. On November 17, 2020, the shareholders approved the plan. In the spring of 2020 the stock had sat below a dollar a share for 30 straight days, drawing a warning from the New York Stock Exchange. On the Friday before the plan came out, it closed at about $1.

05. Now the board estimated liquidation would pay three to four dollars a share, and the stock more than doubled. From the fall of 2019 through May 2022, Luby’s sold properties for around $174 million. On October 1, 2021, a real estate investment company called Store Capital bought 26 cafeteria properties, and that single sale let Luby’s pay off its lender in full.

Fuddruckers went to a buyer named Nicholas Perkins for $18. 5 million, paid with a note. On May 27, 2022, Luby’s stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange for the last time, 40 years after it started. Four days later, what was left of the company went into a liquidating trust.

The best offer for the cafeterias came from Calvin Jin, a food and technology businessman from Chicago. His aunt Sue Jin founded Flying Food Group, which grew into the third largest airline catering company in North America. Jin spent four years as a vice president running its business with Starbucks. He told Texas Monthly he was not interested at first.

The chain sat on the market for months, and in March 2021 he went to Texas to look closer. He ate the fried fish, the chicken fried steak, and the chicken fried chicken, was surprised by how many vegetables there were, and came home craving the beets. He kept seeing the same thing over and over, he said: a great brand with great people making great food at a great price. “There’s got to be a way to make this work,” he said.

The deal was signed on June 21, 2021 for 32 cafeterias and the Luby’s name, without the real estate, and closed on August 26 with 35 cafeterias. Not every location made it into the deal. On June 30, the Luby’s in Bellmead near Waco served its last dinner, and the line went out the door. The building was going to become a gas station.

Jin said he was not going to throw out the menu. “Food is not the problem,” he said. Since then, his team has gone back to Labatt, a San Antonio family company that was one of Luby’s original main food suppliers. General managers set specials for their own neighborhoods.

There is online ordering and a drive-thru now, and the staff got new uniforms. Not every location has lasted. The North Mesa Luby’s in El Paso, open since the 1960s, closed on Easter Sunday of 2023. But in August 2025, a brand new Luby’s opened in downtown Austin on West 11th Street, a small one with a seating area and a serving line, open for breakfast and lunch.

An Austin television station checked, and you can still get the Lu Ann. Today there are about 39 Luby’s, all of them in Texas. You can buy the fried fish and macaroni and cheese frozen in Texas grocery stores, and on Luby’s own ordering site the Lu Ann is listed starting at $9. 49.

In 2006, Dawson’s book used the word revival for the brothers’ turnaround. Fifteen years later, the cafeterias got another one from a family that feeds airline passengers. The steel rails are still there.

You pick up a tray, you slide it along, and when you get to the entrees, you can still just say the Lu Ann.