This Restaurant is Full of History

Cook family has owned buffet since 1959

Except for the yummy food smells wafting from the buffet, you might think you were in a museum when you enter the 1901 building at 704 N. Woodland Blvd. in DeLand. The former grand residence has been a restaurant since Bob and Willa Cook opened a steakhouse called Holiday House there in 1959. The business — now Cook’s Buffet, Cafe & Bakery — has been under the ownership of the Cook family ever since Bob and Willa opened the doors. Family portraits, photographs, advertisements, menus, newspaper clippings and other neatly framed mementos crowd the walls. You might study them, but it’s hard to pull your eyes away from the professionally decorated trees — another tradition of the place DeLandites still call Holiday House, although it has had its new name since 2011.

There are only five trees now, for the fall season. There will be 16 for Christmas. One, the birthday tree, stays up year-round. The décor is a tribute to the family’s history of welcoming patrons to enjoy what owner Michael Cook Sr. calls “comfort food 101.” The menu includes hand carved meats, including a full leg of lamb, salads made fresh in the back, and vegetables cooked the way your mother (or grandmother) did. The gravy is made from pan drippings, and every carrot is peeled by hand, Michael Sr. notes.

Some of the vegetables are grown by Michael Sr. on a 3,000-square-foot plot at his home on Lake Winona. Cook’s Buffet, Michael Sr. likes to say, is “Where farm-to-table has been on the menu for 66 years.” With his son now handling much of the day-to-day restaurant operation, Michael Sr. has stayed busy. “I’m the gardener. I pick out all the plants. I don’t do as much of the manual labor anymore, but if you go to my house, it looks like a desert. Everything is here,” Michael Sr. says with a laugh. He’s constantly improving the lush landscaping and is working to restore areas of the interior.

“Before I get too old to do anything, I want to bring this property back to its glory days,” Michael Sr. said. He will be 73 in January. By far the biggest project lately was the Carriage House, which opened in September as a cozy space for private parties of up to 40 people. The first booking was a 60th birthday. It’s built in the 600-square-foot space where Michael Sr.’s father, restaurant founder Bob Cook, used to film television spots about food and cooking in the early 1980s — “Way before the Food Network got started,” Michael Sr. points out.

Many years earlier, the building housed the horse and carriage used by occupants of the Burrows family winter home that fronted on Woodland Boulevard. “I got a wild hair one day, and I said, ‘I’m going to put the Carriage House back together,’” Michael Sr. said. There began a project that combined historical research, modern business acumen, art by Willa Cook, and a few modern finishes, like the fiberglass faux tin ceiling. Michael Sr. and his son, Michael Cook Jr., worked on the Carriage House together. “We wanted this to feel like a room in your house,” Michael Sr. said. “People like this room because most venues are huge and they cost a lot of money. … People love this, because it’s just like eating at home.”

The addition of the Carriage House is the latest in a series of changes and expansions at the restaurant at 704 N. Woodland Blvd. A giant kitchen was added in the back years ago, and the graceful windowed wraparound porch greatly expanded the seating. Upgrades to the kitchen are next. But the changes began with the conversion from a steakhouse to a buffet shortly after Bob and Willa Cook started their venture. “They just weren’t making enough money” as a steakhouse, Michael Sr. explained. They realized they could serve more customers with fewer employees with buffet service.

The restaurant now has about 30 employees. The buffet concept was a success, and Michael Sr. is pretty sure Cook’s Buffet, Cafe & Bakery is the oldest buffet-style restaurant in Florida owned by the same family, if not the oldest Florida buffet altogether. There have been concessions to modernity, such as the addition of kale on the salad buffet. “Ten years ago, you couldn’t give kale or Brussels sprouts away,” Michael Sr. said. Also, since the COVID-19 pandemic, the restaurant, long open seven days a week, is now closed on Mondays. Some things won’t change, as Michael Sr. and Michael Jr. strive to enable their steady stream of customers to enjoy the meals they ate at Cook’s 20 or even 50 years ago. “Customers who come in now who are my age say, ‘I came here with my grandmother,’” Michael Sr. said. “It’s touched a lot of lives. There have been a lot of happy memories made here.”

Did you know?

As of 2022, the restaurant now known as Cook’s Buffet, Cafe & Bakery had served 8 million customers. Hundreds of thousands of patrons eat there each year, owner Michael Cook Sr. said.
The green beans are carefully cooked, but they’re canned. The kitchen staff otherwise could not keep up with the demand for this vegetable, Michael Cook Sr. said, adding, “Everything that we can do fresh, we do.”
Food stats: 15 tons of carrots a year, each one peeled and chopped by hand; 35,000 pounds of turkey a year.
The cranberry gelatin is the most popular recipe among customers
If you can’t spare the time for a sit-down meal at Cook’s, you can still get the flavors. The restaurant sells frozen pot pies that you can take home and bake.
If not for a family tragedy, Michael Cook Sr. might not be in the restaurant business. After four years in the U.S. Navy, he was living in Virginia when his sisters Wendy and Lisa were killed by a drunk driver in an automobile crash in 1979. Michael Sr. came home to help his father and worked for him until 1983, when he opened his own restaurant, Cook’s Cafe, in Downtown DeLand. He owned that restaurant for 35 years before selling it and returning to the family business on North Woodland Boulevard. Now Connie’s Cafe, the Downtown DeLand restaurant is still in business after 42 years.

“There have been a lot of happy memories made here.” – Michael Cook Sr.

Photo by Barb Shepherd

NEWEST ADDITION — Above, the Carriage House, a place for private parties of up to 40 people, is the newest addition at Cook’s Buffet, Cafe & Bakery. Thoughtfully restored to give the feeling of eating at home, the Carriage House was Michael Sr.’s and Michael Jr.’s latest project. It opened in September.

Photo by Barb Shepherd

LUSH LANDSCAPE FOR LONG WAITS

At left, the south entrance to the garden area. Especially on holidays, customers may wait a while for a table at Cook’s Buffet, but the lush landscaping provides a peaceful waiting room.

On Thanksgiving, Michael Cook Sr. said, the parking lot will be full by 8:30 a.m., and a wait of two to three hours on that holiday is common.

Long too shy to talk to customers, Michael Sr. now goes down the line to greet waiting guests. He tells them, he said with a laugh, “If it was me, I wouldn’t wait. I’d go home and make a bologna sandwich.”

Michael Sr. credits his late wife, Star, with bringing out his personality. Star Cook died in 2019.