Bringing home the biscuits: Keeping growth ambitions in check, family-owned Biscuitville has developed a loyal following by sticking to its kneading.

• Author: Perlmutt, David
• Position: Cover story

Burney Jennings swears the story's true: Sometime in the mid-1960s, Jennings' father, Maurice, and his uncle, R.B., were summoned to their dying grandmother's bedside. Irma Rue Bass, known as "Nanny," had important family business to finalize: Her grandsons, she told them, needed to decide who'd take her small farm near Murfreesboro, Tenn., and who would lay claim to Nanny's secret recipe for her buttermilk biscuits, devoured by generations of Basses and Jennings.

R.B. got the farm.

Older brother Maurice jumped on the recipe. It's proven to be a wise choice. Shortly after Nanny Bass' passing, Maurice gave up selling flour for baking pizzas, and in 1966, opened two takeout joints in Burlington like the ones he'd seen during his sales travels. As Americans' love for pizza grew, he opened more Pizza-To-Go stores, eventually renaming them Pizzaville, in the Burlington area and southern Virginia.

Mornings were slow, so with his inheritance, Maurice decided to test some of Nanny's biscuits during breakfast hours. In short order, they began outselling pizzas. In 1975, he opened a stand-alone biscuit store in downtown Danville, Va., called Biscuitville.

Soon, Maurice was busy transforming his 12 Pizzavilles into what's become a chain of Biscuitvilles that has grown to 54 company-owned stores with a dedicated following.

It's a company that resists rapid expansion, despite pleadings from migrating admirers to expand beyond its two-state market. As Food & Wine magazine trumpeted last year, Biscuitville "needs to be everywhere. ... It's ridiculously good."

"My father took his grandmother's recipe and ran," says Burney Jennings, 54, Biscuitville's second-generation CEO since 1996. "We've been in a slow expansion mode ever since." He started mopping restaurant floors and cleaning restrooms at 16. (Maurice, 83, is retired.) "We think we've practiced sensible growth, opening stores in our footprint where we're known," namely central North Carolina and southern Virginia.

The Greensboro-based chain is a speck on the fastfood breakfast landscape: Charlotte-based Bojangles', which started two years after Biscuitville in 1977, is publicly traded and boasts 764 restaurants in 10 states. Hardee's, started in Rocky Mount in 1960, advertises its "made-ffom-scratch" biscuits at nearly 2,400 locations.

To be sure, Biscuitville's restaurants serve up a bunch of biscuits: More than 40,000 are sold daily. It's just that many outsiders see a bigger opportunity. Jennings...