‘The chicken recipe will survive.’ Lexington meat market moving into Save-A-Lot location
Good news, fried chicken lovers: The Save-A-Lot chicken has been saved.
The bad news: You’re probably not going to have it for football season, unless it’s football season of 2021.
Family-owned Critchfield Meats is moving their store from the shopping center at Nicholasville Road and Zandale Drive into the grocery store on Southland Drive.
The new store will be called Critchfield Meats Family Market. Renovations have begun and probably will take a couple of months. They hope to open in January.
No date has been set for the Zandale store to close but it will be after the holidays.
Save-A-Lot, which closed at the end of July, was widely regarded as having some of the best fried chicken in Lexington, with a decades-old recipe for success that originated on Romany Road.
Mark Critchfield said his family’s butcher shop and bakery has already talked to the store and negotiated to keep all the equipment used to make it.
“The chicken recipe will survive,” he said.
A lot of former employees have applied for jobs in the new store, said Larry McMillan, partner in Critchfield Meats. “We’ll need a lot more help.”
Critchfield’s Meats began with a butcher shop at 1400 North Limestone in 1969 opened by Amos “Butch” Critchfield and mother, Opal. The retail store off Nicholasville Road opened in 1987.
Mark Critchfield, the only one of four brothers still in the business, said they were looking for a way to expand.
“Our retail location has been cramped and with the Panera, it’s hard to get in and out,” he said. “We were looking to expand in Zandale, put a kitchen in.”
The Save-A-Lot spot will give them that space and kitchen. They will go from 4,000 square feet to 21,000 square feet, he said.
Critchfield’s has big plans for how to fill it. They will have a covered outside eating area with tables as well, with a walk-up ordering window.
They will have indoor seating as well.
“We plan on having a place where people could sit down and enjoy the hot bar, a ribeye steak sandwich ... with music. A coffee shop-type feel,” he said.
They will expand the deli, continue the hot bar and add a grill for burgers, ribeye sandwiches and more, and expand their baked goods, he said.
They will offer made-from-scratch side items too.
The store will continue to carry household staples, and add lots of local produce for one-stop shopping.
And much more meat. “Right now we have the high end, but we want to go full-spectrum, and go strongly with local farms,” Critchfield said. “We want to have everything from oxtails to pigs’ feet, prime to kobe beef.”
But all of that will have to wait until January because of the timing.
“If we could get in by November 1, we’ll do it,” he said. But with the COVID pandemic, construction is likely to take two or three months.
“That will put us right in the middle of our busiest season, Thanksgiving and Christmas, which are a third to half of our business,” he said.
So they will wait until after the holidays to close down the existing store, where so many people get holiday turkeys and hams, to move the equipment into the new location.
The Zandale location will close after the move, he said.
This story was originally published August 12, 2020 at 1:21 PM.
