By Randy Tucker
Enquirer staff writer

Apparently, Frisch's favorite thing is its Golden Corral restaurants.

The company said Monday that it plans to expand the franchises by opening 21 new stores in Columbus, Pennsylvania and Michigan during the next decade. That's in addition to the 15 it already has licenses to open (but hasn't begun building) in its existing markets of Cincinnati, Dayton, Louisville, Cleveland and Toledo.

The Walnut Hills-based company is fond of asking consumers - "What's your favorite thing?" - in its campy ads for its Big Boy restaurant chain.

The new stores will bring the total number Golden Corral franchises that Frisch's owns and operates to 62.

Frisch's CEO Craig Maier said the move is part of a long-term strategy for making Golden Corral franchises "a major growth vehicle" for the company.

The move comes in spite of a lackluster performance for fiscal 2004 in which the 26-store Golden Corral unit posted a meager 0.3 percent sales gain. By comparison, the company-owned Big Boy chain, with 88 stores, saw sales increase nearly 5 percent in the same period.

But Maier blamed Golden Corral's performance on unusually high food costs and said there was tremendous potential for buffet-style restaurants in the new markets.

"Golden Corral will never perform as well as Big Boy because Big Boy is an older, more established chain," said Maier, whose company posted profits of $10.5 million last fiscal year, which ended May 30. "But as far as an expansion vehicle, (Golden Corral) has done what we wanted it to do."

Shares in Frisch's closed Monday at $24.77, down 8 cents.

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E-mail rtucker@enquirer.com