JANIE GOULD

Dale and Mary Knisely opened the Maryland Fried Chicken restaurant in Vero’s Miracle Mile area more than 50 years ago. It has remained in the same location ever since. Their son, Bruce, now owns the restaurant with his wife, Judy. He started working there when he was in high school in 1964. Judy has been involved in the business more than 30 years

Q: “Bruce, you started working in the kitchen 50 years ago and you were working there when I came in today ….”

A: “”What else could I be doing? Surfing? No! I enjoy coming in every day. I actually look forward to it, getting up in the morning to get in here and do your thing! I hate to be sitting around! I can’t stand that. Even on days when I shouldn’t be in here, like Christmas morning, I’m in here making sure things are right.”

Q: “You’re not telling me you’re open on Christmas day, are you?”

A: “No. We’re closed, but you know, you have to come around and check things out, make sure everything’s proper.”

Q: “Let’s talk about what you did today.”

A: “First off, in the morning we bread the chicken. That’s done every morning. Then we turn on the cookers and start cooking around 10:30, so it’s fresh every day. We don’t take any chicken left over and reheat it. All of our chicken is marinated overnight. We don’t inject it like other people do! It’s generally in the marinating tub, which is something we’ve done for 50 years, and the breading is a secret recipe, of course. ”We’ve used peanut oil ever since we’ve started the fried chicken, and it’s cooked under pressure.”

Q: “Judy, you were telling me that both of you eat fried chicken every day.”

A: “Every single day! We have to try it, and even if we didn’t, we’d eat it anyway because we love it! All of our family loves it too. Whenever anybody comes to town, this is the first place they stop before they go home.”

Q: “I can smell it, the smell of fried chicken. I’m not in here every day. Can you smell it, Judy?”

A: “No. Not really. We’re so used to it, but we do have a lot of people who live in the area or work in the area who tell us that drives them over here when they get a whiff of the fried chicken cooking.”

Q: “Bruce, when you started here the kitchen wasn’t air-conditioned.”

A: “Well, hardly any (restaurant) kitchens in Vero Beach were air conditioned at that time. The dining room was air conditioned and we had lots of fans. Of course, in the winter it was pretty cold, actually, in the kitchen.”

Q: “Bruce, what’s the biggest change you’ve seen in the business over the years?”

A: “Well, we’ve tried to keep everything about the same. There’s just more competition. There’s a pizza store on every corner. There are thousands of restaurants and opportunities to eat somewhere else, so you have to pay attention to what you’re doing: give good product with good service at a fair price. That’s the combination we try to use.”

Q: “Because, what’s the national average? Of 10 restaurants that open, nine don’t last a year? Judy?”

A: “I think that’s right. Even in this little town, they come and they go. People think that this is easy, but it’s not easy. We love it but it’s a lot of work.”

Q: “What’s the hardest part of it?”

A: “Just making sure that everything that goes out is up to the standards that we want, that it’s good, that people love it, and it’s different from what you can get anyplace else.”

Q: “What’s the craziest thing that ever happened here? Bruce?”

A: “Well, we had a car or two come through the front of the building. It started to look like we had a drive through!”

Q: “After 50 years, how much longer are you going to be running Maryland Fried Chicken?”

A: “(Bruce) I don’t have any plans to retire. Let me put it that way. I feel healthy and strong. When you get up in the morning with all the aches and pains and say, OK, I think I can work another day…I don’t see us leaving anytime soon. We’re having too much fun!”

Q: “And getting ready for dinner now…”

A: “Yeah. We have a crew coming in about 3, and they’ll bread some more chicken for the evening business. Then we do a lot of cleaning and filtering (of the equipment). There are a lot of things we do in the afternoon. It’s not just sit around and wait for customers to come in. We’re quite busy.”

Q: “You mean it’s not siesta time (laughs)?”

A: “No. We need to make the banana pudding. The afternoons are busy!”

A: “(Judy) We make everything here ourselves, every salad, so everything is super fresh. It doesn’t come in our back door in a bottle or a can or a tub. We make it ourselves, and our coleslaw is famous! Everybody comes here to get our coleslaw.”

“(Bruce) We make coleslaw, potato salad, macaroni salad. Everything is made from scratch, so we can keep an eye on it. We make the dressings for the salads on the premises, eight gallons at a time. We make it fresh every day!”

Editor’s note: Read the Knisely’s recipe for potato salad for a crowd in Janie Gould’s new book, “Food for Floridays: Recipes and Stories.” The handsome, full-color book is available at the Vero Beach Book Center on the mainland and Corey’s Pharmacy and the Ocean Grill gift shop on the beachside.