Fred’s Market Restaurant is working on renovations to “spruce things up” for the Plant City staple.
The restaurant, located at 1401 W. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., hasn’t been remodeled in approximately eight years due to the creation of multiple other restaurants in the area, according to Fred Johnson, the owner of Fred’s Market Restaurant.
New carpeting and tile, a buffet and salad bar, restrooms, paint, a new kitchen and dish area and new
decor for the restaurant are running Johnson about $200,000.
“It’s just an updated environment and better,” Johnson said. “It should help with our air conditioning, which has always been an issue.”
The renovations began about three months ago and, though the majority of the changes have been completed, the kitchen will be finished in October. The restaurant had to shut down around two weeks ago from Monday to Friday for several remodels, like moving gas lines and doing electrical work.
Fred’s opened in 1998 with the promise of providing “slow food, fast.” Since its creation it has successfully expanded to four other locations, including Johnson’s Barbeque.
It is famous for having the neighborhood restaurant aesthetic and serving classic southern dishes. People pack the building from breakfast until dinner and you’ll often see customers patiently waiting on its front porch for a table to become available.
“We serve about 1,000 people a day,” Johnson said. “We have five restaurants. I don’t know if we bring people out of the state to eat with us but I know we feed a lot of local people and people from in the state … we try to treat them like they’re hometown anyway, like they’re family.”
When Johnson and his wife, Tammy, opened the restaurant on the site of the State Farmer’s Market, they vowed to always have fresh produce at their fingertips to use in all of their recipes. Now, their sons, Owen and Michael Johnson, have joined in the family business and work at both Fred’s and Johnson’s Barbeque.
Though business is always good, Johnson said the Strawberry Festival is by far the busiest time of the year. Tourists flock to Plant City during the festival, and Johnson said they were very thankful for the festival and all it does for the city.
Johnson said the new renovations will make the experience at Fred’s even more enjoyable than before and that it was “just time” to update the facility.
“We cook the food like we’re gonna eat and we try to treat people like they’re coming into our home and try to make them as comfortable and make them as happy as we can,” Johnson said.