Hardee's Just Crowned A New Biscuit Baker Champ—Find Out Which Southern State He Calls Home

Judging biscuits is serious business.

Southerners are notoriously picky biscuit connoisseurs. If mama doesn't make them, they'll have to be mama-quality and likely scratch-made at a diner by someone who's been making biscuits longer than most people have been alive.

It's no wonder then that Southerners have embraced Hardee's as a remarkably apt substitute for mama's baking. In fact, some may even prefer Hardee's to mama if she's not a particularly skilled baker (or even if she is).

The community-deep love and affection for Hardee's restaurants—and more specifically, their biscuit makers—are well known. It's not every day that someone willingly wakes up to bake batch after batch of fresh biscuits starting at 4 in the morning—except it is precisely that for thousands of Hardee's biscuit makers across as many restaurants.

But of all these treasured biscuit makers, there's one who is so good, so skilled, and so precise that he was just named the Biscuit Baker Competition Champion.

Tony Robinson from Norfolk, Va., received the high honor following a biscuit baking competition in St. Petersburg, Fla. this week. Robinson has been baking biscuits at Hardee's for 11 years. His restaurant is part of Boddie-Noell Enterprises, the largest franchisee of Hardee's in the U.S. They previously held biscuit-baking competitions among their 300-plus restaurants, and Robinson was a finalist nine times and won four times.

This year, Hardee's took the competition one step further by bringing in competitors from other franchises and locations. Four biscuit bakers made it to the end: Heather Holthaus (Maryland), Cody Cantwell (Kentucky), Stephen Jones (Tennessee), and Robinson. The four regional champs were tasked with making 52 biscuits in less than 15 minutes, all entirely from scratch just as they do every morning in their restaurants. Each biscuit was then measured for height, width, and weight to suss out whose biscuits were as near to perfect as a freshly baked biscuit can be.

"I've always liked to cook," Robinson told Southern Living. "I would be the one in my grandmother's kitchen while my brother and cousin went outside and played, but Miss Vicky, who was my first general manager [at Hardee's], asked me one day if I wanted to make biscuits. And I've been doing them ever since."

"A lot of our hometown locals who come in every morning, they know who's making their biscuits," Bill Boddie, franchise operator for Boddie-Noell Enterprises, told Southern Living. "They get very personal with their biscuit makers because they know that biscuit maker is a professional. They know that biscuit maker is getting up and coming in to work at 4 a.m., setting up their station, hand crafting biscuits just for them.'

Boddie visited with Robinson prior to the competition, and he remarked that "all of the customers just came up to me and told me Tony was going to win. They know it's such an honor." It's an honor Robinson doesn't take for granted, too.

"I always feel good when I'm doing biscuits because I love doing biscuits," he said. "I do have quite a few customers at my store that come in. They live close by other Hardee's, but they come to mine to get the biscuits that I made. That is one of the reasons why I still do this, because of the customers." (Boddie-Noell Enterprises is headquartered in Rocky Mountain, NC, which coincidentally is Robinson's hometown.)

Along with bragging rights, Robinson wins $10,000. (His competitors each win their own bragging rights for making it to the finals, in addition to $2,500.)

If people were coming from miles around for Robinson's biscuits before, surely they'll be coming from even further out now. If you stop by for one, too, make sure to tell Tony hi.

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Read the original article on Southern Living.