The World Famous Chicken Dinner

Frankenmuth is famous for one dish above all others, served family style until you cannot eat another bite: fried chicken. The tradition did not start with the two big restaurants you see today. It started with the Fischer family.

In eighteen eighty eight, Theodore Fischer founded what began as the Union House Hotel, later called Fischer's Hotel, and he and his wife Katherine were the first to promote all you can eat family style chicken dinners. Meanwhile, in nineteen twenty eight, William and Emilie Zehnder bought the former Exchange Hotel and opened it on Mother's Day of nineteen twenty nine as Zehnder's. Then in January of nineteen fifty the Zehnder family bought their competition, Fischer's Hotel, and put William Zehnder Junior, nicknamed Tiny, in charge along with his wife Dorothy, a former waitress at Fischer's.

In nineteen fifty five Tiny proposed adding Bavarian atmosphere and architecture, and the family renamed the place the Bavarian Inn, reopening grandly in nineteen fifty nine. So the two rival chicken palaces that face each other across Main Street, Zehnder's and the Bavarian Inn, are today owned by the same family. Between them they serve well over a million chicken dinners a year, a taste of German farm hospitality scaled up to feed the crowds.