Winner, winner ... chicken dinner? This fried chicken restaurant voted best in Beaufort Co.

The food at Maryland Fried Chicken in Beaufort is prepared the same way it has been since the early 1970s, and its owners see no reason to change that now.

“Consistency pays off,” said Tim Cieplowski, who owns Maryland Fried Chicken with his wife, Katherine.

Apparently, its loyal customers agree with the sentiment.

Maryland Fried Chicken won The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette’s competition for the title of Best Fried Chicken in Beaufort County by a sizable margin, taking 75% of the votes (8,212) in the final round against Bluffton’s Cahill’s Chicken Kitchen, a landmark in its own right.

Of the nearly 44,000 ballots cast across all four rounds in a bracket-style competition where the field was cut in half each time, Maryland Fried Chicken garnered more than 22,000 votes.

Maryland Fried Chicken is open from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, but customers are usually lining up around 10:30 a.m.

“We stay pretty busy the rest of the day,” Cieplowski said.

One of Cieplowskis children set up a business website so they could take online orders, but they do little advertising, preferring instead to rely on word-of-mouth and the nostalgia of generations of customers who grew up eating at Maryland Fried Chicken.

The restaurant’s location directly across the street from the Beaufort County Courthouse certainly doesn’t hurt, but Cieplowski said customers who vacation on Hilton Head will make the drive, too.

He estimated the restaurant goes through 450 to 500 pounds of chicken each day, plus pork chops, flounder and other menu options.

Here are some of the comments left by our readers on Facebook when we asked about the best fried chicken in Beaufort County:

• “Without a doubt Maryland fried.”

• “Absolutely, positively Maryland Fried Chicken.”

• “1st My momma!! 2nd Maryland Fried!”

• “Maryland Fried Chicken all day every day!!!!”

Restaurant history

Maryland Fried Chicken opened in Beaufort in 1969 as a franchise. The business started in the Orlando area in the early 1960s, when founder Albert Constantine decided the name would appeal to employees moving to Florida to work in the burgeoning aerospace industry.

By the mid-1970s, though, the restaurants were sold and became individually owned. Katherine Cieplowski’s father, Arnold King, managed and owned the Beaufort location until the Cieplowskis bought the business from him in the early 1990s. Katherine has worked at Maryland Fried Chicken since 1974 and Tim since 1986.

“As far as the chicken, everything’s exactly the same,” Tim Cieplowski explained. “We keep it old school.”

A supplier in Florida, an equally old family business, provides the ingredients — the same coating and marinades and dressings that were used when the business opened — but everything is prepared in-house by the Cieplowskis and their 13 employees.

“Everything’s freshly breaded,” Tim Cieplowski said. “We make our potato salad. We shred the cabbage for the cole slaw.”

On the occasion of the restaurant’s 50th anniversary in 2019, the dining room was spruced up and new counters installed. Other than that, the building has remained largely the same.

In 2008, the restaurant almost lost its landmark sign to a city ordinance mandating that any sign taller than 10 feet or mounted on a pole had to come down. Maryland Fried Chicken’s banner, featuring a school bus yellow hen and chick on a red background, eventually was declared to be historic and given a pass as long as the sign was restored.

Tim Cieplowski said he wanted to thank his customers for the votes.

“I was surprised we made it to the Top 8,” he said. “I thought it would be all newer, bigger, better, flashier. We were really humbled and surprised.”

If you go

Where: 111 Ribaut Road in Beaufort

Hours: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday

Phone: 843-524-8766

Website: http://mfc-beaufort.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/mfchicken