A banner reading “Empire Buffet Coming Soon” has gone up outside the freestanding restaurant building at 130 Black Horse Pike in Audubon, signaling a third buffet tenant in roughly two decades for a property that has struggled to keep an operator in place. The 10,366-square-foot pad site sits along Route 168 in front of Audubon Crossings, the shopping center anchored by Walmart, and it most recently housed Tang Asian Cuisine before that restaurant closed earlier this year.
The coming tenant was first reported by 42 Freeway, according to NJ.com, which noted that no opening date has yet been announced for Empire Buffet. Tang Asian Cuisine is now marked as permanently closed on Google, according to the same report. The building itself spans more than 10,000 square feet, per documentation from the Wolfson Group, which also identifies the pad site's exact location along Route 168 directly in front of the main shopping center.
A Building Built for Buffets From the Start
The structure wasn't repurposed for buffet dining as an afterthought — it was built for it. The freestanding building was originally developed in the mid-2000s to house a Golden Corral restaurant following the 2005 opening of Audubon Crossings, according to the Mall Hall of Fame blog, which traces the property's construction back to the shopping center's original buildout. After Golden Corral shut down, the space sat vacant for years before Tang Asian Cuisine revived it in February 2024, per NJ.com's reporting.
Tang's buffet offered sushi, hibachi, crawfish, and crab legs for roughly $20 per person, according to a post in the South Jersey Food Scene Facebook group, which also noted the restaurant's closure in 2026. The same post details Tang's brief operational run before it shuttered. Tang also operates a sister location along South Delsea Drive in Vineland, giving the outgoing operator a broader regional footprint even as the Audubon storefront went dark.
Audubon Crossings' Retail Pull
Audubon Crossings itself is a 388,465-square-foot power center built in 2005 on the site of the former Black Horse Pike Shopping Center, an open-air plaza, in a $40 million redevelopment according to the Mid Atlantic Real Estate Journal. The center is anchored by a 150,111-square-foot Walmart alongside Marshalls, Ross Dress for Less, Chick-fil-A, and Sonic, with Five Below planned, pulling shoppers from across Camden County and nearby Philadelphia. Route 168 near Nicholson Road, right along the Audubon Crossings outparcels, carries more than 18,000 vehicles a day, giving the pad site heavy pass-by exposure.
Buffet Operators Have Come and Gone Locally
Buffet operators have also come and gone at the Audubon property: Golden Corral closed before Tang Asian Cuisine later took over the site.
Empire Buffet is not a single local storefront but a multi-state concept, with retail transaction panel data from Iceflower tracking 14 locations across 13 states as of 2026. That footprint suggests the brand is betting on the Audubon property succeeding where two prior buffet tenants ultimately did not. For now, the banner outside 130 Black Horse Pike offers the only public signal of the restaurant's plans, with no confirmed opening date yet announced.
