The little chain out of Greensboro, North Carolina did it again. Biscuitville has been voted America's best fast-food breakfast for the fourth consecutive year, beating out McDonald's, Chick-fil-A, and every other breakfast heavyweight you can name. As MSN reports, the family-owned chain keeps taking the crown despite having a fraction of the locations of the chains it's beating.

And I do mean a fraction. Biscuitville has somewhere around 70 to 80 locations, nearly all of them in North Carolina and Virginia. McDonald's and Chick-fil-A each run thousands of locations nationwide. So a regional David keeps winning a national slingshot contest four years running, and past some point you stop calling it an upset and start calling it a pattern.

What I think is going on is simple. Biscuitville makes biscuits from scratch, on-site, every 15 minutes through the morning. Not from a tub of par-baked discs that get reheated. Actual flour, actual butter, rolled and cut by hand, timed so a fresh batch comes out of the oven continuously. I've written before that I'd trust a tiny menu over a long one any day because a kitchen that only makes a few things makes them properly, and Biscuitville might be the purest example of that in fast food. The menu is biscuits. Biscuits with fried chicken, biscuits with bacon and egg, biscuits with country ham, biscuit sandwiches with jelly. They do a few platters and some sides and that's basically the whole catalog.

Now compare that to a chain trying to serve pancakes, burritos, three kinds of sandwiches, coffee drinks and lunch, all before the breakfast cutoff. Focus wins taste polls. You can see why.

The fresh-biscuit timing also creates the fast-food equivalent of a bakery smell, and people plan their mornings around it. There's a whole subculture of road-trippers, I count myself among them, who will route a drive through Virginia specifically to hit a Biscuitville in the morning. My version involved a detour outside Danville a few years back that added 40 minutes to my trip and was worth every single one of them. The bacon, egg and cheese was still warm enough that the cheese had gone fully soft, and I thought about it for roughly a week afterward. I'm not proud of that. I'm also not sorry.

Being family-owned puts Biscuitville in rare company in fast food, where most beloved regional brands eventually get swallowed by a holding company and quietly retooled. When a place still answers to a family instead of a board, I swear you can taste it.

Now, the obvious caveat. If you live outside the Carolinas and Virginia, none of this helps you on a Tuesday morning. That scarcity is part of the appeal, the same way Whataburger and In-N-Out and Culver's all benefit from being someone's hometown thing that outsiders have to pilgrimage for. But it also means the award is doing its real job, which is putting a small Southern chain on the radar of people who'd never otherwise hear of it.

So if you find yourself within 20 minutes of a Biscuitville anytime soon, and even if it's 40, go. Check the breakfast hours at your location, order whatever has country ham on it, and thank me from the road. Have you driven out of your way for a biscuit before, or is that just me? Every place has something worth the detour. This one just happens to have a trophy case.