photo by: Mike Yoder

Panda Garden, 1500 W. Sixth St.

At an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, you know you have gotten your money’s worth when they replace the general’s chicken with a peace treaty. I’m not sure I ever quite got to that point at Lawrence’s Panda Garden restaurant, and now we have little time left to get there. After 30 years in business, Panda Garden is closing at the end of the month.

Owner Lucy White told me a deal has been struck to sell the Panda Garden property at 1500 W. Sixth St. to an out-of-town buyer who plans to open another restaurant at the location. I didn’t get other details from White about the pending restaurant. White, to be honest, was having a hard enough time discussing the decision to close Panda Garden after three decades in business.

“I have been very emotional,” White said. “We’ve had such a good run. We have so many, many, many loyal friends that have come from this business.”

photo by: Mike Yoder

Panda Garden, 1500 W. Sixth St.

White came to America from Taiwan more than 30 years ago. Eventually, she would bring her family members to America. Brothers, a sister and other relatives of White’s all work at the business, and also used to work at the Plum Tree, a restaurant on south Iowa Street that the family also operated until it closed in 2008.

White said that while the decision to sell was not easy, she said the family made the decision for the right reasons.

“It is really hard work,” she said of running the restaurant. “It takes a lot of dedication and devotion, and we want to do it well or we don’t want to do it.”

Lucy White, owner and proprietor of Panda & Plum Garden, 1500 W. Sixth St.

For those of you not familiar with Panda Garden, it is not your traditional Chinese buffet restaurant. Indeed, the buffet has been offered at times, but it has gained a following from its extensive made-to-order menu. The restaurant offers up some Americanized dishes, but also has a menu that is more focused on traditional Chinese dishes, or so I’m told. (I’ll be honest, my Chinese dining usually involves arming myself with a half-dozen egg rolls and going into battle with General Tso’s chicken.)

The Panda Garden’s closing will mark the end of one of the older restaurants in Lawrence. Over the years, I’ve had occasion to try to keep track of what restaurants have some of the older lineage. Panda Garden is part of a group that certainly qualifies as an old-timer, but it is not the oldest. The last time I did any real research on this topic was back in 2014 when Buffalo Bob’s Smokehouse closed in downtown Lawrence. It was perhaps the oldest downtown restaurant at the time, and one of the older in the city. For that story, I checked out an old Polk City Directory from 1977 to see what restaurants were listed then that still exist today. Before you read the next paragraph, make your guesses on the five oldest restaurants I found in Lawrence at that time.

In no particular order, they are: La Tropicana in North Lawrence; The Flamingo Club (yes, it serves food) in North Lawrence; the Wagon Wheel Cafe in the Oread neighborhood, the Taco Bell on 23rd Street and the McDonald’s on 23rd Street.

In other news and notes from around town:

• Not that folks in political circles need anything more to argue about, but this report probably will provide more fodder nonetheless. A new ranking is out that shows Kansas taxpayers have one of the best returns on investments of state tax dollars of any state in the country.

The folks at the financial website WalletHub have been doing a series of reports related to taxes and state governments. They came out with one today that tries to tie it all together and tries to measure the bang for the buck that residents get from their state and local taxes.

As I frequently caution, these rankings have a lot of subjectivity in them. But WalletHub generally uses good data sources, and it is a nonpartisan group. It is not trying to make one party look good or bad, so I think it is worth passing along.

The WalletHub study found Kansas has the 11th best return on investment of any state in the country. WalletHub looked at about 20 factors and other rankings to determine the quality level of state services. Those included rankings of the state’s public school system, its universities, its hospitals, life expectancy averages, health insurance premiums, crime rates, vehicle accident rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, household incomes, job growth totals, poverty rates, rankings of road conditions, commute times, air pollution measures, and a few other factors. It weighted those and combined those to come up with an overall “government services rank.” The study found Kansas had the 16th highest government services rank.

In case you are wondering, middle America was a mixed bag when it came to good government service. Here’s a look at how some other states from our region scored in the government services category:

• No. 4: Iowa

• No. 6. Nebraska

• No. 14. Colorado

• No. 16 Kansas

• No. 34 Missouri

• No. 45 Oklahoma

The WalletHub folks then looked at the total amount of taxes paid in each state and calculated a per capita tax number by using the adult population of each state. They call that their “total taxes per capita rank.” Despite Kansas making significant changes to reduce the amount of taxes business owners pay, Kansas was still middle of the pack on that ranking. Kansas ranked No. 24. Here’s a look at others in the region, with the lower the number meaning the lower amount of taxes per capita:

• No. 4: Missouri

• No. 12: Colorado

• No. 17: Oklahoma

• No. 24: Kansas

• No. 29: Iowa

• No. 28 Nebraska

So, if you are scoring at home, Missouri collects a lot less tax per person than Kansas does, but its quality of government service also is deemed to be less than what is offered in Kansas.

Next, WalletHub combined the two measurements — quality of service and amount of taxes paid — to create a return on investment ranking for each state. As I noted earlier, Kansas ranked No. 11 in that category. That is good, but it wasn’t good enough to be ranked top in our region. Many in our region fared well. Here’s a look:

• No. 3: Colorado

• No. 7: Missouri

• No. 9: Iowa

• No. 10: Nebraska

• No. 11: Kansas

• No. 33: Oklahoma

So, make of that what you will. There are a number of things the ranking didn’t measure — budget deficits, bond ratings and other measures of financial soundness come to mind — but it is interesting to see where Kansas and our neighbors rank, and to think about the tax policies and spending decisions that play into those rankings.

In case you are wondering, the top five states in the ranking are:

• No. 1: New Hampshire

• No. 2: South Dakota

• No. 3: Colorado

• No. 4: Virginia

• No. 5: Florida

The bottom five are:

• No. 46: Delaware

• No. 47: New York

• No. 48: Hawaii

• No. 49: Alaska

• No. 50: North Dakota

You can see the full report here.

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