ralph124c, the problem has not been just the past four years. The statistic I quoted about 60% of all restaurants closing within three years comes from a study done in 2005. I suspect that something like this has been true during all the modern period of American dining and has nothing to do with the economy.
The modern period of American dining began, I’m told, in 1969 (according to one arbitrary definition), when a particular Chinese restaurant in New York quit giving its Chinese menu just to Chinese customers and let everyone chose their food from a translated version of that menu. There had been preliminary signs that things would change. Julia Child’s first PBS show began in 1963, and much of the point of it was that anyone could cook anything and could eat anything. There weren’t even any chain pizza restaurants until the mid-1960’s in the U.S. In the mid-1950’s, in most of the country you couldn’t get pizza at all. In Chinese restaurants you could only order a very small number of items unless you were Chinese yourself, and you had to ask for a menu that was in Chinese. Most of the cuisines that restaurants serve today were unknown. You didn’t eat ethnic food unless that was your own ethnicity. The expensive restaurants which did a lot of expense account meals were basically just French or steak restaurants.
But that was in 1969, when I was in my junior and serior year of high school and living way out in the sticks, so I knew nothing about it at the time. The first I really encountered it was in 1981 when I moved to the area I live in now to start a job with enough money to be able to eat out reasonably often. Restaurants are now quite a different thing from what they were fifty or sixty years ago. They aren’t like grocery stores or gas stations, which expect to be able to serve most people who pass them. They now are often aimed at niche markets, and sometimes they misunderstand that market. It’s not that surprising that they often don’t last very long.
Several restaurants in the mall I work at have done a “midnight flit” after 5 on a Friday, when the mall management has left for the weekend. Many of them have left behind lots and lots of food…mall management was using jars of spaghetti sauce left behind from one place as employee gifts that Christmas! Another one turned off their freezers but left the lights burning. The mall cleaning staff had to dispose of the ruined chicken, and apparently that end of the food court was a very unpleasant place to be that day. Some places have failed to tell their employees that they will not have a job the next day, and the first the mall knows of it is when there is a gaggle of cooks and waiters standing around outside the door. One place that did the midnight clear-out was a popular national chain that hasn’t closed any other locations around here and was always busy from breakfast through the late afternoon…long lines all the time, probably the most popular place in the mall. Security said they saw them hauling out some equipment late at night and were told they were doing some equipment upgrading…and they never came back. Another extremely popular restaurant out in town closed abruptly over a rent dispute, told the newspapers they were negotiating on a newer, better space…for months they kept stringing the news along, giving out details on their new location and then just…gave up. Someone else opened up in their old space and is doing extrememly well, so maybe they were just fibbing all along about the reason they closed.
One of Kentucky’s landmark restaurants, Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville, closed this past Friday unexpectedly. It seems especially nuts considering that they do most of their business around breakfast time and often have an hour wait on weekends for breakfast. They were having some employee issues that were picked up by the press, but nothing a popular restaurant like that couldn’t handle.
The story, from what I’ve picked up online and from people who know the principal players, is that the owner (the titular Lynn) is batshit insane and a spiteful tyrant, and that it would be consistent with her personality to close on a Friday just to deny her employees their weekend take as an extra little “fuck you” on their way out the door.
So it’s always possible that the people at the top making the decisions are simply not reasonable people.
All Dairy Queens aren’t closed; there is one on the way to where I work. There was also one near where I grew up that closed, but the people who bought it just renamed it “Burgers and Shakes” or something and served the exact same menu, right down to the Blizzards.
I’ve never seen it with employees doing this–I’ve seen it multiple times with an owner who wants to drop the franchise and make the restaurant their own. Burger King one day, Bill’s Famous Burgers the next day.
We had a Denny’s by the jail downtown that closed for a bit, reopened as another very small local chain and then closed again reoped as “Big Bang Coffee Shop” with signs that read “Just as good as Dennys” (and it actually was–Denny’s is safe and adequate, but never good) and then signs that said “Denny’s coming back soon!” And now it is back to being a Denny’s.
It’s not limited to chains or smaller restaurants, either. Back in the late 1990s, New York City’s “Official All-Star Cafe” (with Joe Montana and Wayne Gretzky among its original owners, IIRC) had one of the owners enter the restaurant one night and announce that it would be closing for good at closing time; this was the first that anybody had heard about plans to close it.
This is something that I’ve seen a few times: a restaurant will close, ostensibly for renovations, but no work is ever done and the place just collects dust until it’s boarded up a few months later.
Is this a common excuse to fool creditors/landlords? One of the restaurants in my local mall, Pauli Moto’s Asian Bistro, did this only two years after opening (never ate there, but I gathered from the reviews that the food was mediocre.)
There’s a restaurant around here that shut down “for renovations” for a couple months – must have been quite the renovations. Then they upped their prices when they reopened by around 20%. I have a suspicion the reason they waited to up the prices until they renovated was not only so the customers would forget the old prices, but also so they wouldn’t have to repaint the hand-painted sign with all the new prices, but come in with a brand new sign.
Even better, a furniture store near me closed, and a request for a liquor license was posted on the window, with the name of a restaurant supposedly on its way. Nothing ever opened, and now the place is for rent again. That is closing even before opening.
We went to a Marie Callendars to cash in free birthday pie to discover it closed. Based on signs they told neither their staff nor a group who had reserved it for an event.
The local restaurant that closed after six months was mismanaged into the ground by a couple who had just enough experience and ‘fame’ to be very full of themselves.
I’ve heard they are actually rude to people from our town (where their restaurant failed) at their original location in the next town over.
Dairy Queen seems to have very loose franchise control. Unlike most places that lease out a name, look, shared promotion and such, DQ lets franchisees run the places any way they want, which can vary from a better-than-average burger restaurant to awful.
This, and carrying forward to today’s plethora of TV cooking shows, is a big part of the problem IMHO. People watch experienced professional chefs preparing a single dish (or perhaps a full meal), under ideal conditions, with all the tedious, time-consuming prep work edited out/down to fit into the TV time constraints, and think, “I can do that!” And maybe they really are good cooks themselves, with good ideas, and their friends rave about their creations. But they’ve never cooked in a restaurant themselves. So sure, they can prepare a perfect [insert dish name here], but can they do it 15 minutes or less while simultaneously preparing five other, different dishes, along with all the sides and accoutrements, for the other guests at the table, and make everything come off of the stove and onto the plates at the same time so that the server can grab everything at once? It boils down to not realizing that cooking a single meal that is going to be shared amongst several people is vastly different from cooking several different meals for a group of individuals.
You know, this goes a long way in explaining why I hated Chinese food as a kid in the 1970s. My family didn’t eat out often, but a lot of the time when we did my mom, the queen of bland cooking, insisted on Chinese. I’d always end up ordering a fried egg sandwich from the limited “American” section of the menu, because from what I could see “Chinese food” all consisted of a plate of rice topped with limp bean sprouts and celery and maybe some bits of pork or chicken, with some variant of sweet & sour sauce. I was much older before I ever discovered there’s some damn tasty Chinese food out there.
This. I’ve been working in the business, in the same town, for nearly 30 years, and I’ve made a habit of perusing the restaurant “help wanted” ads even when I’m not looking for work. It can be educational. For years, there was a popular Greek restaurant in my town that was almost constantly advertising for cooks and servers. After a while, you start to realize that there must be a good reason why a place can’t keep employees, and it’s usually either because the owner is fire-happy, or people just can’t stand working for them. Eventually, I started encountering people who had worked at that place, and they all had the same stories to tell. It basically boiled down to the owners, a married couple, being native Greeks who believed that all Americans are stupid (actually coming out and saying so), and treated their employees accordingly.
And right now, there’s a “fine dining” establishment that opened here a couple years ago, and judging by the frequency of the ads on Craigslist, that place just can’t keep help either.
These are the owners who, when they finally have to close up, explain it with, “I just couldn’t find good help.” Which, in reality, means, “I just couldn’t find good people who were also willing to put up with my unreasonable ass.”
But even if the owner is a completely reasonable person, they can still run into a personnel problem if they fail to consider the local market. Particularly if they want to open a “fine dining” establishment in a smallish town. Let’s say you’re a 5-star chef, trained at great restaurants in the big city, and you want to come back to your hometown and open a 5-star type of restaurant. If the town doesn’t already have several fine dining establishments, how are you going to find help that has fine dining experience? How many of the local diner, steakhouse, and Denny’s cooks do think know French cooking? You’re going to need to start advertising for help out of town, at which point you discover that the kinds of people you’re looking for aren’t willing to work for small-town restaurant wages.
Then there’s failure to change with the times. When I first moved to this town in 1983, there was an excellent restaurant that had already been successful for decades. The food, service, and atmosphere were all excellent. And expensive. It specifically catered to the older, more affluent crowd, right down to still hiring actual “lounge singers” for the lounge into the 1990s. And that worked for a good long while. But by the time I was an adult, the place had built a reputation among my peers as being “our parents’ place”. We all ate at less expensive places, and drank in the bars that had live rock & roll bands. So this place ended up with a regular clientele that just got older and older, and wasn’t being infused with new blood because they were doing nothing to attract new blood. My best friend worked there for years, eventually resigning toward the end of the place’s decline. Talking about it afterwards, he said, “We used to joke about checking the obituaries to see which of our customers had died each week, but after a while it stopped being a joke, because they really were dying off.” He said the place made an attempt toward the end to attract a younger crowd, but it was way too little, way too late. Maybe it wasn’t a “sudden closing” like the OP is asking about, but given the landmark status this place had around here, it felt like it to a lot of people. One day, the place was all boarded up, and eventually got demolished and had a bank built on the site.
Burgers and Shakes is what I was told that our Fazoli’s building was going to be turned into, but the name of the place is simply The Cook Out. Does anyone else here have a place with that name in their area? If not, you are missing a lot at least in my opinion.
God bless you always!!!
Holly
P.S. Last month a Bo Jangles opened up in my area too and so far they have been good too! Their chicken and macaroni and cheese is awesome!
There’s a Denneys that closed unexpectedly. On the intersection of two main streets, across from a very popular bar, and there is basically no similar competition within miles, other than a couple of fast food places. I was shocked, utterly shocked, to find it closed. It’s like going to the zoo and finding the monkey habitat empty…why??
DQ just down the street is currently closed, but as far as I know he’ll be opening again in the spring, as usual. DQ in the mall a couple towns over is still open (or was last week, anyway).
There was a very good restaurant down in Norfolk that solved that problem by not telling anyone - even their employees - they were closing until after they locked up on their final day of business…
If they did that to me, I’d leave, all right - without waiting for the check.
There is a restaurant building on Corbin Ave here in the Valley. It is fairly large and nice. In the 10 years it has existed, it has hosted no fewer than 5 restaurants. 3 Chinese, 1 Italian and now a BBQ place. It seems like a good spot. You can see it plainly from the road, lots of parking…
I have been in it a couple of times, under different owners, and they were always good. But they always fail. The BBQ place is circling the drain as we speak (although it was successful in it’s previous location).
Location, location, location is very real. Although what makes a good location alludes me. But I think people should refrain from opening restaurants where all that came before have failed.
Many of the fast food restaurants in my town are along the same stretch of the same street, and most of them have done quite well over the years. But there was one spot in that stretch that hosted a Wendy’s, then a Rax, and then a Jack in the Box. All failed, though Wendy’s and Jack in the Box* later opened stores in other locations that have ended up doing well. Rax has since, at the corporate level, reduced the number of stores in the chain and didn’t bother opening a new one here.
The problem: The location is on a three-lane, one-way street, just past an intersection with traffic lights. But between the intersection and the restaurant location, there is a slight curve in the one-way street, and thanks to that curve and the intervening trees, you can see neither the building nor its signage from the intersection. By the time you see it, you’re right on top of it, and unless you’re in the far left lane, you’re not going to be able to turn safely into the parking lot. If you’d been specifically intending to visit the restaurant on that spot you would have changed lanes earlier, but if you had no specific place in mind it was just simpler to continue on past and hit up the McDonald’s, KFC, Arby’s, Taco Bell, or Burger King a little further down the road. The location hosts an auto parts store now.
*The Jack in the Box store at that location had the added misfortune of opening just a few months before the e. coli scare in the '90s.
