Once-Popular Restaurant Chains That Now Barely Exist

There certainly isn't a dearth of places to get a bite to eat in the United States. There are more than 140,000 restaurants associated with a chain, and that accounts for fast food, fast casual, and nicer, sit-down establishments. While that climate has made for an American restaurant atmosphere that's been largely nationalized and homogenized, it also means that customers come to expect specific things and a certain level of quality from all of those networked eateries. And while it seems like there are way more than enough restaurant chains, there used to be even more, providing meals, drinks, and snacks around the week and around the clock to a grateful and recurring clientele.

And yet, everything changes. The U.S. is a big country with a lot of money and a lot of people. But tastes change, the economy booms and busts, and diners move on for whatever reason to other options, leaving even establishment and prolific restaurant operations to falter. Some chains no longer exist, while a few once-mighty and definitively American restaurants remain hanging on by a thread, down to just a few locations, or existing as a shadow of their former glory. Here are some once commonplace restaurants that are on the verge of extinction.

Rax Roast Beef has endured a lot of change and is now just the vestiges of what was once a juggernaut with 504 stores in 38 states. The original Springfield, Ohio, roast beef sandwich restaurant was called JAX Roast Beef in 1967, which Post Cereal bought and retitled RIX Roast Beef before expanding it. The growth came too quickly and the business almost closed down in 1972, until a multi-restaurant franchisee called RAC bought 10 locations, built it back up to 100, and in 1977 renamed it all Rax Roast Beef.

Seeking to compete with almost everyone else in the 1980s and early 1990s, Rax's menu exploded, adding baked potatoes, an expansive salad bar (like Wendy's one, which is no more), cheesesteaks, fish, ham, pocket sandwiches, and buffet options, and building the much-imitated solaria into its restaurants. All those introductions, part of a plan to establish itself as a high-end fast food chain, pushed away Rax's middle-class customer base, and it also led to the hemorrhaging of money. A group of executives bought out Rax in 1991 and shut down hundreds of locations. Less than half a dozen Rax are still open in a cluster of Ohio, Illinois, and Kentucky, selling a since scaled-back menu of mostly roast beef sandwiches.

After learning a lot about the economics of fast food, former Burger Chef and Wendy's franchisee Bill Van Domelen opened his own company that also sold burgers, french fries, and soft drinks called Hot n' Now. In fact, that's all Hot n' Now sold. Setting itself apart with its bare-bones approach, Hot n' Now offered no in-store seating and was a drive-through-only operation. Because it saved costs on real estate and labor, Hot n' Now could turn a profit with a streamlined and ultra-cheap menu. Standard burgers, fries, and beverages all cost just 39 cents a piece.

A regional favorite in the upper Midwest, Hot n' Now went national in 1990 after a purchase and aggressive expansion by PepsiCo. The simplified format didn't last long, with Pepsi executives ordering Hot n' Now outlets to test market products it intended to sell at one of its other subsidiaries, Taco Bell. Pepsi's affiliation with a new burger company in the western U.S. led to In-N-Out Burger switching to Coca-Cola, and after the closure of six franchised Florida spots and a lawsuit, Hot n' Now went cold. Independently owned by 1997, it went bankrupt. Hot n' Now started out with one restaurant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. As of 2025, it's back down to one restaurant, situated about 50 miles away in Sturgis, Michigan, although there are current plans to resurrect the brand.

The pervasive car culture of the 1950s resulted in a boom of drive-in style restaurants serving burgers and shakes to patrons who hung around the premises in their automobiles. McDonald's grew to an astounding number of locations after initially utilizing that business model, and so did since forgotten chains like Henry's Hamburgers. An outgrowth of the Chicago-based ice cream seller Bresler's 33 Flavors, the first Henry's opened in 1959 in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Neck and Neck with McDonald's in terms of national growth in the 1960s, there were more than 200 Henry's Hamburgers open by the end of that decade, which at one point was more than McDonald's could operate. The chain attracted crowds of customers with its menu of 15-cent burgers, 29-cent fish sandwiches, and 10-cent fries.

Financial and corporate restructuring at Bresler's led to the slow death of Henry's in the 1970s, with the parent company choosing to allocate its resources to the ice cream business at the expense of the burger operation. Henry's Hamburgers continued to contract until the present day, with just the original location in Benton Harbor, Michigan, still selling a classic drive-in menu of burgers, shakes, and frozen sodas.

At one point, the U.S. restaurant market could sustain a number of restaurant chains that offered a family friendly menu, prices, and environment along with long hours and a selection of pies. Many such coffee shop-diner-bakery hybrids have disappeared, including Bakers Square. Formerly an Iowa sandwiches-and-pie restaurant called Mrs. C's, Pillsbury's bought the operation, renamed it Poppin' Fresh Pies after its influential food mascot, and built it into a chain, which was known as Bakers Square after a 1983 sale to Village Inn operators VICORP.

Faced with ever decreasing patronage and higher real estate costs, Bakers Square's corporate parent entered bankruptcy protection in 2008, opting to right-size the operation by shutting down more than 50 of its restaurants. Peaking at 148 shops in 2001, 45 were still open by 2011, and as of 2025, that number is down to eight standalone Bakers Square restaurants. The company mostly now focuses on its original core business of pies, selling them out of 51 Famous Dave's and Tahoe Joe's restaurants.

Fried fish and other seafood became an established subset of the American fast food industry in the 1970s, thanks in large part to the good name of Arthur Treacher. He wasn't the founder or chef of Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips, but rather an actor well known for his stuffy, stereotypically British character roles and as the sidekick on "The Merv Griffin Show" who licensed his name to the Ohio-based chain that sold primarily fish and chips, strongly associated with England. The whitefish and chips started coming out of the fryers at the first Arthur Treacher's in 1969, and about 10 years later, it had grown into a gigantic nationwide chain of 826 restaurants.

Frozen fish company Mrs. Paul's Kitchen bought the operation in the late 1970s and sold it to Lumara Foods of America in 1982, which could only keep Arthur Treacher's above water for two years before a bankruptcy filing. The restaurant stayed in business but with an ever decreasing footprint, shrinking to just one location by 2021, in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. It has since attempted a couple of modest comebacks, such as a reinvention as a ghost kitchen with new owner Nathan's Famous, and opening two more standalone shops in Ohio.

Druther's is a diner in Campbellsville, Kentucky, the last remnant of a once mighty fast food operation. Burger Queen opened outside of the Cypress Gardens amusement park in 1956, selling primarily burgers, chicken, and shakes. The founders sold franchising rights to George Clark and Michael Gannon, who opened nine restaurants in Florida by 1963 before moving north to Clark's home of Kentucky. The pair focused on areas without a McDonald's toehold, and by the end of the 1960s, they'd opened 171 Burger Queen restaurants across seven states.

As it opened more royally named restaurants in small towns, the similarly functioning Dairy Queen filed a lawsuit, alleging trademark infringement. Burger Queen got to keep the name but in 1981 decided to forge ahead, adopting the name Druther's. Still competing with Dairy Queen for small-town customers, Druther's admitted defeat in 1990 and signed a deal to convert about 100 of its 145 outlets into DQs. The restaurants still carrying the Druther's branding disappeared in the 2000s, leaving just the one in Kentucky.

The Great Depression turned meat loaf into an American staple, but it really wasn't until the rise of Boston Market when that comfort food, along with mashed potatoes, ham, and rotisserie chicken, became the foundation of a fast food empire. Once known as Boston Chicken, Boston Market moved out of New England and into the rest of the United States in the early 1990s. At one point, there were more than 1,100 outlets serving up plated homestyle meals of slow-cooked meats and starchy sides. Boston Market was one of the most lucrative investments in fast food, with the value of the company's stock more than doubling upon its 1993 IPO. 

Customers packed Boston Market outlets as quickly as they could be built, prompting the company to build even more. By the 2010s, the heat and interest had died down, and Boston Market realized it had over-saturated the market. Suffering from financial problems that naturally led to stores closing, Boston Market comprised 460 restaurants by 2015.

Once one of the fastest-growing chains, Boston Market was among the fastest-disappearing operations of the 2020s. In 2023, just 285 were left, and that shrunk by 90% within a year. As of 2025, only a handful of domestic Boston Markets remain in 16 states and territories, while the company is looking elsewhere for business, opening a new branch in India.

Cosi started out in France in the late 1980s and entered the crowded American sandwich sector in the 1990s, differentiating itself from the likes of Subway with its fancier fare that included flatbread-based entrees and Tuscan-style pizza. Very soon after vying for a spot in the U.S., Cosi began to suffer from financial issues. The American wing didn't earn a profit from 1998 to 2015, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2016. In spite of that, Cosi had still managed to hit 151 locations by 2008. While it was acquired by a private ownership concern, Cosi still couldn't reach its potential, and both filed for bankruptcy and went up for sale once again in 2020. By that point, only 15 Cosi shops remained.

The company aimed to stay alive by transitioning from a restaurant into a catering service. But only 12 cafés, almost entirely in the northeastern corridor, still sell to the public at-large.

The biggest restaurant chain in America in the 1960s was Howard Johnson's, notable for its menu of burgers, ice cream, and fried clams. Operating hundreds of roadside diners brought in so much money that in 1969 the company launched The Ground Round, a slightly more upscale but still family-oriented casual dining spinoff. With circulating mascot Bingo the Clown offering free popcorn and peanuts to diners and cartoons unspooled on giant screens, the restaurant offered plated burgers, sandwiches, and other American pub-style fare. Following a series of acquisitions and changing corporate arrangements, the Ground Round peaked with 215 eateries in 1988.

A victim of its own success, the Ground Round pushed the door open for similar chains like Applebee's and Chili's to siphon off its business throughout the 1990s. After the restaurants fell deeply into debt, owner Boston Ventures Management shut down all company-owned locations and one of its largest franchisees entered bankruptcy. Two attempts to revive The Ground Round as a sports bar in 2013 and 2021 didn't take, and by 2024, there was no more chain. Four independent Ground Round restaurants stayed open in North Dakota and Ohio.

Accurately predicting the rise of affordable, casual steakhouses in the 1990s, Pizza Hut franchisee Jamie B. Coulter opened Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon in 1989. Ultimately going head-to-head with the likes of Texas Roadhouse and Outback, Lone Star served giant steaks, big platters of seafood, and massive salads, because things are just bigger in Texas, although the restaurant was based in North Carolina. Within three years, Coulter had opened two more steakhouses, and by 2000, there were around 265 Lone Star Steakhouses.

The rapid growth halted by 2002, when the company endured a $1.14 million loss in six months after failing to acquire the high-end Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steak House. The economic crisis of 2008 and 2009 led to less disposable income for millions of Americans to dine out on, and 27 of the 179 Lone Star Steakhouses closed as a result. The company continued to lose money, and by the end of 2016, the beloved U.S. steakhouse began to disappear – just 16 restaurants were left. Lone Star Steakhouse no longer operates any locations in the contiguous U.S., and the only outlet left is in the territory of Guam.

Before fast food chains went national as a matter of course in the latter decades of the 20th century, they would mainly expand enough to dominate a region of the United States. From the 1920s to the 1940s, one of the most prominent regional fast food operations was a burger joint called Kewpee. Named after the big-eyed, Kewpie porcelain doll, which reached mega-fad status in the 1910s, the initial outlet, Kewpee Hotel Hamburgs, set up shop in Flint, Michigan, in 1923. Within five years, it had expanded into Ohio and Wisconsin with the aid of franchisees. 

Kewpee kept its offerings inexpensive and simple, rarely offering much more than single and double hamburgers and cheeseburgers, fries, shakes, and malts, and its square-shaped burgers inspired Wendy's. Kewpee was so affordable that during the Great Depression, it did so well that it could expand, bursting into around 400 outlets, mostly in the Midwest, by the early 1940s.

Kewpee persisted in its home region, but in lower numbers. Today, less than five remain open, including three in the Lima, Ohio, area, where the chain has been present since 1928.

America's top casual dining chains dominate the restaurant world today, and the informal, easy-going restaurant style offering abundance, kids meals, and cocktails was popularized by food entrepreneur Norman Brinker in the 1970s. One of his first projects was the Irish-style pub evoking Bennigan's, premiering in 1976 with a menu of familiar and hearty burgers, steaks, and sandwiches, such as the Monte Cristo, which the chain became famous for.

There were more than 300 Bennigan's in operation in 32 states around the U.S. in 2008, the year that the country faced a critical economic downturn and parent company Metromedia Restaurant Group filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Following a successful financial reorganization, Metromedia could afford to keep only 70 Bennigan's restaurants open. As of 2025, just six original-format Bennigan's in the middle U.S. are still serving up steaks, sandwiches, and drinks. However, about limited-menu and express-style 30 Bennigan's On the Fly exist in casinos, airports, food truck pods, and travel centers.

Cafeterias are most commonly linked to institutional settings like schools and hospitals. But the format in which customers go through a line and are served portions of items of their choice is a viable dining-out option in many areas, particularly in the South. At one time, Piccadilly was one of the biggest names in cafeteria dining, which offers an experience like a buffet but without all the secrets. The chain began with a single line-up in Baton Rouge in 1932, and then spread across the southeast.

It boasted 131 units in 1998 when it bought out its larger and closest competitor, Morrison's, converting most of those 142 locations into Piccadilly restaurants. Despite the potential for double the business, and opening up emergency and school-based meal services, Piccadilly faltered quickly and severely. Within five years, all but 41 cafeterias had closed, and Piccadilly filed for bankruptcy. It recovered, but then entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection again in 2012. A more modest operation has persisted, with 27 standard Piccadilly cafeterias situated primarily in Louisiana and Georgia, as well as two to-go spots and one Morrison's.