COVID-19 has hit all businesses hard, but few have been as pummeled as the restaurant
industry.
And so, with great sadness, we're seeing the demise of our favorite restaurants.
These are the restaurants that are going out of business due to the pandemic, so far.
Souplantation opened its first San Diego restaurant in 1978, back when all-you-can-eat salad bars
and self-service buffets were all the rage.
With a focus on home-style soups and fresh salads, the chain spread throughout California
before expanding into the southern U.S., under the name Sweet Tomatoes.
Even before most restaurants began closing down to contain the spread of COVID-19, Garden
Fresh Corporation, which had owned the chain since 1983, was being proactive.
On March 10, CEO John Haywood temporarily shuttered all Souplantation and Sweet Tomato
locations, promising to reopen as soon as possible.
Unfortunately, the possibilities of an all-you-can-eat buffet staying alive in the age of COVID were
close to nil, given federal recommendations against self-service operations.
"While many restaurants have stayed open for takeout and delivery during the stay-at-home
order, buffet-type businesses, like San Diego-based Souplantation, have remained closed."
Even once reopening was underway, customers were sure to be squeamish about mingling at
the communal 50-foot salad bar.
Meanwhile, the restaurants' signature concept couldn't be adapted to either table service
or delivery.
As Haywood confessed to Restaurant Business, revenues were plummeting as the company spent
more than $1 million per week, even with their doors closed.
With no reprieve on the horizon, Haywood admitted in May that the temporary closure would be
permanent, resulting in the closure of 97 Souplantation and Sweet Tomatoes locations,
leaving 4,400 workers unemployed.
Equally renowned for its owners as well as its burgers, the Boston-based Wahlburgers
franchise was started by chef Paul Wahlberg and his more famous siblings, Mark and Donnie
Wahlberg, both of whom cut their teeth as boy band wonders before becoming actors, and
then restaurateurs.
Since opening their first location in Massachusetts in 2011, the trio has watched their chain
grow.
There are currently close to 40 locations throughout the U.S., as well as in Canada
and Germany.
But the pandemic is apparently causing the company to totally lose its foothold in one
state.
In 2016, the first Florida Walhburgers opened in downtown Orlando, with a block party and
cameo appearances by two out of three Walhberg brothers.
"I think, God, they did a world-class job.
The restaurant was absolutely amazing.
The event was fantastic.
They pulled out all the stops."
A second location in the Orlando neighborhood of Waterford Lakes followed in 2017, with
plans being made to eventually grow the number of Florida outposts to 20.
Burger business was booming until the coronavirus began to hit Florida hard.
According to Wahlburger's website, the majority of its restaurants throughout the country
were either only partially open or temporarily closed during summer 2020.
However, on June 25, ClickOrlando.com reported that the franchisee for the downtown Wahlburgers
would be closing up shop for good.
Less than a month later, the Waterford Lakes restaurant also announced that it had served
its final burger.
With that one-two punch, the Sunshine State is now bereft of Wahlburgers.
On the opposite end of the celebrity food chain from Wahlburgers is Villa Blanca.
The Beverly Hills eatery is one the glitziest jewels in the restaurant empire of multi-hyphenate
actress and entrepreneur Lisa Vanderpump and her husband Ken Todd.
The couple inaugurated Villa Blanca in 2009, a year before Vanderpump was catapulted into
the reality star firmanament as an original cast member of The Real Housewives of Beverly
Hills.
An unofficial Real Housewives clubhouse, Villa Blanca was popular with celebrity gawkers
and fans of Lisa's spin-off show, Vanderpump Rules.
At least it was until March 2020, when Vanderpump temporarily closed all of her restaurants.
When the decision was made to permanently shutter Villa Blanca, the celebrity news machine
went into overdrive.
Among the most contagious gossip was the rumor that the restaurant was in financial straits
following a discrimination lawsuit.
In a Daily Mail interview, the star dissed the, quote, "many untrue articles," claiming
the real reason for closing was a lethal combination of a rent hike paired with the pandemic.
Vanderpump reportedly hopes to resurrect Villa Blanca in the future.
But for now she's focused on reopening her other West Hollywood restaurants, where she
intends to transfer many Villa Blanca employees.
In the meantime, she's making the best of home-quarantine by filming "A Very Silly Cooking
Show," with her daughter, Pandora.
With pioneering chef Paul Prudhomme's death in 2015, many feared for the future of his
legendary New Orleans restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen.
He has been noted as one of the United States' very first celebrity chefs.
"Welcome.
I'm glad you decided to spend some time with me and my pots and pans.
I'd like to talk to you about Louisiana cooking."
When Prudhomme and his wife Kay opened their French Quarter restaurant in 1979, few imagined
that their unpretentious neighborhood establishment would be ground zero of a major Cajun and
Creole food revolution.
As food journalist Ian McNulty told NPR,
"In a city famous for restaurants, [K-Paul's] really stood out...tak[ing] the food of the
Louisiana countryside and mak[ing] it this worldwide obsession."
According to McNulty, K-Paul's was all set to continue operations after Prudhomme's death,
with Pruhomme's niece running the restaurant and her husband taking over chef duties.
The unexpected pandemic, and the resulting drop in tourism, left them unable to sustain
that goal.
On July 13, K-Paul's demise was breaking news and it broke many hearts.
Fans may take some comfort in the legion of Prudhomme cookbooks and TV series that survive,
as well as his namesake Creole-Cajun seasonings.
America's other "first-ever superchef," Wolfgang Puck, has also fallen on hard times during
the pandemic, with the recent shutterings of The Source and Five Sixty.
This double-whammy is all the more shocking considering the size and heft of Puck's business
empire.
With 110 fine dining and casual restaurants, in addition to catering and licensing deals,
his total annual revenues were estimated to be around $650 million in 2018.
Five Sixty opened in 2009, at the top of Dallas' iconic Reunion Tower, the restaurant's name
having referred to its height of 560 feet above ground level.
Dining on dumplings and lacquered Chinese duckling with the spectacular view, quickly
became a must-see Dallas dining destination, but that stretch of success sadly came to
an end in late April with the news that the COVID-19 pandemic would be permanently shuttering
the restaurant.
In mid-May, Puck's D.C.-based The Source followed suit after 13 years in business.
The Asian fusion restaurant had marked Puck's initial foray into the nation's capital.
A DC power dining hotspot, The Source spearheaded a changing of the culinary guard, weaning
locals off steakhouses and onto the izakaya bar grub that made The Source a perennial
favorite.
The closings have taken their toll on Puck who confessed to The Hollywood Reporter that
he'd been stress-eating a lot of chocolate, admitting,
"I think I've gained 10 pounds these past few weeks."
David Chang is another celebrity restaurateur who suffered a double dose of coronavirus
closures.
In the aughts, Chang's Momofuku restaurant group caused a small tsunami in the restaurant
industry, with Chang's disarming mix of lo-fi and high-end elements blurring the lines between
fine dining and fast casual.
And yet, as Eater noted in its article about the closures, despite a, quote, "billionaire
investor, an international footprint, and the name recognition of one of the country's
most celebrated chefs of the past two decades," Momofuku hasn't been immune to the onslaught
of COVID-19.
"It's not just Momofuku.
There are so many other businesses that need help.
It's every single restaurant and small business in the service sector."
On May 13, the group, which owns 16 restaurants and two multi-city chains, announced the closure
of Momofuku Nishi in NYC and Momofuku CCDC in Washington, D.C.
After the closures, Chang confessed during a tearful episode of his podcast,
"I'm still at war with this decision.
It's not ever going to sit right with me and at the same time, I know exactly why we need
to do it.
From a cerebral level, I definitely understand it, from an emotional level, it's never quit,
ever."
Upon opening its Greenwich Village doors in 1984, Gotham Bar & Grill became the template
for a new kind of fine American dining, in which French elegance collided with a New
American cuisine celebrating seasonal, local ingredients, a radical concept at the time.
Under the helm of cutting-edge chef Alfred Portale, the restaurant racked up rave reviews
and multiple Michelin stars.
In 2019, Portale stepped down from his position as the chef at Gotham, paving the way for
a new era for the storied restaurant.
But Gotham barely had time to find a new groove when COVID-19 hit New York City.
As restaurants began temporarily shutting down, Gotham announced that it would be serving
its last supper on March 14.
Edward McCrady's tavern first opened in 1778, where it was the hub of post-Revolutionary
social life in downtown Charleston.
Illustrious early customers included the likes of George Washington.
Centuries later, in 1993 McCrady's reopened as a restaurant, which went through multiple
phases, and chefs, until 2006 when along came Sean Brock.
Brock transformed McCrady's kitchen into a laboratory of molecular gastronomy, where
he carried out unorthodox experiments using local line-caught catfish, pasture-raised
pork, and herbs and edible flowers raised on the roof.
In doing so, Brock single-handedly put Charleston on the culinary map while leading a hard-core
revival of Southern cooking known as "lardcore."
Although McCrady's survived Brock's departure to Nashville in 2018, COVID-19 brought the
establishment's long life to a definitive end in late April.
In 1933, an Austin bootlegger, country singer, and yodeler named Kenneth Threadgill celebrated
the end of Prohibition by standing in line all night to be the first person in the country
to get a beer license.
He then transformed the Gulf gas station he'd acquired into an after hours bar for musicians.
Threadgill's was on its way to becoming a local institution by the mid-'1960s, when
a University of Texas student by the name of Janis Joplin started playing blues on her
autoharp on folk nights.
Threadgill's had fallen on hard times by 1981, when Eddie Wilson scooped it up.
A music promoter with hippie leanings, Wilson transformed the iconic Austin building into
a music venue and restaurant featuring his own mother's Southern-style comfort food.
In recent times, however, business had soured with Austinite foodies increasingly forsaking
the restaurant's chicken-fried steak and meatloaf for the more innovative-seeming fusion restaurants
elsewhere in town.
When the pandemic struck, Wilson decided it was time to retire.
In mid-April, he put Threadgill's up for sale and its collection of musical memorabilia
up for auction.
It was a bittersweet goodbye to an Austin institution.
The 76-year-old Wilson confessed to the Austin American-Statesman,
"I've been in a lot of roll-around and tumbling brawls, but I've never been this old.
This whole pandemic has been like a kick in the gut that bent me over."
In 83 years of business, Louis' Restaurant survived its share of near disasters.
"Survived World War II; there was a fire in '49 that destroyed our restaurant, they rebuilt;
the Sutro Bath fire almost destroyed our restaurant."
Perched upon rugged cliffs overlooking the Pacific, the San Francisco diner was established
in 1937 by Greek immigrants Louis and Helen Hontalas, who rented a small but scenic piece
of land on which they opened a cafe.
With passing years, Louis' became a popular getaway-with-a-view, where customers could
enjoy burgers while occasionally catching a sight of passing whales and dolphins.
In 1973, the National Park Service acquired the land, and Louis' became part of the Golden
Gate National Recreation Area.
Over the decades, Louis' narrowly escaped raging fires, revocations of its concession
contract, and other threats of outright obliteration.
Yet, on July 13, this San Francisco institution finally closed its doors, stating on Facebook
that waiting out the pandemic was, quote, "financially unreasonable."
Co-owner Tom Hontalas, grandson of Louis and Helen, confessed to NBC that breaking the
news to his staff was heartbreaking, saying,
"We couldn't even hug our staff."
Check out one of our newest videos right here!
Plus, even more Mashed videos about your favorite restaurants are coming soon.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one.