OT - fav eatery closed
FSMCDesigns
Posts: 12,846
Ever have a place you LOVE to eat at close? I just discovered a a small coffee shop I used to eat at all the time is now closed and I am so bummed. Over 3 years ago I was looking at the delivery app Eats24 (which grubhub took over) and found a place called CoffeeHolic about 2.5 miles from my apt. They had an interesting menu and since me and the GF were in the mood for breakfast food and something sweet, we gave them a try and the food was amazing! It got to the point that on our days off we always got breakfast from them and even lunch at times. They were always great on the phone when an order was wrong or they ran out of something since it was all made in store.
Less than a year ago, grubhub took over Eats24 and the option to have this place deliver to me was no longer there. I called grubhub and the cafe trying to get this fixed so I could get deliveries and the cafe could get my business, but nothing ever came of it. So at this point the GF and I had to make efforts to go by there when we wanted something, either on days off, or before or after work. I am ashamed to say that my business with them became a lot less frequent because of the inconvienance of not having a delivery option with my last visit being a few months ago. I stopped using grubhub at this time also for this and other reasons and we have also stopped eating out as much to focus on cooking more and healthier food..
Well today, the GF and I decided to order some breakfast and as we were going thru the list on grubhub, she remembered CoffeeHolic, so I googled them to get the number and BOOM, saw they were permanently closed. Our hearts sank and in a way we feel a little guilty since we didn't make more of an effort to keep eating there. I was in food service management for years and a sous chef before my current job, so I know how competitive it is out there in the food service market, but it just makes me sad when a really quality place goes out of business and less than quality chain places are thriving.
Anyone else have any experiences like this?
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Yep, an Italian fast food place that actually had lasagna and all Italian food available as dine-in AND as drive-through window! I loved that I could get that without ever leaving my car. It closed last year. I don't feel bad about the limited times I went there, it wasn't exactly nearby. But it's sad the unique eateries are the first to go, they had a dream of offering their own unique twists to the dining out experience. It was Fazoli's. They are a franchise and have stores elsewhere though.
I just checkd out Fazoli's, food loooks good, to bad there isn't one in the Dallas area, would love to try them out. the GF would kill for that orange glaze cheesecake, she loves anything orange flavored, LOL
Mmmm...oranges (as she eats an orange Milano cookie...). ;)
Coming from an Italian family, the food is my favorite and I would LOVE to have a place like Fazoli's nearby. Unfortunately we don't have anything like that back here :'( That means I have to make it if I want it. It's a dirty job, but someone's gotta do it :P.
Laurie
...had my favourite Thai-Vietnamese place shut down a short while ago. My favourites were their big beef noodle (rice stick) bowl (and yes, it was big) as well as excellent Pho, priced between 6$ - 7$.
it's sad, but it happens. the restaurant industry is brutal, especially for one-of-kind places.
on the bright side, out where we are, i see a lot of good people succesfully making the jump from food trucks or carts to brick-and-mortar restaurants.
here's hoping the original owners of your breakfast spot open someplace new and near you sometime soon. :)
it's weird as all get-out that you couldn't get delivery after grubhub got involved. i thought delivering food was what grubhub was all about. were you just outside their new delivery area? two and a half miles isn't much of a haul, really.
j
Oh man, I looooooove Fazoli's. We lost ours many many years ago. It was a family favorite, and we would stop there often to pick up breadsticks (and sometimes pick up what I think was alfredo sauce to go with them. It's been quite a long time). My mom always treated dinner there like it was a treat. We were always looking forward to lasagna, cheesecake, pizza, etc. A friend of mine went to visit family in another state and had Fazoli's for dinner one night. I was so jealous. We only have two locations left in the state, and they're two hours away from me. I'll probably have to make a stop there if I make a trip. This particular city gets a lot of good restaurants that mine doesn't. I already have a list of three other restaurants I plan to visit.
We seem to lose a lot of good businesses around here. There was a burger place that I always heard about. I kept putting it off, and then decided one afternoon to go there for lunch. They were permanently closed. A cajun express restaurant replaced it, which I heard had terrible food and service. We drove past it today and that place closed too. I don't think they were even in business for six months. We have one restaurant outside our neighborhood that was a taco bell-like restaurant (it was back in the 90s, I can't for the life of me remember the name of it), fried chicken restaurant, then a place with burgers and hot dogs, an Italian restaurant, and it's somehow survived as a Thai restaurant for the last ten years or so. Every time something new opened, my mom would try it and I'd say, "Don't get used to it. It won't last long." Some businesses just don't perform well in our city. A lot of the restaurants at the local Tanger Outlets have closed down in the past two years.
Nope, still in the delivery area. Grubhub said it was up to the cafe and the cafe told us that is was up to Grubhub, go figure. I started having more and more issues with GH and especially their delivery people, so it's good I just stopped using them for awhile. I love cooking, but I hate the cleanup afterwards.
Really off topic thread
you guys need to learn how to make a sandwich
Don't know if it's the same one, but this one is still alive https://www.mazzios.com/
I seem to remember a Mazzios when I was in college at Texas AM, College Station. I freakin love the pizza from i fratelli's here in Dallas.
vegemite??
Thanks for the responses guys, it's appreciated
Fazoli's was great, they had way better bread sticks than Olive Garden. But our closed down as well. The problem was never food, it was horrible mismanagement. The owner would not spend a dime to keep up the place. The parking lot looked the moon with all of the craters in it so nobody wanted to drive through it. Equipment was failing, the AC didn't work half the time so it was hot inside, the carpet needed to be changed, just yikes. Meanwhile while the Olive Garden was expensive and not all that fantastic, they had a swanky new building and always had lots of people ready to serve. And I have read about how poorly Fazoli's handles its franchises. They even force their franchises to buy little things like toilet paper directly from Fazoli's at a higher cost than it would be to buy it elsewhere, just weird and silly stuff like this. So running a Fazoli's cost a lot of money compared to other franchises, and that is why you see these places close even though they have good food. The franchise was too expensive.
While there are lots of Italian places, the concept of quick service Italian is quite rare. I think if Fazolis allowed their franchises more freedom they could not only survive, but thrive. Just imagine a Fazolis concept similar to the way Chipotle does, surely somebody is doing this with Italian?
I later moved to another town, and we found another Italian place that we quickly grew to love. This time a local joint. One of their specialties was cream sauce, he never called it alfredo, no, it was cream sauce which they made when you ordered. He would correct anybody who called it "alfredo." I don't care what it is called, it was the best alfredo/cream sauce I ever had anywhere. This place was voted "Best in the Burg" numerous times, too. But one day, the owner called it quits. I thought business was still pretty decent! I don't know what happened, but this one hurt. Their Facebook lit up with people sad to see them go. We have tried desperately to find a place with a cream sauce like it, and come up empty. We've driven hundreds of miles around and sampled all kinds of Italian. Nobody is close. Their NY style pizza was pretty great, too, but the cream sauce was so good it was about the only thing I would order every time I went there.
What really annoys me is that both of these were connected to new Olive Gardens opening up about a year or two prior to them closing just across the street. I cannot stand Olive Garden. I guess customers really are fickle about having a fancy building to walk into, because that is really the only advantage Olive Garden had over these other places IMO.
So, my wife wanted something using Grubhub, and she asked if I wanted anything. From experience, I didn't want to have to control my emotions about the delivery circumstances right before I ate; so, I replied, no, thank you very much. Well, after an hour, she called the restaurant to find out what happened, and they told her that her order had already been delivered. She told them that was not true. They contacted the delivery driver, and he told them that he looked at the order, and it looked so good that he decided to eat it. I'm not joking. They refunded the money and, in an effort to keep her business, said they were sending a new order out. The next morning we found it hanging on our front doorknob.
The drivers usually work for grubhub, so I would call and get his butt fired!!
...foodie carts are a big thing here in Portland. Alas two of the best ones in the city were shut down (one that was only a couple blocks from where I used to live) because someone bought the property to build an office building on one site and an upscale apartment building on the other.
I avoid the food delivery services as the added fee often makes what would be affordable dining not so affordable any more. Also there have been times that when it finally got to me, it was almost cold as well (not good for things like oven baked Mac with 4 Cheeses and Bacon).
Well it did not leave Xyer0 out of pocket at all but yeah they certainly hired themselves a slacker who has probably done it since and been kicked to the curb.
Wow, that's crazy! I've always worried about finding deliveries on our porch. We had a delivery left on our porch once (they didn't bother to ring the doorbell), but luckily I heard the car door shut when they got back in the car. I wasn't too happy about that. A lot of the businesses around here use Doordash (and actually advertise it) and the only other problem we've encountered was a driver that brought a duplicate order. I'm still not sure how that happened. He showed up an hour after the first delivery, asking if we'd ordered again. We hadn't. We checked our bank account and the web site to make sure we'd only had one order. He realized there had been some sort of error and looked upset about it, but there was nothing we could do. We'd placed one order and it had already been delivered.
..another place I miss was Noah's Bagels. We had a couple around town. Properly boiled and then oven baked with two dozen flavours of shmeers to go on top as well as bagel sandwiches and in house made bagel dogs (made with big kosher hot doggies). They had some of the best coffee, not the kind that was over roasted it tasted brunt or so amped up with caffeine one cup would glue you to the ceiling, but a good rich tasting (truly "bottomless") cup I could drink all afternoon without getting the shakes or make my gut feel like I was drinking the fluid from a Sears Die Hard™ battery. They were very popular and rightly so. Any day of the week you usually had to stand in line to make your order.
Sadly they were bought out by this outfit called Einsteins' which, unlike the namesake, was not a very smart company. The quality of the bagels was mediocre at best (the texture seemed more bread instead of a real bagel), they had no where near the selection of schmeers, none of the other items (like the bagel dogs and bagel sandwiches), and the coffee they served was that wretched greasy spoon type like you'd get at Denny's™ that you wouldn't want a second cup of. Needless to say every time I went by there, I saw maybe four or five people inside at the same time of the day when Noah's would be packed. Eventually they went out of business. The one in the "Bohemian" Hawthorne district which I patronised the most, was split up into some boutique clothing shop and an upscale fried egg place.
Yeah, "time marches on" they say, but not always for the better.
Restaurants, especially fast food chains, are a revolving door in my county of about 60K people. I eat out about once every 3 years on average in the past ten years but I notice all the hulls of chain restaurants that have come & gone. There are more fast food places here than gas stations or used car lots although used car lots give them a run for number one. I guess if you work in fast food and aren't management you need a cheap ride from a used car lots for sure as we have no public transportation.
Unless you are one of the big chains like McDonald's, Burger King, or so on, that are almost guaranteed success, someone will get an SBA loan, gamble on a franchising license for an up & coming chain, go in business a few years or less, and go out of business. Even Starbucks tried & failed two to have franchise locations here before a 3rd try, anchoring in new Kroger's Super Store bailed them out.
One of my brothers tried to franchise in a big city but that lasted less than two years. I sometimes wonder how many businesses, both mom & pop small businesses & big chain, are actually out of red ink and making profit. It costs massive amounts of money at every turn and it's almost a requirement to have massive economies of scale and automated manufacturing to succeed.
There is still a Fazoli's here so I'm guessing that must be sufficiently different from the Mellow Mushroom, Pizza Hut, Domino's, Papa John's, Penn Station, Subway, Little Cesar's, and so on in town and what's sufficiently different must also be sufficiently good too.
There are also still two Taco Bells in town, but they are truly awful now and not a cheap bargain like they once were even with their now stingy portions almost devoid of pinto beans. I was surprised customers tolerate it with return business.
Schlotzsky's, Golden Corral, and so many others have come and gone so fast here.
Think of all the empty hulls of former chain businesses that have come and gone in your area and that's pretty indicative of all the red ink even these national chains generate. Our local mall is pretty empty and going to any mall anywhere nowadays is somewhat of a non-event after at one time being an exciting day of entertainment.
It was the same when I lived in Zurich too. It's not unique to the USA, not by a long shot.
Gambrinus...while not an "eatery" per-se, here in Portland, there have been several Starbucks which actually closed down. In the Hawthorne District and Richmond Neighborhoods where I used to live and haunt, there has never been a Starbucks as long as I've lived here (30 years).
On a sad note, earlier this spring, one of the most iconic of NW craft breweries (and first in the region), Bridgeport Brewing, shut their doors for good late last spring. When I worked in the area many years ago, their pub was a great place to go for lunch (mainly toasted sandwiches and pizza slices), as well as after work for their generous happy hour. On nice days they had tables on the old loading dock (the building as well as the one across the alleyway used to belong to a rope making company and is on the historic register). The brewery and alehouse became a a model for other craft brewing operations as well as a cornerstone for the revival of the Pearl District which used to be little more than a collection of freight rail terminals and warehouses north of the city centre.
Several factors contributed to their demise. First, over the years, ale tastes have changed. Bridgeport prided themselves on producing British styled brews like IPAs, Porters, Stouts, and Pale Ales however brew aficionados have developed a wider palate for more diverse styles.. Add to this the resurgence of hard ciders (there are several exclusive Cider pubs here), and the hipsters who tend to favour cheap industrial beers like Pabst and regional favourite, Rainier.
Another factor is a saturation of newer small neighborhood and boutique brewing operations in the area. After the sale by the founding family to Gambrinus,of Texas, production was almost doubled and it felt to some that Bridgeport was beginning to take on more of the feel of a big national rather than local micro brewer (after the sale, Bridgeport ales were available in 18 states)
Over the years they not only renovated the interior of the old warehouse (much the charm it once had being replaced with a lot of metal which gave it more of a cold sterile feel) and expanded their food offerings beyond the normal "pub fare". However, they still were the only pub in the area to also serve an "honest" pint (20 oz Imperial) at the same price that other pubs charged for the more traditional smaller US "pints" (which during happy hour was only 4$, 1$ less than most other locations in the city). They also sold 6 packs, cases, and kegs. They also had one of the most diverse happy hour menus I've seen anywhere (not sliders, wings, and tater tots) as well as "package" sales of beer to go, from individual bottles of their potent Old Knucklehead barleywine to full kegs. I used to go there to get beer for home as a 6 pack was 8$ (+ 60¢ deposit) which was around 3$ less than at the Safeway across the street. In spite of what some may have felt about them, I still liked their going there (granted, I prefer British styled ales myself) and was saddened to see them close. During the last week they were open, I managed to score one of the last a 6 packs of my favourite Multiball Imperial IPA which is a fairly stiff brew (8.1%). Hoped to get at least one 22 oz bottle of Old Knucklehead, but by the time I was able to get inside, the last bottles had been sold.
Just the other week I saw the mash tuns from the brewery laying on their sides along the street, and a couple weeks beforehand the fermenters were removed. .Not sure who will take the space over as the building teks up the full block.
Yeah, get him fired and he'll probably go and get a job at LaserShip....gawd ;). Look them up on YouTube for a laugh. LOL.
Laurie
oh man, I would hope not!
Funny, I get my groceries delivered thru Amazon and it always seems they have everyday prople delivering them instead of Amazon workers. The other day I got the knock on the door they were here and as i was bringing them in, this little old Hispanic man, probably about 70 was bringing up the last bag in 98 degree weather (I live on the 3rd floor, hence the delivery, LOL). Man, I felt pretty bad for him and tippped him extra. I guess when you gotta pay the bills.......
I went grocery shopping in North Berkeley (the area known as the Gourmet Ghetto) and saw this and thought of the thread:
Oh man Lazership was SO BAD when amazon was using them down here. Delivered to the wrong place, not delivered at all, destoryed when they were delivered, obviously opened and rifled through, the whole kit and kaboodle.
I get my groceries delivered as well because I have trouble walking and therefore shopping ;). I've used Peapod, hubby has picked up an order at the local Walmart grocery (they don't deliver around here - yet), and I've used Instacart. Of the three, Instacart was the least desireable (but it was the fastest of the three - less than half a day from online order to showing up at my door). It's kind of an Uber-type thing only with groceries instead of taxi service, so the delivery person uses their own car, goes to the store you designate and picks the groceries and then delivers them. I had the worse experience with Instacart. I have my own ideas why, but...needless to say I stick now with Peapod and Walmart Grocery. Sometimes you're just better off paying the higher premium ;) LOL.
Laurie
...oh geez, they still exist. Though probably only in their original home market. I wonder if they still have that great "New York" styled coffee.
We had a local chain of coffee shops in Portland called Coffee People which was started by a husband and wife team back in the early 1980s (their motto was "Good Coffee, No Backtalk"). They had a number of locations throughout Portland and even opened the first "full service" drive-through espresso/coffee shop called Motor Moka (since taken over by Starbucks) as well as Aero Moka at PDX airport, and my old hangout, the Immediate Care Centre (along with the "Crash Cart" outside) on NW 23rd by Good Samaritan Hospital. Coffee People was a local Portland Icon for decades before and during the "90s coffee boom" when Starbucks, Seattle's Best, and Peet's descended on the city. Unfortunately the specialty coffee shop boom became their undoing as to compete against a giant like Starbucks, they over expanded, not just in Portland, but to several other cities such as Chicago, Denver, and San Diego as well. This eventually put them in dire financial states and they eventually ended up shutting down the entire operation, selling off the company to some European conglomerate (which only sells whole bean coffee and Keurig cups under the name, sans the original logos and iconography). In 2016 the company's original founders Jim & Patty Roberts were able to re-acquire the Coffee People brand from that company, and opened up a new shop in Northeast Portland as well as one in Beaverton on the west side (in what was one of their original shops) and another near Good Samaritan in NW Portland (not very far from where the original Immediate Care Centre was). They are considering expanding a bit more, but are much more cautious about doing so this time around.
So what once was lost, has returned to its original home.
...as difficult as it is at times to physically do the grocery shopping, I still prefer to do it myself. For one, I get to look at the quality, labels, and choose what and exactly how much I actually need/want. Second, I tend to shop at several different markets to get certain things, that may be overpriced at one but not at the other or where something is offered that another market doesn't sell (for example the Safeway a few blocks down the street stopped handing bulk spices and now only sells them in those tiny, very expensive jars, while fresh seafood at the Fred Meyer a little further away is much more expensive [and they never carry catfish anymore]). Third I have to pay with my debit rather than EBT card. Fourth, I can't use my canvas bags, as well as have to deal with multiple plastic bags for every bit of produce/fruit I order. Finally, I don't have to pay delivery fees.
I also have a small kitchen with limited cabinet space so the "European shopping" method (just purchasing what I need for the next few days instead of weeks) works much better.