Famed Restaurant Chain Is Coming Back 20 Years After Bankruptcy!

News

A long-time player in the chain restaurant scene throughout the late ’80s and ’90s is about to make its return following a catastrophic foodborne illness outbreak and bankruptcy nearly 20 years ago.

Restaurants Closed But Brand Remained In Stores

Full-service Mexican chain Chi-Chi’s was once a staple among chain restaurants, especially throughout the Midwest.

It’s unique fried ice cream treat ranked right up there with Americanized chain delicacies like Olive Garden’s breadsticks or Applebee’s dirt-cheap margaritas.

According to CNN, Chi-Chi’s first opened in Minnesota in 1975 before quickly expanding to more than 200 restaurants scattered around the U.S. Along with the fried ice cream, the restaurant offered up your typical Mexican chain fare such as sizzling fajitas and tacos.

Then, things went terribly bad.

The Chi-Chi’s chain shuttered it’s restaurants for good (or at least we thought) after what CNN described as a “hepatitis A outbreak at a Pittsburgh-area location traced to green onions served in its complimentary salsa, sickening 650 people and resulting in four deaths and several hundred lawsuits.”

Following its closure, the brand’s name was eventually acquired by Hormel Foods, which still makes and distributes Chi-Chi’s salsa that is widely sold at stores throughout the U.S. along with similarly branded chips and tortillas.

Hormel Foods/Canva

When Is Chi-Chi’s Coming Back?

It’s still fairly early in the process, but the first steps for an actual Chi-Chi’s restaurant revival were put into place this week.

Restaurant Business reports Michael McDermott, son of the one of the brand’s founders Marno McDermott, reached a deal with Hormel to open restaurants under the Chi-Chi’s name.

The first restaurants are planned to open sometime in 2025.

“Chi-Chi’s is the latest defunct restaurant brand to attempt a comeback following similar resuscitation attempts at Steak & Ale and The Ground Round,” Restaurant Business says.

“The efforts typically appeal to customers’ nostalgia while also freshening up the old brands for a new generation.”

The way it stands as we close out 2024, the next 12 months could prove to be a boom for many chain restaurants.

Here is a look at 15 chains with their eyes set on widespread expansion throughout the U.S. in 2025.

Popular Restaurants That Have Faded Away

All-Star Cafe

All-Star Cafe

The success of the Hard Rock Cafe all over the globe sparked a wave of knockoff themed restaurants.
In the end, restaurants based on tchotchkes turned out to be a less sustainable business than restaurants based on, y’know, delicious food, and almost all of Hard Rock’s competitors went extinct in a few years.
One of the more notable examples is the Official All-Star Cafe, which was an off-shoot of the similar Planet Hollywood chain, except instead of movie stars it was backed by pro athletes like Shaquille O’Neal, Ken Griffey Jr., and Wayne Gretzky.
The first location was in New York City in 1995, but the chain never quite took off.
(Maybe the fact that most people associate sporting events with overpriced, uninspired slip might have had something to do with it?) The chain shut its doors in 2007.
Beefsteak Charlie’s

Beefsteak Charlie’s

Gradually, this New York City restaurant expanded and became a Tri-State area institution with dozens of locations.
Its commercials hyping their steaks and unlimited salad bar became staples on television.
The chain and it’s “You’re gonna get spoiled!” slogan were both mocked in an early SNL sketch for the similarly named “Pre-Chewed Charlie’s.”
Despite the strong name recognition, the chain gradually declined, and went out of business completely in the late 2000s.
Burger Chef

Burger Chef

When the original Star Wars opened its theaters, its early tie-in fast food items weren’t with McDonald’s.
They were with Burger Chef, a burger joint that had over 1,000 restaurants at the height of its business in the 1970s.
Although they slowly declined through the 1980s, Burger Chef holds a place in fast food history; they introduced their own version of the Happy Meal (known as the “Funmeal”) more than five years before McDonald’s.

 

Chi-Chi’s

Chi-Chi’s

Chi-Chi’s — named after one of its founder’s wives — thrived all through the 1970s and 1980s.
By the 1990s, the company operated more than 200 restaurants while Hormel licensed their name for a successful line of tortilla chips and salsas.
The products are still sold in grocers, but the restaurants went out of business by the mid 2000s, not long after they were linked to a large hepatitis outbreak.
(As is my understanding, people tend not to want to eat at restaurants suspected of giving their customers hepatitis.)
Dive!

Dive!

Steven Spielberg: Master filmmaker and … sandwich artisan? For a while there, yes.
In the 1990s, Spielberg opened his own L.A. sandwich shop, named Dive! for its underwater theme, complete with an enormous yellow submarine lodged in the exterior.
Spielberg’s sub offerings included a soft shell crab sammy and a “Nuclear Sicilian Sub Rosa,” whatever that is. Although a second Dive! did open in Las Vegas, both stores were sunk by the early 2000s.
Don Pablo’s

Don Pablo’s

If you never ate at a Chi-Chi’s, you probably ate at a Don Pablo’s instead, which was the country’s second-biggest Mexican and Tex-Mex chain in the late 1990s.
The success didn’t last, though. Despite its array of tacos and fajitas, Don Pablo’s corporate owner filed for bankruptcy in the 2000s and the last remaining outlet closed in 2019.

 

Fashion Cafe

Fashion Cafe

Around the same time as the All-Star Cafe, a group of supermodels signed on to serve as the frontwomen of a Fashion Cafe chain.
It didn’t fare much better, even with the backing of Elle Macpherson and Naomi Campbell, along with a menu that was supposedly seven pages long.
The flagship location in New York City opened and closed within three years.
The Ground Round

The Ground Round

Originally launched as a spinoff venture of the popular Howard Johnson’s chain of hotels and restaurants, The Ground Round was famous for its menu full of traditional American fare, plus the free basket of popcorn you got when you sat down at your table.
Although the chain once had more than 200 locations, it struggled to compete in the increasingly crowded casual dining marketplace and their corporate owners filed for bankruptcy in 2004.
While the chain is essentially defunct now, there are a small handful of independently-owned Ground Rounds that are still in business — mostly in North Dakota.
If you happen to be in the area and are in the mood for some Cajun tortellini or Caribbean sizzling sirloin tips, do a Google search.
I just hope they still give you popcorn.
Howard Johnson’s

Howard Johnson’s

The years have been just as unkind to the Ground Round’s original owners, Howard Johnson’s.
While the company still operates many hotels, it was formerly the #1 restaurant chain in the country as well, and now its restaurant business is totally kaput.
(The very last one closed in 2022.) If you want to go down a weird internet rabbit hole, try googling Howard Johnson’s Children’s Menu, and see some of the weird foods they used to sell to kids, like the “Humpty Dumpty,” which was a “Small Tuna Fish Salad, Egg, and Tomato on Crisp Lettuce, Potato Chip Garnish, Roll, and Butter, Ice Cream, Sherbet or Gelatin” plus a drink — all for 95 cents. Yum!

 

Kenny Rogers Roasters

Kenny Rogers Roasters

Immortalized on an episode of Seinfeld where Kramer and Jerry both got addicted to its chicken, Kenny Rogers Roasters turned the country music icon into a fast-food maven in the 1990s.
Although the U.S. branches of Kenny’s Roasters are long since closed, they still operate over 100 outlets internationally.
Someone let Kramer and Jerry know it’s time to book a flight to Malaysia.
Lone Star Steakhouse

Lone Star Steakhouse

One of the more famous quirks of this steakhouse chain: Every table got served a bucket of roasted peanuts — and guests were encouraged to throw the shells on the floor.
Kids loved the novelty of being encouraged to make a mess, although I’m not sure their parents were as enamored with eating in a restaurant where the floor was routinely filthy.
Supposedly there is one (1) last remaining Lone Star still open in Guam.
The rest rode off into the sunset long ago.
Marvel Mania

Marvel Mania

Look at this. Look at where Marvel was at just three years before X-Men.
This was Marvel’s very first theme restaurant, located at Universal Studios Hollywood.
And, yes, that was what the Hulk costumed character looked like at the big debut.
The food at Marvel Mania — which I begged my parents to go to — was thoroughly meh, but the decor, including a life-size Iron Man armor, was like a dream come true at the time.
Unfortunately, the meh food seemed to win out over the cool Marvel memorabilia, and the restaurant closed before a second location could open.

 

Morrison’s

Morrison’s

At one time there were dozens of Morrison’s Cafeterias sprinkled throughout the American South, each offering dozens of items.
(One vintage commercial I found on YouTube hyped their fried shrimp, seafood au gratin, baked fillet, fried fish, fried scallops, blackened fillets, plus any two vegetables, and bread and butter. That’s a lot of food!) In 1998, they were bought by one of their competitors, Piccadilly, which closed almost all of the locations — although there is apparently one still in operation in Mobile, Alabama.
Anyone got a hankering for some seafood au gratin?
NASCAR Cafe

NASCAR Cafe

What’s more appetizing than the smell of motor oil and diesel fuel? Apparently a lot, because despite the enduring popularity of NASCAR, the NASCAR Cafe did not endure for long, even with a flagship location in the Sahara Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip that also included its very own roller coaster, Speed: The Ride. As for the food, none of the menus I can find online include any items connected to racing, although the decor was genuinely impressive, with full-size stock cars on a track that lined the walls.
Old Country Buffet

Old Country Buffet

Who doesn’t love a restaurant that offers all you can eat? Buffets with expansive menus and low prices exploded in the 1980s and ’90s, with the Old Country Buffet among the most successful of the bunch.
Unfortunately, buffets were not made to withstand pandemics; they couldn’t adapt to a world powered by food delivery, and their enormous troughs of food now looked more like biohazards than selling points.
Its corporate owners shuttered Old Country Buffet, along with a whole fleet of other buffets they owned including HomeTown Buffet, in the early 2020s.

 

Showbiz Pizza Place

Showbiz Pizza Place

In thte 1980s, there were two giants in the pizza/arcade space: Chuck E. Cheese, which endures to this day (although its in the midst of dumping their famous animatronics) and Showbiz Pizza Place, which had its own weird animatronic animal band, The Rock-afire Explosion — which has such a dedicated cult audience, it even got its own documentary in 2008.
Showbiz and Chuck E. Cheese merged in the mid-1980s, and over time, the Showbiz brand was phased out. At this point, the show’s been over for a long time.
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