20 WORST Restaurants From The 1980s, Nobody Wants Back! 

I went there a couple of times and I thought the food was pretty good. The only thing is the one we had was one of those that had the contaminated green onions so I don’t think very many people where I live wants to see the restaurant chain revived.

I loved Chi-Chi's. Yeah, it was 'Americanized' Mexican food. But it was damn good. The seafood Chimichangas were amazing. Haven't found anything like them anywhere since. Plus the atmosphere was great. I really miss that place.

I liked Chi Chi's too. Sure, it wasn't "authentic" Mexican, but I thought the food was pretty good for what it was

It looks delicious, hard to find good TexMex anymore...now. places are either all Mex or all Tex 😂

I at least like the waitress in the Chi-Chi's commercial shown in this clip. There's a diner in Farmingville, New York that went Tex-Mex roughly a decade ago, but I don't know how good the food is.

My parents would take us out for the day on a ride and we would always stop at Howard Johnson's for breakfast. I loved it. This list stinks.

@dukey19941 When I was a kid, A Friday night at Howard Johnson's for fried clams a treat! They were so good!

I loved the Monte Christo at Bennigans!! It was a great restaurant and I’ll never understand why it failed…

Yes thank you! I so miss Bennigan’s and their Monte Cristo. Sadly the only place that I can find that makes them is Cheddar's. Its good but just not the same. Bennigan’s was great because it was somewhere where a group of people could go to and they had something for everyone. However, I did not enjoy when they tried to go to a southwest theme briefly in the 90's.

Bennigan’s was fantastic. The concept got a little long in the tooth, but the quality of my local Bennigan’s never dropped until the very end.

Me too

Ditto!

@cyberbeer65 Though impossible, yours is the best answer, at least philosophically. Even some of the ones we liked deserved to die. Ruby Tuesday, a top tier establishment into the early 90s, offered a standard American menu featuring great steaks and excellent service. The salad bar similar to Steak and Ale but better. It's not gone yet but it won't be long. Lum's was a casual favorite of mine for both culinary and sentimental reasons. Long gone. Of course, many, many other old favorites. If you have reached senior years like me, the list of lost favs is in the dozens. Sad, sad, sad.

why? the food sucked.

@@JoeDirtisawsome It's a magic pixie dust hypothetical in which some of the once beloved chains will return in their original glory and others will still be popular with diehard fans. It's a case of accepting the bitter with the sweet (restaurants that were once fabulous but declined over time) in a completely make believe scenario.

Best Breakfast ever!

Cracker Barrel's pride in their food and service went way down too. So disappointing.

I legit didn't know they were a "restaurant". We stayed at one of their hotels in Baton Rouge on the way to LA from NY and the roaches were literally putting shoulder to the door to break in and rob us. We fled like it was a mansion in Amityville. My dad and I were still laughing about that until he died over 20 years later. Never set foot in one since.

Only 2 locations are left now. One is in my hometown of Cuyahoga Falls, OH. It's still very good.

I love Arthur Treachers ! A local pizza chain where i live, sells Arthur's , yummy

Agreed, Arthur Teacher's was the best!

I loved dining at Arturo’s Bistro, as I refer to it

Me too

Still alive and well in the Philippines, with over 460 locations.

I liked it too

Our Shakey’s in my W. Tx big town was the most excellent and popular restaurant here… from its lunchtime buffet ( which was “the place” ) to go for a workday lunch , to the game room and the cartoon room. It was a place we went to at least 2 or 3 times a month with our growing children and you simply have not had a pizza until you eat one of Shakey’s “Deli Pizza”! What a masterpiece! It was a pizza piled high with all the great things you could ask for! Huge slices of pepperoni, fresh mushrooms, tomato slices etc etc! The restaurant was also a significant contributor to community functions and it closed around 1998 or so. I still miss it to this day!

Shakeys had great pizza. This guys videos are always questionable 🙄

It was awesome so much better than pizza hut

Agreed

Thank you.

I liked Bennigans.

I want SANDYs back. If it is what I think it is

Bennigan’s is still around today in some states as of 2024.

I fondly remember Howard Johnson's and loved and missed their cheeseburgers for a long time afterwards, always hoping I'd find one still operating.

I loved Arthur's too. The fish and chips were always good.

Howard Johnson taught me to love fried clams.

Or by someone who wasn’t even alive when these places were in operation.

Agreed.

Absolutely! There is still a Bonanza in Lebanon, Virginia (about an hour from me). I really need to go back there, their Chicken Monterey is 🔥!

The funniest thing about this is the same channel also did a video called "80s restauraunts that we want back" and over half of the restauraunts on that video are also on this one.

Yes I did too 😋

Yep and the taco salad. Yum

That fried ice cream still lives in my dreams.

Occasionally I can find 'Fried Ice Cream' flavored ice cream and relive the experience. Their chicken fajitas were decent. And I loved the corn casserole.

That fried ice cream was amazing . I miss that lol

It was better cuz it was mostly home cooked. Dining out was an occasion.

ok boomer

Almost every chain restaurant in my area has gotten terrible. And some of the mom n pop joints are worse too. Makes me sad.

well it was actual food not 90% chemicals with a bit of food mixed in.

@@sandraday6955 ok boomer

That happens to many successful businesses. The greedy conglomerates buy them out and run them into the ground.

@@elultimo102 Yes, I think you are correct, those corporations just want to increase the profit margin and suck the life out of the management and employes. So they cut corners on quality, Increse prices, reduce portions and under staff the restaurants all to increse profit. The dark side of Capitalism.

This is because the beancounters take over, cutting quality by cutting corners, trying to increase profits. They just drive it into the ground 😮

There was also a Ponderosa Steakhouse

@@marylist1236 yes, I like Ponderosa . was it the best steak you could buy anywhere no but for the price it was a good place

In Kalamazoo, Michigan, we had H. Salt esq Fish & Chips

Loved pancakes at Sambo’s as a kid

Used to always go to Chi Chi’s for my birthday in the late 70s in Richfield Mn. Great food during that period. This was the original Chi Chi’s.

Sambo was an Indian boy

Yes! Very good! And so close to what you get in the UK!

I have a recioe guven to me by a friend who was the manager of our local Arthur Treachers. Soooo close to the original!!

No... the recurring theme here is inconsistent food, and poor service, something that major chains need to plan on, before they open.

The channel is called "America Before" and I think its more about nostalgia than objectivity.

They regurgitate & shuffle the same closed chains & put different labels on them. First, they are the places we want back, then they are places we never want to see again. The content changes to reflect the title.

I loved going there as a kid! They had one at the mall where I took skating lessons. After class, mom took us there for dinner. I loved it omg...

We had a Bonanza near us. I remember going there as a kid. I thought the food was great! It closed in the early 90's I believe.

Last time at Bonanza when Paul McCartney published Red Rose Speedy in Meriden CT.

They had Bonanza Restaurants everywhere. Our family loved going there.

You must live close to me because ours closed last year also. It was in the Kroger shopping center on Hensley Drive.

That’s how the greedy corporations took over the good restaurants that didn’t want to sell.

I would actually call this video click bait.

Mickey D doesn't fall in the same category as Chipotle. The food at Chipotle is made fresh, Mickey D is frozen. Taco bell and burger King or checkers are bottom of the barrel...

@@chiarac3833 Dude Chipotle taste horrible. In fact if I had to chose I'll take Mcd's over them any day. Everything Chipotle makes taste like soap.

@@ZombieHunter37 perhaps you're going to the wrong location. I've never had bad Chipotle and I'll take whatever they're serving over the pink slime at Micky D's any day...

@@ZombieHunter37 Maybe too much cilantro----It does taste like soap to many of us.

@@elultimo102 Yea they use way too much of that stuff. Everything thing there taste like Dawn.

I met my husband at Shakey’s on State Line Road, Kansas City Kansas across from KUMC. We were married for 49 yrs. He died in 2020, but Shakey’s will always hold a place in my heart!

We used to call it Arthur Tortures lmao!

Bonjour Montréal ❤

They do an episode with the same chains but change the title to "places we want back." It's just to make content.

I enjoyed the one in Cherry Hill, NJ.

The Lobster Bisque was out of this World

Ironically I actually used to work at the one off alt US 19 at the intersection of Gulf to Bay in Clearwater, FL, back in the mid-1980's, during "New Coke" era (I remember because they let us drink soda fountain drinks for free). I also worked at Lums (my 1st 2nd and 3rd job, on breaks from school) and Bennigans, the latter of which was a sibling of Steak & Ale, as all our checks originated from "LBJ Boulevard" in Texas somewhere. They had amazingly high standards at both places, providing a great deal of training material and explicit instructional manuals showing how they wanted to have stuff done at Steak & Ale. In fact, I lived with a guy who was training to eventually be a manager there. We got held up by armed robbers who forced their way in after closing, but as I did prep during the day I wasn't there. One of the guys, himself a manager-in-training, who was there at the time of the incident told us this story about a similar robbery that had gone wrong and one of the workers wound up getting that weird hook that served as an exterior walk-in freezer door handle shoved through his nose up into his skull, and another employee wound up getting their head crunched in the bread hook-equiped stand up Hobart industrial mixer, in an effort to induce access to the safe that no one on hand apparently could supply, whereas no one was actually hurt at our little drama. Their approach to prime rib was like a Holy Sacrament: Only the anointed few were worthy to pursue the process, and it always turned out great. A decent salad bar- not quite up to Brown Derby standards, (my 4th job, Lol), but everything reasonably expected was there. Bennigans had some of the best appetizers you can imagine, and there was a lot of creativity that went into the menu... They went a bit hard into Cajun style stuff in the late eighties and I am not sure where they went from there, but they had great happy hour drink specials to go with those apps if you were into the Sauce, as it were... Possibly part of the turn off might have been the sort of yuppy polished-brass fern bar type vibe they were trying to generate, with leather-bound menus and whatnot, but Cheers was a going concern I assume was a sort of thematic mentor of sorts, and that show was tremendously popular. In many cases I have to assume that food prices and trends with drinking and driving had a huge effect on people wanting to go out to eat, as everyone knew the Bottom Line was how much booze got passed through the back door: Managers would come up to the line and taste our French fries just to make sure they were salty enough to make people Thirsty, if you know what I mean... DUI laws and whatnot really put the kaybash on the bottle or two of wine with dinner crowd...

I went to the Steak & Ale om State Route 35 in Middletown NJ. I loved the food and was sad when it closed!

I also wish Steak and Ale would come back. Always went to Pittsburgh North Hills location.

ATs was decent 🍤 . I liked the 🇬🇧 decor. Traditional.

I know they still had them in France in the mid-80s. Very popular when I visited Paris in 1985. I had never heard of them, and thought the name humorous / stupid, even knowing the Popeye connection.

lol me too!! my parents would be so frustrated bc they hated mexican food, and that was always my birthday choice😂👅

I remember most of them

Some of these I have never heard of the ones I do remember were gross and under rated just plain yuck

I don't think the guy who made this video really heard of any of these restaurants personally.

Speak for yourself. I dunno anyone who doesn't love these places.

In the '60s, after church, my parents would get a barrel of Kentucky Fried Chicken and we'd head out up the Great River Road. We'd stop about a half hour up the river, eat lunch, and then just enjoy the ride through the country. In the '70s, KFC was still good, but facing competition. In the late '80s, I was headed north from South Florida. In a hurry, so I grabbed a large box of KFC nuggets (liked them better than McDonald's) and jumped on the highway. I didn't think I was going to make it to a rest area with the cramps I was getting. It was like a colon flush. I tried some KFC later, both chicken and nuggets, with the same results. What used to be good was faster reacting than Taco Bell. In my old age, if I feel constipated, KFC is usually good for clearing that up.

KFC was once great food. Not sure what happened to them.

I used to work at a Big Boy and you are absolutely correct, even down to the "special sauce".

I used to go to Sambo's with my co-workers after we got off work from a night club. They never failed to serve great early morning breakfast

That was a stupid reason to change its name then close

I liked Bonanza a lot

Shakey's use to have good pizza especially their linguicia sausage pizza 😋

Howard Johnson's was a staple ee looked for while on vacation with my grandfather on the East Coast and when he visited us in CA we went to them there too. MY younger of my two sisters loved the fried clams and we always had to go so she could satisfy her cravings.

I used to go as a teen with my buds on a weekend to SHAKEYS pizza parlor in CLARKSVILLE ,TN. and I would order the beer OLD WORLD DARK by the pitcher ! I was only 16 so you can imagine the anxiety while dining on pizza and chugging black beer !😂😂😂Good times !!

We used to go to Ponderosa as a family. But to be honest, their steaks were ass. There is still one in Orlando if you want to go.

Don’t try to reason with a robot.

Bonanza & Ponderosa chains were + in PA; 1970s 1980s..by the 1990s they drifted away. 🥩

Shakeys was the place to go for groups after a game or celebration. Chuck E Cheese is bad pizza and for kids. Shakeys had better pizza, had MOJOS and chicken so was good for everyone

I liked Shakey's ,there are still a few left in California

The pizza was very good at the Shakeys I worked at. Of course we were trying to dump the franchise an we were sourcing most of the ingredients ourselves and not from corporate. We insisted on top quality ingredients and I think it showed in the product. We got out of the franchise deal around 1979. I left in 1989. Restaurant it still going today.

Riverside?

I wish GREEDY Corporatists had a lifespan!!! I HATE THEM 🤬😡

If Red Lobster is owned by some Greedy Corporation and not Mom and Pops, let them go away then, WHO CARES 😡

No they fail because of corporate bean counters interfering in the restaurant operations and menu trying to squeeze a few more shekels of profit at the expense of quality and service.

Pizza Hut had a good one in the 1980s

what cities? shakeys was always my favorite

@@ronaldheesch3723 L.A area and Orange County. Covina, Sylmar, Downey, Lakewood, Torrance, Santa Ana, Garden Grove, Anaheim and a bunch more

Love their MOJO potatoes

La Habra CA Redlands CA

@@MrCarter4121 the la puente location on Hacienda has the mojos and chicken down to an art. youl find me there there stuffing my face with spaghetti and mojos on any given weekday during bunch o lunch

Me too especially the Monte Cristo

Where?

@@dragoncubes1074 From F is for Family. It's a parody of Sambo's.

@@Mondomeyer I must have missed that one. Thanks for the clarification.

{Interestingly, it's popularity was much higher as a strip joint.)

​@@krisandersen8695did they serve pizza? Asking for a friend...

@@chiarac3833 uhmmmm...... if you knew who to talk to, you could get quite a lot of things that weren't on the regular "menu".

@@krisandersen8695 😝😁😆