The restaurant business is a hard one.
The profit margins are thin, the employee base is hard to wrangle, and you usually have to take on a ton of debt because it’s so expensive to open a location.
As a result, the difference between success and failure is razor thin. A few bad Yelp reviews can do it. So can customers “getting bored.” Or tiny changes in the broader economy (read more on Ohio specfically here).
Here are 5 Ohio restaurants (and at least 18 locations) that have shut down recently…
Hot Chicken Takeover
We really wanted this Nashville hot chicken place to work. It started by crowdfunding a food truck on Kickstarter after a successful pop-up restaurant.
It sold to new investors a couple times and grew.
But it fully came apart in 2025, closing five locations throughout the year, ending with the last location standing in North Market (one of those cool indoor markets) in Columbus on September 20, 2025.
Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que
Famous Dave’s is down to two locations in Ohio, both near Cleveland (Sandusky and North Olmstead) because the Toledo location closed down in February 2025.
Staff was given a week’s notice.
Melt Bar & Grilled
The restaurant that was famous for giving Melt-tattooed customers free food declared bankruptcy in 2024, but its final location in Lakewood held on until January 1st of this year.
Maple Street Biscuit Co.
This biscuit restaurant owned by Cracker Barrel closed 14 of its locations nationwide.
The Powell location was one of them. It just opened in March 2024 and shut down within the past month.
On the plus side, its fellow Columbus-area locations of Worthington and Polaris are still open.
Frisch’s Big Boy
This iconic chain (McDonald’s Big Mac was inspired by Big Boy’s Double Deck Hamburger) has been losing locations for years.
The Frisch’s franchise of Big Boy has been closing locations heavily from 2024 and continuing into 2025.
It still has 31 locations open even after closing double digits’ worth in recent months. We’ll call it 10 locations as a conservative estimate for our purposes.
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