6 Chain Restaurants That Never Managed to Take Hold in New York

You would have thought a burger chain with Mark Wahlberg’s name on the door was an easy win for staying in business in New York City.

It wasn’t.

Wahlburgers planned seven New York City locations. Today, only one is left, tucked inside a Long Island mall.

These are the chain restaurants that tried NYC and never got their footing.

1. Golden Corral

The Golden Corral buffet chain chose Route 9 in Poughkeepsie for its Hudson Valley debut in early 2017.

The buffet chain didn’t make it two months.

Workers said they went unpaid, and diners complained the food ran low.

The location closed that spring. That’s a rough opening act.

Golden Corral tried again in the fall of 2018, and this time it had a full parking lot and glowing reviews.

Then the pandemic hit, and buffets across the country were forced to close.

When this one reopened, diners didn’t fully come back.

A “for sale” sign went up outside not long after.

Another buffet moved into the space and lasted a few years before closing too.

The building has sat empty since, and local developers have asked the city for approval to turn it into a self-storage facility.

Golden Corral still runs several hundred locations across the country.

Golden Corral’s own restaurant locator lists four locations left in New York State today: The Bronx, Queensbury, Rochester, and Syracuse.

2. Wahlburgers

Wahlburgers, the Boston-born burger chain owned by Mark Wahlberg and his family, set out to open seven “patty shops” across New York City.

The first opened on Coney Island in August 2015.

It didn’t last.

The Coney Island counter closed in September 2017 after falling behind on its rent and its staff’s paychecks, according to a report at the time.

A second location, planned for an 8,300-square-foot space on Eighth Avenue in Times Square, never opened at all, even though the lease had been signed back in 2015.

A third Wahlburgers opened on the Upper East Side in May 2017.

New York City’s health department shut it down that October for code violations, and the restaurant closed for good the next month.

Wahlburgers also tried Long Island, opening in Port Jefferson Station in 2016.

That one closed too, in January 2020, and a local paper’s headline put it plainly: New York’s only Wahlburgers had shut its doors.

A different Wahlburgers has since opened, inside the Roosevelt Field mall’s dining area in Garden City, though that 2024 opening was never part of the original seven-location deal.

Seven were planned in 2015.

None of those seven are still open, and the mall food court took until 2024 to give the chain its one remaining foothold in the state.

3. Steak ‘n Shake

Steak ‘n Shake opened its first and only New York location on January 12, 2012, right next to the Ed Sullivan Theater in Midtown.

It was tiny by design, a 22-seat, counter-service-only shop testing a concept the chain called Signature.

Lines wrapped around the block on opening day.

New Yorkers chase a food trend fast.

They drop it just as fast.

Steak ‘n Shake didn’t stick.

The Broadway location closed within about five years, and Steak ‘n Shake never opened a second restaurant in the state to replace it.

The Indiana-based chain still runs hundreds of locations across the Midwest and South.

New York never got another shot.

4. &pizza

The &pizza chain brought its build-your-own ovals to Manhattan for the first time in the summer of 2017, opening on West 28th Street.

More locations followed within a couple of years, from Astor Place to Wall Street to NoMad.

Then, one by one, they started closing.

The Washington, D.C.-based chain shut down eleven underperforming, company-run shops, and a large share of them sat in New York City.

Its chief executive didn't dance around why: Charging $13 for a custom pie is a hard sell in a city with $5 dollar slices on nearly every corner.

&pizza has kept only a small footprint in the city since.

New York diners kept choosing the dollar slice instead.

5. Fatburger

Fatburger has tried New York twice.

The Beverly Hills burger chain had already run locations in Manhattan, Long Island, and Jersey City at some earlier point.

By December 2012, every one of them had closed, according to a report at the time.

That didn't stop a second attempt.

Fatburger partnered with the Riese Organization, a major New York restaurant operator, and announced plans for ten Manhattan locations starting in 2013.

The first opened that spring in Murray Hill, on Third Avenue.

Nine more were supposed to follow.

They didn't.

The Murray Hill location itself was gone within a few years, and no second wave of Fatburgers ever opened across the city.

Two tries. Zero locations left.

6. Dickey's Barbecue Pit

Dickey's Barbecue Pit was the country's largest barbecue chain in 2017, when it ran 567 restaurants nationwide, according to Restaurant Business.

New York got a batch of them over the years, including locations in Fishkill and Brooklyn.

New York already had its own barbecue chain by the time Dickey's showed up.

Dinosaur Bar-B-Que was founded in Syracuse in 1988, and it had decades to build a following in the same upstate cities Dickey's was trying to crack.

Many of Dickey's New York locations are gone now.

Restaurant Business reported that franchisees closed more than a quarter of Dickey's restaurants nationwide in a year and a half of shutdowns, and its scattered New York locations were part of that count.

As of early 2025, just three Dickey's remained in the entire state: Scarsdale, Norwich, and Buffalo.

Three locations, spread across three corners of the state, for a chain built to be everywhere.

That's not exactly taking hold.

Why National Chains Keep Losing Ground in New York

These six chains didn't fail in New York for no reason.

They ran into the same three walls.

New York rent alone can cost more than a chain budgeted for the whole store.

Fatburger's own chief executive described rent as always an issue in New York when his chain arrived in 2013.

The market is already packed with dollar-slice counters and homegrown barbecue joints doing the same thing cheaper, with decades more loyalty already built in.

Steak 'n Shake found out how fast that curiosity fades: Lines wrapped the block on opening day, and they never came back.

&pizza's own leadership pointed to real estate and labor costs as the reason its growth shifted toward cheaper regions instead.

Golden Corral and Dickey's ran into a different version of the same problem outside the city.

The audience for an all-you-can-eat buffet or a barbecue combo wasn't large enough to fill a big-format restaurant every night.

A chain built for wide-open parking lots and predictable rent rarely translates well to New York's tight footprints and higher price per square foot.

The math rarely works.

The chains that do eventually crack it tend to shrink the format first: Smaller stores, higher menu prices, and a kitchen layout built for the tiny back-of-house space New York City real estate offers.