8 Diner Foods That Vanished From Ohio Menus (and Locals Still Miss)
A diner regular in Circleville orders the same roast beef sandwich he’s ordered for decades, at a counter most of the country forgot existed.
That regional chain once had more than 500 locations chasing Arby’s across the country.
These are the diner foods that have vanished or almost vanished from Ohio menus.
Locals who are old enough to remember still miss them.
1. Skyscraper Cone
Isaly’s built its whole reputation in Mansfield, where founder William Isaly started selling ice cream out of his dairy plant in 1912.
His shops became famous for the Skyscraper Cone, a soft-serve tower that stood four inches tall and sold for a nickel.
Isaly’s counters also served chipped chopped ham piled high on a bun, sliced so thin the meat curled off the blade.
The chain also invented the Klondike bar in 1922, engineering a chocolate coating that would cling to a solid block of ice cream.
Isaly’s grew to nearly 400 Ohio and Pennsylvania stores by the late 1940s, and the last Mansfield location shut its doors in 1970.
Not anymore.
No original Isaly’s storefront survives in Ohio today.
2. BBC and the Potato Bar
Rax Roast Beef opened as a Springfield roast beef stand called Jax in 1967, years before it became Arby’s biggest rival.
Regulars ordered roast beef piled with bacon and cheddar into a sandwich they called beef, bacon, and cheddar (BBC), then loaded up at an all-you-can-eat salad and baked potato bar.
Bad ad decisions did the chain in.
It happened fast.
Rax swelled to 504 locations in the 1980s before a strange ad campaign and a 1992 bankruptcy gutted the brand.
Only six Rax restaurants remain anywhere, and four of them still serve Ohioans in Circleville, Lancaster, Ironton, and New Carlisle.
3. Kenny King’s Secret Recipe
Kenny King opened his first Cleveland drive-in on West 117th Street in 1950, and it grew into a family restaurant chain that filled Northeast Ohio.
Local accounts say King traveled to Kentucky and licensed Harland Sanders’ own fried chicken recipe before most of the country had ever heard of a Colonel.
The chain leaned on that connection for decades.
Kids who cleaned their plates got a toy from the restaurant’s Treasure Chest, a promotion that ran years before Happy Meals existed.
Kenny King Jr. ran the family business after his father’s death in 1972, but the last Kenny King’s closed in 2004.
Not even that saved it.
4. Original Fish Fry
Columbus gave Ohio its first Arthur Treacher’s in 1969, a British-style fish and chips counter that sold its catch out of paper bags.
Hush puppies and clam chowder rounded out the menu, and the chain grew fast on the idea.
It worked, for a while.
Arthur Treacher’s counted more than 800 locations nationwide by the 1970s, then lost most of them to bankruptcy and ownership changes over the following decades.
These days, every Arthur Treacher’s left standing sits in Ohio, and there are only a handful of them.
5. Blue-and-White Cake Box
Lionel A. Pile opened Hough Bakeries on Cleveland’s Hough Avenue in 1903, building the streusel coffee cake that would define the company for the rest of the century.
The bakery packed its coffee cakes, hot cross buns, sticky pecan rolls, and Easter daffodil cakes into a signature blue-and-white box tied with string, and Cleveland families carried that box home for holidays and Sunday breakfasts for generations.
Hough grew into a Cleveland staple with 28 branch stores plus outlets inside supermarkets and department stores, pulling in about $12 million a year and employing 1,000 people by the early 1970s.
Then it collapsed.
A 1990 sale to Amerifoods fell apart, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy, and all 32 of the chain’s stores and its Lakeview Road headquarters closed on the same day, August 8, 1992, with no warning to employees or customers.
No Hough Bakeries location has reopened in Cleveland since.
6. Wendy’s Other Chicken
Wendy’s founder Dave Thomas didn’t stop at burgers.
His company opened Sisters Chicken & Biscuits in Columbus in 1979, a fried chicken spot built around warm, buttery biscuits that many regulars remember better than the chicken.
The concept spread fast.
Sisters grew to nearly 80 locations by 1985, then Wendy’s sold the chain off in 1987, just a couple of years later.
Every remaining Sisters closed by the mid-1990s, though a few of those slanted-roof buildings still stand in central Ohio, doing business as something else entirely.
Psst! How much do you know about Ohio’s food history? Take our quiz and see if you can ace it.
Quiz
Ohio Diner IQ
Answer nine questions on Ohio’s food history and diner culture. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
Cincinnati chili got its start in 1922 at a hot dog stand named after the burlesque theater next door. What was the restaurant called?
7. Endless Salad Bar
Ponderosa moved its headquarters to Dayton in 1971, and its self-serve salad bar became the whole reason families packed into a booth on a Friday night.
Steaks came with unlimited trips to a buffet loaded with toppings, soup, and dessert.
Nobody left hungry.
The chain once ran hundreds of Ohio locations.
Only three Ponderosa restaurants remain anywhere in Ohio now, and Columbus keeps just one location running on South High Street.
A food creator's TikTok visit to that last Columbus Ponderosa went viral in late 2025, racking up views from people who hadn't thought about the buffet in decades.
8. White Tower Hamburgers
White Tower opened its first stand in Milwaukee in 1926, building tiny square burgers that copied White Castle's down to the nickel price.
A federal court eventually forced the chain to change its castle-shaped storefronts, but that didn't stop White Tower locations from opening across Ohio anyway.
Most closed decades ago.
Toledo kept a White Tower open on Sylvania Avenue long after Milwaukee's own flagship shut down in 1976.
That Toledo counter became the final White Tower still serving hamburgers anywhere in the country, a title nobody at the company ever wanted to hold.
A small fire broke out inside the building in 2022, and the restaurant never reopened.
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