8 Restaurant Chains Georgians Grew Up With That Are Almost Gone
Think you could find a Shoney’s in Georgia this weekend?
You’d have two shots at it.
The chain ran around 1,300 restaurants across 34 states at its peak in 1998, back when a Georgia road trip meant a breakfast bar and a slice of strawberry pie.
These are the restaurant chains Georgians grew up with that have all but disappeared.
1. TGI Fridays
TGI Fridays anchored a Doraville shopping center in Georgia so completely that the whole plaza carried its name.
Friday’s Plaza stood at Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and Tilly Mill Road until the decades-old center came down in December 2020.
The Buckhead restaurant on Peachtree Road served until 2009, and a medical office building went up on the site.
Two are left in the whole state.
One sits on Camp Creek Parkway in Atlanta.
The other is out on Mount Zion Road in Morrow, and the chain’s own locator shows nothing else in the state.
Buford, Kennesaw, Duluth, Alpharetta, and Marietta each had one.
They’re all gone.
The restaurant near the Mall at Stonecrest in Lithonia shut this past spring, which left the pair still standing.
Georgia’s Airport TGI Fridays
TGI Fridays still runs three counters inside Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.
Those are licensed units built for travelers, not the sit-down restaurants with the striped awnings.
They sit past security on Concourses B, E, and T, so a boarding pass is the price of a plate of potato skins.
2. Shoney’s
Forsyth and Vidalia have the last two Shoney’s restaurants in Georgia, according to the company’s own location list.
Vidalia opens at 6 a.m., Forsyth at 7.
They’re a long drive apart.
At its 1998 peak the company ran around 1,300 restaurants across 34 states.
By late 2025 the whole chain was down to 51 restaurants in sixteen states.
So a Georgian who wants that hot fudge cake now plans the drive around it.
3. Denny’s
Denny’s put the Grand Slam on the menu in Georgia first, in Atlanta in 1977, as a nod to Hank Aaron.
Georgia has nine Denny’s restaurants left.
Norcross has the only one anywhere near Atlanta.
Five of the others sit in I-75 towns: Resaca, Locust Grove, Byron, Cordele, and Valdosta.
Brunswick and Richmond Hill are I-95 stops, and Columbus is out on the Alabama line.
Denny’s told investors in 2024 that it would close about 150 restaurants by the end of 2025.
It kept closing them.
A Grand Slam in the state that inspired it is a highway errand now.
4. Fuddruckers
Fuddruckers built its Georgia business on a burger you finished yourself at a produce bar loaded with tomato slices and pickles.
Two are left in the state, and neither one is in metro Atlanta.
The Commerce restaurant sits on Highway 441, up by the outlet stores.
The other is inside a travel center on Highway 17 in Richmond Hill, which is a strange address for a burger you drove across town for in 1994.
South Carolina, with a fraction of Georgia’s population, still has four on the company’s location list.
That comparison stings.
5. O’Charley’s
O’Charley’s has closed at least twenty of its Georgia restaurants on the way down.
Conyers, Douglasville, Newnan, Macon, Villa Rica, Dalton, Acworth, Griffin, and Hiram all lost theirs.
Austell lost its restaurant in 2026.
Four are still open: Stockbridge, Canton, Centerville, and Fort Oglethorpe.
By the company’s own location list this summer, O’Charley’s was down to 46 restaurants in twelve states.
Five of those states have exactly one restaurant left.
Georgia isn’t far off.
Psst! How much do you know about the companies behind Georgia’s old drive-thrus? Flip these cards and see how many you can get right.
6. Mrs. Winner’s
Georgia families treated Mrs. Winner’s fried chicken and free biscuits as an ordinary weekday lunch.
The entire chain was down to about a dozen restaurants by late 2025.
Those dozen are split among North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee.
One of Georgia’s survivors sits on Pio Nono Avenue in Macon.
Decatur, Marietta, Smyrna, Cartersville, Griffin, and McDonough have all closed theirs, along with a stack of addresses inside Atlanta.
The chain counted 184 stores in 1984.
That was the peak.
Those biscuits are a scavenger hunt now.
7. Long John Silver’s
Long John Silver’s kept a fish-and-hush-puppies counter in Georgia towns for decades.
Seven are left in the entire state, according to the chain’s restaurant list.
Ohio still has 51 of them, Texas 72, and Kentucky 44.
South Carolina has the same seven, in a state with far fewer people to feed.
Georgia lost the rest.
Seven restaurants spread across 159 counties add up to a long drive for anybody with a craving.
Order the hush puppies while you’re standing there.
8. Old Hickory House
Old Hickory House has been smoking pork in Georgia since 1955, when the first one opened on Piedmont Road in Atlanta.
Georgia has exactly one of them left.
It’s the Tucker restaurant on Northlake Parkway, open since 1974.
Members of the same family ran their own Old Hickory House restaurants around Atlanta under the shared name, and four of them closed up and retired.
The Forest Park location is where Jackie Gleason filmed his scene in Smokey and the Bandit in 1977, the one where he orders a Diablo sandwich.
Burt Reynolds was there too.
Tucker still sells the Diablo sandwich.
That’s the whole chain now, Brunswick stew and all.
What Moved in Instead
Georgia’s emptied-out chain restaurants rarely stay empty for long.
The first Whataburger in metro Atlanta opened in November 2022 at 705 Townpark Lane in Kennesaw, on the site of a former O’Charley’s.
Raising Cane’s took over another former O’Charley’s on Jonesboro Road in McDonough in March 2025.
Buffalo Wild Wings moved into the Carrollton and Rome buildings.
Bambinelli’s Pizza & Pasta took the Tucker building, and a Korean barbecue and hot pot restaurant took Lawrenceville.
Georgians still eat there.
The sign out front is the part that changed.
How Big Those Buildings Are
Georgia’s shuttered chain restaurants leave some sizable buildings behind, which is part of why a replacement takes a while.
The TGI Fridays at Stonecrest ran roughly 8,500 square feet on a property of more than two acres.
It opened in 2012.
The O’Charley’s in Hiram covered about 7,000 square feet on 1.3 acres, tucked between a LongHorn Steakhouse and a Wendy’s in front of a Sam’s Club.
That restaurant opened in 2002 and closed over a weekend in 2025 without telling anybody first.
Its neighbors made it easy to re-lease, and several interested parties turned up quickly.
Chains That Left Georgia Entirely
A few chains have packed up and left Georgia entirely.
Del Taco closed its remaining Georgia restaurants at 3 p.m. on February 17, 2026, the third time the chain has retreated from the state.
When it came back in 2012, the plan called for 60 Georgia restaurants.
It never got close.
Bahama Breeze is going the same way.
Darden announced in February that it would close all 28 remaining restaurants, and the Duluth location on Breckinridge Boulevard shut on April 5.
There’s a Georgia footnote in that one. Bill Darden opened his first restaurant, The Green Frog, in Waycross in 1938, when he was 19.
The Bahama Breeze in Kennesaw, on Ernest Barrett Parkway, is slated to become a different Darden brand.
El Pollo Loco, Pollo Tropical, and Smashburger each arrived in metro Atlanta with a marketing push and later left Georgia altogether.
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