Who Ate Burger Chef?

Buyouts, sale-leasebacks and a pile of paperwork turned the American roadside into a handful of logos owned by a handful of firms. Dayton watched it happen.

By Richthrax · Oct. 25, 2026

Ask anybody in the Miami Valley over 40 where they used to eat and you'll get a list of places that don't exist anymore. Ponderosa. Rax. Red Barn. Burger Chef. Arthur Treacher's. Frisch's, until a couple of years ago, on half the corners in the county.

We tell ourselves tastes changed. Some did. But when you line up what happened to those chains, the same thing keeps showing up: somebody bought them, loaded them with debt or sold the buildings out from under them, and the menu we had to choose from got smaller. And the rules we wrote for restaurants since then have mostly made it cheaper to be big.

Dayton was the steakhouse capital

Ponderosa was headquartered right here from 1968 to 1994, in a steak-shaped building it opened at Dayton International Airport in 1974. At its 1989 peak, after merging with Bonanza, it had 736 restaurants, more than any steakhouse chain in the country, according to company histories and the Dayton Daily News.

Then the dealmakers showed up. Corporate raider Asher Edelman took it over in 1986. Two years later John Kluge's Metromedia bought it for $8.6 million in cash plus $290 million in debt it took on, and rolled it together with Bonanza and Steak and Ale. In 1994 the headquarters left Dayton for Dallas, taking 120 jobs with it. Metromedia's steakhouse arm filed for bankruptcy in 2008. In 2024 there were 21 Ponderosas left in the whole country.

Springfield gave the country Rax, which had about 500 roast-beef restaurants in the mid-1980s, and Red Barn, a 1970s chicken-and-burger chain in 19 or more states. Columbus gave it Arthur Treacher's, which reached 826 fish-and-chips shops. Today there are six Rax restaurants, one of them in New Carlisle, a handful of Arthur Treacher's and no Red Barns.

One burger chain swallowed three

Burger Chef had more than 1,200 restaurants in the early 1970s, close to McDonald's at the time. General Foods bought it in 1968 and let it shrink to about 650. In 1982, Hardee's, then owned by Canada's Imasco, bought what was left and turned the stores into Hardee's.

That same year Marriott bought Gino's, a 359-unit chain started by Baltimore Colts players, and converted the best stores to its Roy Rogers brand. In 1990 Hardee's bought Roy Rogers too, 648 restaurants, and broke it up. Three regional powerhouses ended up inside one burger chain. In 1997 CKE bought Hardee's. Today CKE belongs to Roark Capital.

Roark is the name to remember. Its Inspire Brands owns Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Sonic, Jimmy John's, Dunkin' and Baskin-Robbins, more than 33,000 restaurants in all, and in 2024 Roark bought Subway, a deal the Wall Street Journal put at about $9.6 billion. Add Restaurant Brands International (Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Hortons, Firehouse Subs, about 33,000 restaurants) and Yum Brands (KFC, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, more than 64,000) and you've got a big share of the drive-thru signs in America answering to three owners. Brian Callaci of the Open Markets Institute called that kind of ownership "an illusion of choice." The Federal Trade Commission looked into the Subway deal.

Sell the building, rent it back, go broke

The move that keeps killing chains has a name: the sale-leaseback. A buyer purchases a chain, sells the restaurants' land and buildings to a landlord, and pockets the cash. The restaurant becomes a tenant in its own home, paying rent forever.

Cincinnati's Frisch's Big Boy is the local version. Private equity firm NRD Capital bought it in 2015 for $175 million, when it had 121 restaurants. About four months later, 74 of those stores were sold to a real estate company for $47 million and leased back. By 2024, WCPO reported, Frisch's was paying about 38% more rent per store than in 2015. That fall, eviction suits piled up, and the Kettering, Englewood and Huber Heights stores closed within days of each other, along with Fairborn, Miami Township, Troy and Xenia. As of last fall, 31 Frisch's were left.

Red Lobster ran the same play on a bigger stage: Golden Gate Capital bought it in 2014 for $2.1 billion, $1.5 billion of it raised by selling the real estate. Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024. Golden Gate also bought Ohio's Bob Evans in 2017 with 523 restaurants. When it sold the chain this February, it had a little over 400.

It isn't a coincidence. Of the 21 restaurant and bar chains that went bankrupt in 2024, 10 were backed by private equity, according to PitchBook data reported by CNBC.

The paperwork tax

Here's where regulation comes in. I'm not against health inspections. I like knowing the cooler works. But look at who the rules are easiest on.

Opening a restaurant in a big American city takes an average of 13 separate permits and licenses costing more than $5,300 in fees, and over $22,600 in San Francisco, the Institute for Justice found. That's before the lawyer, the architect and the months of waiting. A chain with 3,000 stores has a department for that. A guy opening his first diner on Wayne Avenue has a folding table and a weekend.

Then there's the new middleman. DoorDash and Uber Eats charge local restaurants 15% to 30% of every order. McDonald's negotiated a base rate around 11.6%, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Researchers at Wharton and NYU found delivery apps "significantly increase" the odds a restaurant closes, and that small independents struggle the most.

The scoreboard: in 2025, the number of independent restaurants in America fell by about 9,500 while the big chains added locations, according to the research firm Technomic. Chains now run about a third of the restaurants but take in more than 60% of the money.

The other side

To be fair about it, not every chain died at a raider's hands. Rax collapsed from its own mismanagement. Burger Chef was already shrinking under General Foods, a food company, not a buyout shop. Some of the biggest new rules actually aim at the giants: federal calorie labeling covers only chains with 20 or more locations, and California's $20 fast-food wage covers only chains with 60 or more. Economists still argue over what that wage did to jobs. A UC Berkeley team found no job losses, while a National Bureau of Economic Research paper estimated about a 3% drop. And Technomic blames rising labor, rent and insurance costs, plus too many restaurants chasing too few dollars, more than it blames any owner.

Fair enough. But somebody chose to sell the buildings. Somebody chose to stack the debt. And somebody, every time, walked away with the money while the cooks and the regulars got a padlock on the door.

What we can do

Eat local when you can. Marion's and Cassano's have been Dayton family businesses for more than 60 years, and they're still here because we kept showing up. Order pickup straight from the restaurant instead of through an app. Ask your city commissioners how many permits it takes to open a sandwich shop in Dayton, and whether one counter and one fee schedule could do it. And ask the people we're electing on Nov. 3 where they stand on private equity buying up the businesses we grew up with.

The menu didn't shrink by accident. It can grow back the same way: on purpose.