This week on Nation's Restaurant News the top story was Hooters closes dozens of restaurants. Hooters is the latest casual dining chain to close a significant number of locations amid a challenging operating environment where costs remain high and consumers become more discerning. Reports of abrupt closures in markets from Louisville, Kentucky, to Bryan, Texas, to Lakeland, Florida, began spreading Sunday evening. About 40 restaurants around the U.S. have been shuttered, according to local news reports.
In other news, Pizza Hut has launched a new pizza format, Chicago Tavern-Style Pizza, along with several new pizza toppings.
Tavern pizza is a thin-crust pie usually sliced into squares that is widely eaten in the Windy City, much more so than the deep-dish pies for which the city is better known.
Also, after news broke that Panera Bread is shutting down another of its fresh dough manufacturing facilities in Chandler, Ariz. (as first reported by the St. Louis Business Journal), Nation’s Restaurant News learned that the JAB Holding-owned bakery-café chain has shut down at least two more of its fresh dough manufacturing facilities in Denver and Seattle, bringing the total to four closures. In areas where FDFs are shutting down, the company is switching to a par-baked operations model, where bakery items are partially pre-made off-premises, frozen, and then finished in the oven at a Panera café.
See what else was trending on NRN.com this week.