Chains Lexington has loved and lost: Vote now for your favorite forgotten restaurant
Lexington used to have a lot of chains restaurants of all kinds: Cafeterias, steakhouses with huge salad bars, sit-down places with Tiffany-style lights and brass rails. Or maybe lots of quirky antiques artfully nailed to walls.
Now a lot of this casual dining has gone away, and so have a lot of other places. Remember when frozen yogurt was big? Or the bagel craze of the late 1990s?
O’Charley’s, once a chain with more than 200 locations including at least three in Lexington, recently closed its last restaurant here. But they’ve been slowly disappearing since the late 1990s.
We’ve rounded up some of the chains Lexington loved and lost in the last 25 years. We’d like to know which readers miss the most.
You can use the polling feature below to weigh in, and if we’ve missed one, shoot us an email at ask@herald-leader.com.
If you’d like to read more, this piece from 2013 highlighted some chains now closed in Lexington that lived on in other locations.
This story may be updated with suggestions from readers.
Do you have a question about Lexington history for our service journalism team? We’d like to hear from you. Fill out our Know Your Kentucky form or email ask@herald-leader.com.
This story was originally published June 14, 2023 at 12:58 PM.
