Kings Family Restaurants, an iconic Western Pennsylvania chain that once boasted 30 locations and created a darker counter-confection to its rival’s Smiley Cookie, has been whittled down to just five sites.
Patrons who went to the Kings at 315 Hyde Park Road in Allegheny Township on Sunday learned the eatery was closed by reading a sign on the door announcing it was permanently shut down.
Of the five remaining locations, one is in Kittanning and another is in Hempfield. Kings also has restaurants in Franklin, Canonsburg and Wintersville, Ohio.
Officials at the North Versailles offices of Kelly Companies, the restaurant’s ownership group, did not respond to calls and emails from the Trib. Company officials in the California office also did not respond to voicemail and email requests for comment.
The Kings in Allegheny Township pays about $3,700 a year in property taxes to Westmoreland County, about $2,800 to the municipality and about $16,000annually to the Kiski Area School District. The company is up to date on its tax payments, according to tax collector Valerie Hassa.
Joe Massaro, president and CEO of the Pennsylvania Restaurant & Lodging Association, said he does not know the specific challenges Kings is facing, but “restaurants big and small are challenged with several unprecedented situations” that can make it difficult for them to remain afloat.
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• Customers stunned as Kings in Allegheny Township permanently closes
Many of the restaurants that survived the pandemic with government subsidies or by successfully switching to only takeout and delivery are still struggling, he said.
Unlike retail or product-based businesses that had items on the shelf or in a warehouse waiting to be sold, the income lost during the pandemic “can’t be made up, those days are lost,” he said.
As a result, restaurants must do without savings to cover the normal drops in business that can occur during the year or even replace equipment that fails.
“Now that customers are coming back and demand is high, restaurants often don’t have the working capital they need to handle normal fluctuations in business because of those two years of low demand and shutdowns,” he said.
Restaurants also are dealing with rising inflation for food and dramatic swings in prices.
“Restaurants can react a bit with their pricing, but they have to be careful not to overreact and scare customers away,” Massaro said. “But when they don’t pass along the entire increase in cost to them, they are cutting into an already slim profit margin.”
The demand for higher wages among service workers since the end of the pandemic also cuts into that same price-sensitive revenue stream, he said.
“The higher wages are good for the workers and something we like to see, but it can make it difficult,” Massaro said.
Even when offering higher wages, restaurants are having a difficult time filling positions, with many resorting to scaling back operations.
“During the pandemic, we told millions of workers across the country, ‘Go home. We don’t have work for you right now, and we don’t know when we’ll have you back,’ ” Massaro said. “Many of those people found new careers, and some have made changes in their lives so they don’t need to rely on two incomes to make it work.”
He said vacant restaurant positions eventually will be filled, but it takes time and resources to train a workforce.
Sunday’s abrupt shutdown of the restaurant in Allegheny Township was the latest in a string of Kings closings since it changed ownership.
Kings was established in 1967 in North Versailles and built a strong reputation offering a family-style menu that includes sandwiches, burgers, soups and classic American fare.
Kings reported annual sales of about $51 million in 2013 and was serving about 500,000 customers a month.
Two years later, founder Hartley King sold his 30 restaurants to San Diego-based Kelly Companies.
According to its business profile, Kelly Companies owns 10 restaurant brands in 27 states, including Kings. The other chains are Claim Jumper Steakhouse & Bar, Champps Kitchen & Bar, Fox & Hound Sports Tavern, Craft Republic, Joe’s Crab Shack, Brick House Tavern + Tap, Grady’s BBQ and McCormick & Schmick’s.
Kings’ most recent closings
In September, the Kings in Presque Isle Plaza in Plum’s Holiday Park neighborhood closed. Sheetz plans to tear down the building and build a gas station and convenience store on the site. The Plum Kings opened in 1974.
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In January 2021 the company announced that eight of its restaurants — the ones in Allegheny Township, Kittanning, Monroeville, Monaca, Canonsburg, Somerset, Franklin and Meadville — were on the market as part of a master lease portfolio in which the buyer would make a single rent payment for all the sites.
Of those eight, only the restaurants in Kittanning, Canonsburg and Franklin remain open.
The company closed another one of its restaurants in Salem Township in 2021.
The site of a former Kings in Buffalo Township is being converted into an Italian eatery and a Starbucks coffee shop.
Sharon Hein of Cranberry, who was a cashier and hostess at the Kings in Marshall for three years before it closed in 2017, said she has bittersweet memories of the time she spent there.
“It was a wonderful place to work,” she said. “I would see the same people every day. They were like your family.”
She said the location was so popular that “there were Sundays when there was a line to get into the restaurant.”
Hein’s husband, David, who with with her at the Kings in Hempfield Pointe on Monday, said that while he continues to patronize Kings restaurants, he thinks the quality has suffered since the chain changed hands.
“I liked it (Kings), but that was when Hartley (King) owned it,” David Hein said. “It was always jammed (with customers). Unfortunately, I think it has gone downhill.”
Kings celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2017 by offering patrons buy-one-get-one free meals and free slices of its famous apple pie with cinnamon ice cream.
When Kelly Companies took ownership of Kings, the new leadership acknowledged the company’s deep roots in Western Pennsylvania and said they wanted to build on the founder’s success.
They said they planned no major changes except for some remodeling of locations and tweaks to the menu.
Efforts were made to reinvigorate the brand through marketing campaigns and new menu items such as pretzel buns and the return of the famous Frownie Brownie, which was originally created as a tongue-in-cheek counterpoint to the Eat’n Park Smiley cookie.
Frownie disappeared in 2015 after the company was sold to Kelly Companies but made a comeback in March 2019 and was promoted on billboards, television ads and social media.
Despite the company’s efforts, restaurants were closed in Harmar, Marshall, Altoona, Bridgeville and Imperial in 2017.
Competitors such as Eat’n Park, which still operates nearly 60 locations in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, have not been immune to closings.
In January 2021, Eat’n Park closed its Squirrel Hill location after for 45 years.
The Eat’n Park in Edgewood was closed in October 2020 after 29 years and the one in McKees Rocks closed in May 2019 after 53 years.
Jeanne Siecinski of Hempfield said she enjoys going to the Kings restaurant at Hempfield Pointe along Route 30, where she meets up with friends on Mondays to play cards.
“They are always very nice,” Siecinski said of the employees at Kings.
But she worries if the writing is on the wall for its future.
“I’m hoping they stay open,” she said. “Everything is closing. That’s sad.”
Staff writer Joe Napsha contributed to this report.
Tony LaRussa is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tony by email at tlarussa@triblive.com or via Twitter .