It has been a crazy year in the restaurant business in Lincoln, NE. 2013 brought with it our new Lincoln Haymarket Arena and what happened in that area is amazing and continues to expand. There is a huge list of new restaurants and flavors in that area. We are a little behind on getting them all added to the menus page, but working on it.

However as we suspected, there have been some costs to this. With the opening of new restaurants and their success one has to remember that those dollars would have been spent at other establishments around town. So we have seen a good list of closing this year also. The most notable and public recently was the Tastee Inn & Out at 48th & Vine. We have also just heard that El Sitio at 48th & Pioneers is also closing its doors. Qulin at 84th & O Street, open and closed this year. Unfortunately for these two the main issue there is probably location, both were located in buildings that are kind of known as buildings where restaurants just don’t seem to make it in. We have seen restaurants in those locations come and go far to often.

Sam & Louie’s Pizza has closed all locations except for the downtown location. Applebee’s closed their downtown location. Skeeter Barnes closed their location out at 57 & Hwy 2. Hometown Cafe closed up shop just up the street by Lowes. Which made way for Dickey’s BBQ to open their third location there. OSO Burrito closed their downtown location but hopefully it is just for renovations as we do see some activity there. Wendy’s at 33rd and Cornhusker has closed. There is a new place called The Pie Hole out at 48th & Cornhusker the replaced the Mabuhay Express Filipino restaurant that was there. Lone Star steak house left town, Replaced with Aces Haus of Cuisine a few month later. Great Harvest Bread closed up shop. And the little breakfast & sandwich shop called White or Wheat at 70th & Van Dorn has closed and Yami Korean Cuisine has just opened there. So we have had our fair share of closings in town.

For those who love Chinese food…we saw Windchimes closed and then a few month later a new player, Shen Cafe took over the house. Mr. Hui’s, Mr. Lees, China House, Golden China, Hong Kong, Asian Cafe, and a few others have popped up and filled in the gaps around town. Hiro 88 moved in down in the Haymarket also.