The Last Days of What Was Once Boston Chicken. From Humble Beginnings, the Once-Flourishing Boston Market Fast-Casual Chain is Now Mired in Ignominy

Poor Boston Market. The once-great chain that was once a leader in what we now refer to as “fast-casual” restaurants has gone from its humble origins as Boston Chicken followed by a rebranding ten years later to Boston Market, and ultimately an expansion to some 1,200 restaurants.
Now it exists… barely… in ignominy.
What exactly is ignominy in this business? It’s when a franchise business is so desperate to survive  that it would move to allow anyone to open up a Boston Market restaurant without having to pay the usual franchise fees or meet other customary buy-in requirements. That move happened ten weeks ago.
Approach the window of one of the perhaps 27 remaining Boston Markets in the country, this one in a somewhat upscale shopping center in Bayside, New York, it’s hard to tell if it is indeed open. It is, in fact, open, but there’s an odd sign that says “CASH ONLY” visible through the window. Across the parking lot, a massive location that housed an Applebee’s restaurant until perhaps a year ago remains vacant but there’s a newly renovated JPMorgan Chase Bank, a newly renovated Stop & Shop supermarket, a new Starbucks, along with a Duane Reade,  a Foot Locker, a Sephora, and one of its oldest tenants, a Ben’s Kosher Delicatessen.
A near-empty dining room at the Bayside, N.Y., location at the end of the day.
Boston Chicken was founded in 1985 in Newton, just outside Boston, by Steven Kolow and Arthur Cores. It specialized in rotisserie chicken and a variety of accompaniments ranging from excellent cornbread, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and corn, among other offerings.  The chain began to expand quite rapidly in the early and mid 1990s and added new items to its menu in 1995 such as meatloaf, turkey, and ham.  It also changed its name to Boston Market.
In hindsight, it was the name change that signaled its eventual fall from grace.
The company moved further from its core business and added a chain of bagel cafés, Einstein’s, and added Boston Carver Sandwiches to the Boston Market menu. As it expanded, it raised a tremendous amount of debt to finance the vast move.
Indeed, the rapid expansion may have been too rapid as it filed for bankruptcy in 1998.
McDonald’s purchased the company, at first for its real estate but it then decided that the Boston Market could be turned into a profitable chain so it kept it going. That lasted a mere seven years before the world’s largest hamburger chain unloaded it to Sun Capital Partners, which turned it around and sold it in 2020 to Engage Brands, a company controlled by one Jignesh Pandya, an individual who has long billed himself as a “tycoon” but whose history is replete with lawsuits and unpaid bills.
The beginning of the end, however, really started in July of last year.
A “Cash Only” screen is another sign of a company in turmoil.
Pandya, who promised he would soon return the brand to its former self and be opening two new restaurants per week, effectively did the opposite. He instructed company employees to pay bills taking sharp discounts, if the bills were paid at all. Unpaid bills left the company temporarily locked out of its Boulder, Colorado corporate offices last year and resulted in the sudden closing of restaurants across the country, many without any notice.
In early July, a landlord filed a complaint in court stating that Boston Market owed in excess of $61,000 in unpaid rent for a restaurant in Danbury, Connecticut. The restaurant was evicted shortly thereafter. Around the same time that the Danbury location was being evicted, US Foods sued Boston Market for $11.3 million, accusing the company of owing them over $10 million for food it had distributed over the past several years.
In mid-August, the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workplace Development issued a Stop-Work Order at 27 of the 31 Boston Market stores in the state in part because the company owed $605.471 in back pay to 314 employees.
Pandya himself has seen hundreds of lawsuits filed against him for unpaid wages, and unpaid suppliers. In December 2023, both Pandya and the company filed for bankruptcy. The company’s bankruptcy case was dismissed in January 2024 after being unresponsive to court requests.
US Foods won its case on February 1 in a case in which Manish Shah, district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, said that Boston Market’s defenses in the lawsuit were “gossamer.”
And therm’s just the highlights.
The façade of the Boston Market – previously a Boston Chicken – restaurant in Bayside, N.Y.
But back to our little Boston Market restaurant in Bayside. In what I once observed to be a fairly busy establishment – whenever I would walk by, diners were lined up to place their orders, which they would then receive on a tray and carry over to an empty table – I’ve only observed a handful of customers in recent days. The very restaurant that my brother Greg liked for its signature rotisserie chicken and sweet potatoes was practically a ghost ship with one, maybe two workers trying to steer a sinking ship.
It’s only a matter of time, however. While the restaurant is still open, Pandya hasn’t apparently paid the telephone bill. While the main number is answered by an automated attendant, when a caller dialing +1 718 224-1747 followed the instructions and pressed “1” to speak to someone at the establishment, all that was heard was a reorder tone – fast busy signal – a call-progress tone that serves to indicate that there is no path to the location, perhaps an appropriate ending to what will soon be a locked front door after someone turns the lights off for the very last time.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)