All-you-can-eat buffets, kids birthday parties, often tacky decor and more than a few gimmicks.
If you ate out as a family in the 1980s and ’90s, you’ll undoubtedly have visited some restaurants that ticked some – or all – of these boxes.
Restaurants that have long since disappeared and yet are remembered by their former patrons as if they visited them only yesterday.
If you’re like us, you’ll wonder what happened to them.
Here are some of the most forgotten Australian restaurant chains that were once big news
Sizzler
Hugely popular in the 1990s, at its height the steakhouse and buffet chain had dozens of locations across Australia and cultivated a loyal family fanbase after opening its first restaurant at Annerley in Brisbane in 1985.
They even hosted the occasional wedding.
But times changed and the brand slowly slid into obscurity, closing the majority of its outlets amid declining patronage.
The original Annerley store was among the most recent to shut its doors, holding on until 2017.
Sizzler does still operate in nine locations across three states, with five restaurants in Queensland, on in NSW and two in Western Australia.
Pizza Hut still exists today, though not in the format that most would remember it by.
In the ’80s and ’90s the pizza chain was famous for its ‘all you can eat’ pizza and dessert buffet, and it was the go-to destination for thousands of kids’ birthday parties for that very reason.
Who could forget their all you can eat pizza, pasta and desert bar!
While the company still has hundreds of takeaway stores nationally, its iconic brick and barn-roofed venues have since been repurposed for a myriad of other uses
If you’ve ever thrown opened peanut shells on the floor of a restaurant, it was probably at Lone Star.
The American steakhouse franchise opened its first location at Parramatta in 1993 and seven years later it had 21 restaurants across Australia.
That was as good as it got, though, and 10 stores were reportedly shut down in 2000 after a review of its operations, before its American parent company sold the 11 remaining restaurants in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland to local operators in 2003.
A number of stores were later purchased by Outback Jacks Bar and Grill, while all Queensland restaurants and the original Parramatta store shut up shop in 2011.
Ollie’s was a household name in Victoria, NSW and other states in the 1980s, with advertisements like the one above, featuring Shirley Strachan from Skyhooks, doing the rounds.
But three little letters quickly ended the chicken chain’s reign: KFC.
The global chicken giant swallowed the Aussie stores in the early ’90s, and the rest is history.
Back in 2007 Investment and funds manager Iris Capital has purchased the 30-year old family steakhouse group The Black Stump for an undisclosed sum.
Formerly the Iris Hotel Group, the investment firm hopes to revive the Aussie-styled eatery which struggled in the competitive family restaurant market.
"Our strategy is to return the Black Stump to its iconic status," Iris director Oscar Budai said in a statement. Since then the restaurant has vanished off the map.
Did anyone ever eat here without a shop-a-docket?
It may not have been the fanciest restaurant in town, but a night out at The Black Stump was classic 1990s suburbia.
They were famous for their steaks – until they weren’t.
Holly’s
During the 1980s and 1990s, a visit to K-Mart wasn’t just to grab a bargain, you could also leave with your hunger satisfied.
Holly’s was located inside K-Mart stores and delivered a great variety of meals for shoppers, highlighted by their hot chips and gravy.
With K-Mart now being open 24 hours in some cities, surely it’s time to bring back this blast from the past.
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