Last remaining Denny's in San Francisco closes after nearly 25 years

SAN FRANCISCO (Gray News) – The last remaining Denny's in the San Francisco area has closed.

After nearly 25 years in business, the 24-hour restaurant near San Francisco's Union Square closed on August 1, SFGate reported.

Franchise owner Chris Haque told the news agency that ongoing vandalism contributed to their decision to close.

“We were the only business left and we stayed open until the last day,” Haque is quoted as saying. “The cost of doing business is enormous. There is vandalism and people come, eat and leave and there is no one to stop them.”

Haque further said that the dine-and-dash problem keeps recurring and reducing the restaurant's profit margins.

The franchisee will reportedly continue to operate a Denny's location in Tacoma, Washington, but the Union Square restaurant is the second Denny's it has had to close.

Hague said he was a franchisee of a Denny's store in Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco before it closed in 2019.

In recent years, empty retail spaces have become increasingly common in downtown San Francisco.

Retailers such as Uniqlo, Nordstrom Rack and Anthropologie have closed.

And the owner of Westfield San Francisco Centre, a fixture at the mall for more than 20 years, announced he would return the mall to his lender, citing declining sales and customer traffic, The Associated Press reported last year.

“I was standing outside my bar at 10 p.m. and saw it was like a party in the street,” Jack Mogannam, manager of Sam's Cable Car Lounge, told AP. “Now you see about six people in the street, up and down the block. It's a ghost town.”