If you clicked on this story, you probably remember your hometown Sizzler. I remember mine. It was the fanciest restaurant I’d ever been to, and I have a distinct memory of sitting on its lushly carpeted floor, tracking the adults’ legs to and from the buffet. I wasn’t normally a floor sitter, but the worst brain freeze my tiny, 6-year-old self had yet experienced was trying to cleave my skull in two. When I think of Sizzler, I still think of the ice cream sundae that double-crossed me.
Perhaps you remember the weekly coupons that came in the mail. Or the cheese toast and Malibu chicken. For a while, it seemed no California suburb was without a local Sizzler, the steakhouse that promised affordable luxury for the whole family.
The first Sizzler opened in 1958 in Culver City. Del and Helen Johnson’s new restaurant advertised “a steak you can’t afford to miss”: A New York strip served with a baked potato or fries, plus a roll and butter, was $1.39. That’s about $12 today, still quite the deal. If you wanted the healthier lunch special — a quarter-pound ground round with cottage cheese, jello and a rye crisp — that was just 59 cents. To cut consumer costs even further, Sizzler nixed tips. “When you dine with us, you never have to worry about the tipping!” Sizzler bragged in its ads.
A steak and lobster tail meal at Sizzler steakhouse.
Mark James Miller via Wikimedia CommonsThe concept was a massive hit. By 1961, the Johnsons opened 12 more locations. Four years later, they were up to 100, almost all in California. Depending on when your Sizzler was renovated, you may have memories of this first concept, which they billed as “snug and cozy.” Some even had fireplaces.
As the years chugged along, Sizzler weathered an American health food kick by adding a salad bar. But by the 1980s, red meat was coming back into fashion. Unfortunately for the by-then ubiquitous California steakhouse, they faced a new problem: major competition in the casual, family-oriented, sit-down space. Suburbs were getting Outback Steakhouses, Fresh Choices and Red Lobsters. Sizzler, by comparison, felt stale.
In 1991, the glorious rebrand came:
The promotional video is pure ‘90s. There is a song, featuring lyrics like, “Sizzler is the one that brings us choices! Sizzler is the choice of America!” (Sidenote: The YouTube video features an all-time great comment: “Play this at my funeral, it’ll cheer my family up as they remember my love of Sizzler.”) There are women at the salad bar who look like they’ve just left the set of a Whitesnake video, and two different sailors, one of the military variety and another who is maybe the Long John Silver’s mascot.
The video smashes you over the head with the virtues of its new “buffet court” concept. Instead of single servings of steak and seafood dinners, Sizzler customers could now use all-you-can-eat options to fill up. It was “a restaurant within a restaurant,” built on the idea that dissatisfied American diners craved more variety.
Patrons help themselves at the new salad bar at the newly remodeled Sizzler restaurant in Atwater Village, Calif., in 2005.
Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagAnd variety there was. The buffet court had it all: fruit salad with marshmallows, carrot salad with raisins, fried zucchini, French onion soup, a taco bar and something called “tomato amazement,” just to name a few dishes. For dessert, there was the aforementioned opulent sundae bar that froze my young brain.
Reviews were mixed. Some customers were confused by the new model, not sure if the restaurant was table service or serve yourself (it was both). Others missed the old, cheaper salad bar that was enough for many to fill up on a full meal. One restaurant critic in the Roseville Press-Tribune called the offerings “heavy on the deep fried indigestibles” and reluctantly said “the miniature chicken things were OK.” The Los Angeles Times indelicately referred to it as a “trough-brau, a place heavy eaters go to load up on $6.95 tri-tip and all-you-can-eat tapioca.”
Unfortunately for Sizzler, the pivot was disastrous. Five years later, they announced they were closing 136 restaurants and laying off over 4,600 workers. Industry experts pointed to the curious predicament they’d put themselves in. As middle-class dining preferences shifted, Sizzler plopped itself right in no man’s land: fast food was cheaper and less fussy, but competing sit-down restaurants were of increasingly better quality. “Sizzler got too old, got banged up, didn’t respond until it was too late,” one restaurant writer told the New York Times in 1996. “And when they did, it was the wrong strategy.”
It’s service with a smile at the front counter at the newly remodeled Sizzler restaurant in Atwater Village, Calif., in 2005.
Richard Hartog/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagThe buffet also flopped. “Buffet chains are mini factories,” an industry expert told the Times. “Designed from the ground up to be buffets, and they’re 10,000-square-foot stores, about twice the size of many Sizzlers.”
They closed all the Midwest Sizzlers, and overseas locations in Australia shuttered one by one. Today, there are about 100 Sizzlers left across the United States and about a dozen in Puerto Rico. California’s Sizzlers are primarily clustered around the original Culver City restaurant, although the Bay Area still has a handful along highway corridors like Colma’s Serra Boulevard location. If this stroll down chain restaurant memory lane has put you in the mood for Sizzler, know that the menu has changed. It’s pared down significantly since its glory days, with a more manageable selection of cheaper-cut steaks, chicken and shrimp dishes. The most expensive steak, a rib eye, is $22.49.
Like many chains during the pandemic, Sizzler filed for Chapter 11 over the past year. Although it’s survived bankruptcy before, the consumer desires of suburban America have likely changed in inalterable ways. The salad days are gone forever, accidentally foretold by their 1991 promotional video.
“Sizzler for the ’90s,” the narrator excitedly says. “Exactly what America wants.”
