90 percent of restaurants fail in the first year, research on the topic by Cornell Hotel and Restaurant Administration Quarterly shows it’s more like one-fourth that fail. By the third year, 60 percent close.
That study, which sampled a city in the Midwest, is a few years old, and there are none that are more up to date. But it’s easy to see from the many that come and go here, running a successful restaurant isn’t a piece of cake.
Among the more recent to close, the Tilted Kilt, which opened in 2009 in the Ambassador Row Shopping Center and closed in April, blamed its departure partly on declining blue-collar clientele as a result of the shutdown in offshore drilling after the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in the spring 2010.
