#frisch's

My time working at Frisch’s has been a few months short but I’ve had enough for a lifetime. A manager here known as Bianca has had an apparent history of driving off employees and harassing autistic individuals, but that became more than apparent when I started working there. After my first day at the job, mere days after it got out that I had Aspergers Syndrome, she told me over phone that I was not coming in anymore.

Here’s the short version of what’s been going on since then, long version down below

(Pictured: the iconic sign of the Frisch's Mainliner restaurant. The sign was dismantled this past Monday. Another sign on the other side of the restaurant, barely visible in the background of this photo, has been left to decay and probably crush someone's car when it finally collapses.)

In 2015, Frisch's, a local family restaurant chain that's been around since 1939, was bought out by an out-of-state private-equity firm. Late last year, after a solid nine years of the new ownership neglecting the chain's financial needs to pad their own pockets, locations started getting shut down en masse. Recently, that rot finally came for my local restaurant and long-time haunt, which happened to also be the chain's flagship for most of its existence: the Mainliner. I was devastated. I was angry. And when I get angry, I start looking for who to blame and how to fix it. In looking into the specifics of how it all went down, I ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole. Buckle up--things are about to go a bit Pepe Silvia.

(Pictured: Things going a bit Pepe Silvia.) From 2015 up until this past November, Frisch's was owned by NRD Capital, a flock of private-equity vultures from Atlanta, GA. They're the ones getting all the flak for the chain's collapse, and rightly so; they were, after all, profiting off the chain while refusing to put enough back into it to keep staff employed or rent paid...wait. Rent? Yes, while Frisch's restaurants originally owned the land they were built on, 74 of the locations--including my beloved Mainliner--were sold to Florida real-estate holdings company NNN REIT a mere four months after NRD bought the chain out. NNN then proceeded to ratchet up the rent, which NRD refused to pay for; it all came to a head in just this past year, with NNN ordering the eviction of every single Frisch's restaurant that sat on what was now their property.

(Pictured: NNN as envisioned by Walt Disney, probably.) And I thought a lot of that was odd. After all, NRD didn't stand to gain anything from selling their own property and leasing it back. They couldn't even claim it was for short-term gain, either--they sold the land for less than a third of what they paid to buy the entire company, after all. I figured there had to be more to this story, so I started digging, looking for any commonality between NRD and NNN besides screwing over Frisch's and having inscrutable naming conventions. Everything I checked came up a dead end--no other investments in common, no shared executives, not even a shareholder with stake in both companies. They didn't seem to have any connection at all. I mean, it was a private-equity firm started by some Pakistani dude and a real-estate holding company started by Golden Corral.

(Pictured: a real estate mogul, apparently.)

And wouldn't you know it, it was Golden Corral, of all things, that ended up being the through-line for this entire story.

(Pictured: EEEEEEVIL! EEEEEEEVIL!)

NNN REIT started out as a holding company specifically for Golden Corral's restaurant properties. Coincidentally, NRD owns multiple Golden Corral franchises; naturally, the actual property those restaurants sit on is owned by NNN. Here's the crazy part: pretty much ALL of those properties are in the Greater Cincinnati Area, and NRD bought them in 2012 when they were sold by their original franchisee, allegedly due to lackluster profit margins but timed right in the middle of a major norovirus outbreak at a restaurant in Wyoming that led to accusations of widespread improper food handling. The original franchisee company was...Frisch's. I couldn't make this up if I tried.

(Pictured: One [1] Very Screwed Franchisee)

So, what does all this mean? Well, not a whole lot you could prove in court, I don't reckon, but to me it sounds like the company that started out as a subsidiary holding company of Golden Corral but became the effective owner of Golden Corral decided to turn a short-term loss into a long-term property grab by using a current franchisee to buy out a former one. Is that legal? Good question, but it sure the hell doesn't feel like it ought to be.

(Pictured: The exact wrong person to ask.)

A shame... this is where me and my (spiritual) dad used to meet for lunch every week, and when I went back to town to visit when my friend went to hospice, we met there again for old time's sake.