Another Luby’s restaurant is closing: See which Fort Worth-area cafeterias are open
The ever-shrinking Luby’s chain of Texas cafeterias will close a 25-year-old location on South Hulen Street on Sunday.
The closing, expected since the Houston-based company changed hands last year, leaves only a single location in the Fort Worth-Arlington area to order Luby’s “LuAnn Plates,” fried “square fish” fillets and Thanksgiving or Christmas turkey dinners to go.
The location at 5901 S. Hulen St. originally opened in 1998, replacing a Luby’s that had opened in 1977 inside then-brand-new Hulen Mall when that neighborhood was new and booming.
A Luby’s 9 miles east at 3312 SE Loop 820, Forest Hill, remains open. It was one of 31 Luby’s bought by a new ownership group led by Calvin Gin of Chicago.
Dallas-area locations also remain open at 5600 S. Hampton Road; 13455 Midway Road; 801 N. Beckley Road, DeSoto; and 5040 W. Park Blvd., Plano.
Another Luby’s closed last year on Loop 820 in north Fort Worth.
The home of fried fish, fried or baked chicken and chicken-fried steak with lots of vegetables had been for sale since 2020.
Luby’s was already floundering but was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic, with sales down 75% in March, April and May 2021.
For many Texans, Luby’s Cafeterias are the epitome of comfort food. The 1990s animated Fox television series “King of the Hill” even named one of its characters Luanne Platter, after the renowned Luby’s smaller “LuAnn Platter” that includes a half-serving of an entree, a side item and a roll for about $9.
Last year, the company announced that Luby’s and once-popular corporate cousin Fuddruckers, a burger grill, would be closed and dissolved if buyers are not found.
A former Fuddruckers in Fort Worth, 5601 SW Loop 820, is now a Pluckers Wing Bar. Fuddruckers remains open in Frisco and Rockwall.
Large chain cafeterias have faded from the restaurant scene in recent years, partly because diners tended to go through the line only once without spending extra money on appetizers or spur-of-the-moment desserts.
Another legacy Texas chain, San Antonio-based Furr’s AYCE Marketplace, closed its last Tarrant County location in 2021 and later went completely out of business. The 95-year-old Highland Park Cafeteria in Dallas closed in May 2020.
In 2019, “Food & Wine” ranked Cleburne Cafeteria in Houston as the nation’s best.
Among the top 10 were Philippe in Los Angeles, “home of the original French dip,” and Arnold’s Country Kitchen in Nashville, regularly ranked as the nation’s premier plate-lunch cafe.
Several smaller cafeteria-style restaurants survive locally, mostly specializing in home cooking or barbecue.
The most prominent example in Texas is Underwood’s Bar-B-Q in Brownwood, along with smaller homestyle restaurants such as Madea’s Down Home Cooking in Everman and grocery counters such as Roy Pope Grocery in Fort Worth.
Luby’s is open for lunch and dinner daily; 817-263-5858 in Fort Worth through Oct. 16, or 817-293-0060 in Forest Hill, lubys.com
This story was originally published October 11, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
