Wednesday, April 1, 2009

UFood Grill shuts down

The Bedford location of UFood Grill closed last week. There are about a dozen location in several states. UFood Grill originally opened in Bedford as KnowFat LifeStyle Grille about 5 years ago. The store underwent a renovation and changed it's name to UFood Grill last July.

Since the name change, I noticed the restaurant seemed to be less busy (at least during lunch) and during the past month or two was noticebly quiet the few times I stopped by. Maybe the combination of the economy and the name change did them in. Looking back, with the marketing relationship they have with George Foreman, perhaps a better name would have been The George Foreman Grill. The restaurant is currently vacant with a for lease sign on the window. It looks like they are going to try to sell everything turnkey to another restaurant. This is similar to what happened when Fiji Fujiyama (thanks JMP) closed a bunch of years ago. Most of the equipment was sold to Ginger which opened in the same location.

What's interesting is watching which restaurants picks up business when a nearby restaurant goes out of business or renovates and whether they keep the business. When McDonalds closed for renovation in late 2007, one restaurant that seemed to pick up a lot of business was Bedford House of Beef and judging by the lines, they seem to have managed to keep a lot of that business after McDonalds re-opened.

6 comments:

jp said...

"similar to what happened when Fiji closed"

I guess you meant Fujiyama. Much as I like Ginger, I still miss the Fujiyama folks.

Adam Schwartz said...

Hi jmp,

Yes I did mean Fujiyama - thanks. Enjoyed them as well.

Anonymous said...

This is too bad. I always liked the menu at Ufood, but only ate there periodically because it was a little on the expensive side. Tried to take my parents there for lunch last week and was surprised to see the "for sale" sign in the window.

Anonymous said...

This was big news in our office this week. "KnowFat!" was a staple on our regular lunch runs during the work week, so much so that we were known by name to Elias (the manager, nice guy), et. al. After the switch-over to UFood, we became frustrated with the menu and recipe changes. It also seemed like quality control was an issue, as we would routinely find something missing from our orders. In the end, we just stopped going. But we'll all miss them even still!

Anonymous said...

The Landlord kicked out Barnstormers because he thought that UFood Grill would be great. Right before they closed, Barnstormers had plans to add more features to the cafe. I hope the landlord is loosing money.

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