By Kim Leonard and Sam Spatter
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Wednesday, September 22, 2004
It’s adios to Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurants.
The remaining 66 Chi-Chi’s nationwide closed Sunday, after a long decline in business and last year’s outbreak of hepatitis A at the Beaver Valley Mall location that killed four people and sickened about 660 others.
While a supply of Mexican-grown green onions — and not the restaurant’s food-handling practices — eventually was identified as the source, the Beaver location and the chain in general failed to survive the national publicity. The Chi-Chi’s in Beaver, Pleasant Hills and Hempfield were the last three in the Pittsburgh area.
“They had their base core of customers who were loyal,” Tim Veith, general manager of the Beaver Valley Mall, said of the restaurant there, “but they lost their other customers.”
After closing Nov. 3 when diners began to fall ill with hepatitis A, which attacks the liver, the Beaver location reopened with fanfare on Jan. 15, publicizing a stringent new set of cleanliness standards.
A statement on the company’s Web site now says, “We would like to thank all of our loyal customers of the past 27 years and with a tear in our eye, say Adios.”
“Thanks for 13 great years,” said the words on a sign on the door at the closed Chi-Chi’s along East Pittsburgh Street in Hempfield.
Deborah Englert, the borough secretary in Pleasant Hills, said she’d heard a rumor the restaurant there might close, adding that she would miss it.

Veith said the Beaver mall received advance notice of the closing and is unsure about the location’s future.
Outback Steakhouse Inc. in August acquired the rights to 76 properties from Chi-Chi’s Inc. and its affiliates for $42.5 million. It said many would be converted to Outback brand restaurants.
Outback operates 857 steakhouses nationwide — including five in the Pittsburgh area — plus 159 Carrabba’s Italian Grills, 46 Bonefish Grills, 25 Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse and Wine bars, 18 Roy’s, five Cheeseburger in Paradise restaurants and two Lee Roy Selmon’s in 50 states and 21 countries.
“We’re waiting, as everybody else is, to see what Chi-Chi’s and Outback will do,” Veith said.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review’s efforts to learn what the Outback chain plans for the Beaver and Pleasant Hills properties were unsuccessful. Also, the Mesquite Beach Restaurant, a former Chi-Chi’s in Butler, has closed.
Local restaurateurs were surprised that Chi-Chi’s was able to recover at all after the hepatitis A troubles, said Victor Son, who operates Dingbats and Abate restaurants in the area and heads the Pennsylvania Restaurant Association’s western chapter.
“With the amount of competition out there and so many alternatives — between local operators and the big chain operators — we’re all struggling just to maintain our business share,” he said, “and a disaster such as Chi-Chi’s suffered can cut off enough customers to ruin business for good.”
Chad Brooks, who is opening his second local Qdoba Mexican Grill franchise location this week at the SouthSide Works, said that although the Chi-Chi’s franchise was struggling financially anyway, the disease outbreak was “really the death blow.”
But businesses can recover from tragedy. Qdoba’s parent company is the Jack in the Box restaurant chain, linked with the deaths of four children in the early ’90s from food contaminated with E. coli, Brooks noted.
That company was doing well financially, and “they were able to aggressively address the situation and make restitution,” Brooks said. “They also, out of that, created a state-of-the-industry food safety handling program, which they shared with the industry free of charge.”
Kim Leonard and Sam Spatter can be reached at kleonard@tribweb.com or (412) 380-5606.