How a Newton chicken shop became a 1,200-store chain
Boston Market opened in 1985 as Boston Chicken, one storefront in Newton, Massachusetts, started by Steven Kolow and Arthur Cores. It sold rotisserie chicken and sides at fast-food speed, which made it a home-cooked dinner nobody had to cook.
The idea worked in one neighborhood, and then it drew investors who knew how to scale retail. The company moved its headquarters to Golden, Colorado, and signed area developers to open restaurants across the country.
Those developers did not bring their own money. The parent company lent it to them, then booked the interest on those loans as income, which made the corporation look healthier than the restaurants under it.
Turkey, meatloaf and ham joined the menu in 1995, and the name changed from Boston Chicken to Boston Market. By the late 1990s the chain was running about 1,200 restaurants in the United States, the figure Restaurant Business still cites as its peak.
For a few years a family dinner chain was also one of the fastest growing retail stories in the country, with new restaurants opening faster than anyone could measure whether the old ones made money.
Why did Boston Chicken file for bankruptcy in 1998?
Because the restaurants could not repay the loans the parent company had made to its own developers, and supermarkets had moved into the exact meal Boston Market sold.
Grocery chains and warehouse clubs put hot rotisserie chicken near the registers at prices Boston Market could not match, and The Boston Globe pointed at Costco's chicken pricing as one of the forces the chain never answered.
On October 5, 1998, Boston Chicken filed for Chapter 11 protection in the US Bankruptcy Court in Phoenix, together with 14 Boston Market subsidiaries, and closed 178 restaurants the same day. About $283 million of its senior debt was due on October 17, and the restructuring was not going to be finished in twelve days.
J. Michael Jenkins, then chairman, president and chief executive, told CNN that week: "We had hoped to restructure out-of-court and gave it our best effort."
What followed was a pattern this site keeps running into. The business was never rebuilt. The name was sold, and sold again, as an asset.
Who owns Boston Market today?
Engage Brands, a company controlled by the restaurant franchisee and real estate investor Jay Pandya, has owned Boston Market since April 2020.
McDonald's bought the brand in 2000 and never grew it, then sold it to the private equity firm Sun Capital Partners in 2007. Sun Capital held it for 13 years before selling to Engage Brands, and the chain still had hundreds of restaurants at that point.
The ownership chain reads like Sears: each owner further from the kitchen than the last, each one treating a familiar name as a line on a balance sheet.
Nobody at Engage Brands has announced a shutdown. There was no farewell campaign and no closing date. The restaurants stopped one address at a time, usually when a landlord or a state agency forced the door shut.
That silence is why the question keeps getting typed into search engines. A chain that announces it is closing gets a news cycle. A chain that goes quiet leaves customers driving to a locked building with the menu board still lit.
Is Boston Market still in business in 2026?
Yes, technically, and the count is now small enough to check by hand. Restaurant Business did exactly that in 2026: the company's own website listed six restaurants, two of them in New Jersey and the rest in Texas, Pennsylvania and New York.
The trade publication called all six. Three were open and operating, two calls went unanswered, and one returned a busy signal.
The slope behind that number is steep. Boston Market went into 2023 with roughly 300 restaurants and finished 2025 with 15, according to Technomic, a Restaurant Business sibling company.
Massachusetts, where the first store opened in 1985, has had no Boston Market since 2025. The chain has nothing left in the state it was named for.
Compare that with Kmart, which is down to three stores and still publishes a store locator that matches reality. Boston Market's locator kept sending customers to restaurants that had already closed, which is the detail most of the complaints are actually about.
The brand itself is not finished. Boston Market At Home frozen dinners are still stocked in American supermarkets, made under license by the frozen-food company Bellisio Foods and run separately from the restaurants. Restaurant Business also tracked a franchised Boston Chicken that opened in Delhi in late 2024 and closed after its landlord went to court over unpaid rent.
Rent, wages and a stop-work order: what actually closed the stores
Not a change in what Americans eat. Unpaid bills. Landlords moved against Boston Market over rent, suppliers sued over invoices, and state agencies shut restaurants over taxes and payroll.
The clearest public record is in New Jersey. On August 15, 2023, the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development issued stop-work orders at 27 Boston Market restaurants after worker complaints, and its investigation found wages unpaid or paid late, along with minimum wage, sick leave and record-keeping violations.
The order was lifted the following month, once the company had paid more than $630,000 in back wages to 314 workers. New Jersey Labor Commissioner Robert Asaro-Angelo put it plainly in the department's September 2023 announcement: "if you don't pay your workers, we will shut you down."
Closures that arrive by order or eviction notice do not come with a sign in the window, which is why so many regulars found out by driving there.
The name outliving the stores is not unusual, as Montgomery Ward shows: it has sold goods online under a different owner since 2008, 7 years after its last store closed.
What the $38 million Corner Bakery judgment showed
The most detailed account of how money moved through Jay Pandya's companies comes from a fight over the other chain he bought.
SSCP Restaurant Investors, which took over Corner Bakery, sued Pandya, Boston Market and Pandya Restaurant Growth Brands, accusing them of "shocking, systemic breaches of fiduciary duties" and of stripping cash out of Corner Bakery before its own Chapter 11 filing in February 2023.
Boston Market and Pandya Restaurant Growth Brands never answered the complaint. They were declared in default, and a federal judge awarded SSCP a $38 million judgment.
A $38 million judgment against a company with six listed restaurants is not a sum anyone expects to collect. It is a measure of what was taken out before the doors closed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Boston Market still open in 2026?
Barely. In 2026 Boston Market listed six restaurants on its own website, two of them in New Jersey and the rest in Texas, Pennsylvania and New York, and Restaurant Business reached only three of them by phone. Boston Market has had no location in Massachusetts, where the chain started in 1985, since 2025.
Who owns Boston Market now?
Boston Market has been owned since April 2020 by Engage Brands, a company controlled by Jay Pandya. McDonald's owned the chain from 2000 until 2007, when it sold to the private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, and Sun Capital sold to Engage Brands 13 years later.
Why did Boston Market close so many locations?
Unpaid bills rather than empty dining rooms. Landlords acted over rent and states acted over taxes and payroll, including stop-work orders at 27 New Jersey Boston Market restaurants in August 2023 that were lifted only after the company paid more than $630,000 in back wages to 314 workers. Boston Market ran about 1,200 restaurants in the late 1990s and listed six in 2026.