The trouble started for Frisch’s restaurants in the Cincinnati area when they allowed a private equity acquisition from NRD Capital to bring in a bunch of woke ideas that started a chain reaction beginning in 2015 that essentially killed the business during the self-made government Covid crises that sealed the deal.  Sadly, Frisch’s has always been a big part of my family’s life; but these days, they are empty everywhere.  I saw the writing on the wall the day I tried to order a Coke, and they told me they had switched to Pepsi products.  That was in 2015, ahead of President Trump’s first term, and I shook my head at my wife at the impending doom that was to come.  Pepsi tends to support a client base that is more liberal than Coke, which has, over the years, marketed toward more traditional audiences.  And Frisch’s was always about respect for tradition, family strength, and the morning breakfast bar.  It has been very sad to see so many of Frisch’s restaurants closing, especially the one in Fairfield off Seward Road, and the one right in the heart of Sharonville.  A few are still fluttering along, but when I drive by them at 6:30 AM, they are as closed as a barn door to a stable full of wild horses.  A self-imposed exile caused by parasitic lending practices and people in finance who thought they could loot benefit from a solid Cincinnati tradition, when they set up a lease agreement that just financially crushed the restaurant chain that relied on family tradition and a community experience to survive.  Other similar restaurants, such as Denny’s, Applebee’s, and Red Lobster, have all been going through the same kind of challenges.  But adding to the problem were the Covid shutdowns, for which Frische’s never recovered, and changes in social discourse that has an anti-family slant to it, and what we are seeing now with the closure of over 40 locations, 20 of them just in 2024 alone, is the foolish and parasitic imposition of government and short sighted financial institutions destroying American business.

I have unique knowledge about this decline as I used to work at Frisch’s as a waiter during the 90s, a period that had crushing difficulty for me.  I was going through a lot of what Frisch’s is now at that time in my life, with serious lawsuits and government trouble that were crushing.  A lot of people would not have blamed me for committing suicide, given the level of pain and suffering I was enduring at this time.  It was so severe and complex that Job from the Bible was fortunate.  People had no idea how I would survive or if I would.  Without being too ostentatious, I can say that it was horrible, and at the time, I saw no way out.  I was acting as my own lawyer in several lawsuits, which did not have a very good track record of success.  Looking back on it, believe what you want about God, but he was testing me, and I passed the test primarily by dusting myself off and becoming a waiter at Frisch’s while I spent the next five years digging out of that bottomless hole with extraordinarily high tips from a public who had come to like me quite a bit.  I was their area philosopher, and people would come to eat at the Frisch’s restaurant that I worked at on Fields Ertle Road to hear me talk and give them advice.  And I learned a lot about people during this critical time that I use daily.  And the wisdom I gained from all that crushing pain was better than all the gold available to the masses of humanity.  And thinking back on it, I couldn’t have had it any other way. 

I picked that particular restaurant to work at because it was where my wife and I went all the time as a young couple, and on the first day that my first daughter was born, coming home from the hospital, we ate there with her all cuddled up in a blanket on the table.  So I picked that moment to make a massive life recovery, and hustled back to health.  I put on a smile and a whole lot of hustle, worked all I could and I won my cases, fought off a lot of very evil people and I made a small fortune in unnaturally high tips because of my personality and the families who came to eat at the restaurant that I was working at to have me work their table.  They would ask for me at the front specifically.  I understood why Frisch’s was such a great place as a host to the family experience, and I wanted to help with that effort any way I could, literally being at the bottom of the barrel myself.  I learned that a healthy dose of optimism can carry you through anything, for a large part, that was the marketing plan for Frisch’s to provide a platform for the public to engage in positive community interaction.  It’s where people went to see their friends and neighbors and to have good food, which started with the Car Hop days, where personal automobiles fused with American lifestyles centered around freedom and independence. 

You can’t live in the past, and things do change.  But what happened to Frisch’s is a massive social breakdown where people don’t go out into the community for a shared experience anymore, and that is a government policy problem attached to the United Nations.  The breakdown of the family structure is very much a globalist trend that interferes with places of business like Frisch’s.  I was also so pro-family that my customers would give me their checks worth of tips to show their appreciation, tipping at a rate of 80% or more, with 100% not uncommon.  Rob Dibble, the former Reds pitcher from the Nasty Boy days used to stop by and eat at my station quite often and would leave me $100 tips for a ten-dollar check, to hear me talk.  People went to Frisch’s for the company and the food.  The globalism that attacked American ideas was against both things that migrated into our local community through hostile lending practices, leaving behind a lot of history and tradition. And Frisch’s and its excellent breakfast bars are now a thing of the past.  And the writing was on the wall when they switched from Coke to Pepsi in 2015.  It was too late when they tried to correct that mistake just a few years ago and return to Coke.  They had blown their market viability and been destroyed by forces that took it for granted that Frisch’s would always have its lights on.  And now people don’t do things as a family like they used to, leaving Frisch’s out of the consideration by a public that used to value those experiences and has not yet replaced the sentiment with other options in the marketplace.  This wasn’t a natural market-driven killing. It was the purposeful destruction of many hidden elements that are parasitic in nature and anti-American at heart.  And Frisch’s was, and whatever survives from all this, a very pro-American family gathering place that shows what the efforts of globalism always intended for them and us as a whole.  Without Trump, America would be just as Frisch’s is now, only a memory with empty storefronts and massive debts as a distant memory of what it once was. 

Rich Hoffman

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