LYNNWOOD—The Lynnwood Shari’s Cafe and Pies is just one more Washington State closure following the Pacific Northwest diner chain’s years of financial troubles and accrued debt.
A total of 15 of Washington State’s 20 Shari’s locations have now been permanently closed including its other Snohomish County location in Mill Creek. This leaves just five Washington locations still in operation including: Vancouver, Bellingham, Moses Lake, Olympia, and Puyallup.
At this point it’s unclear whether these remaining locations will remain open or transfer to different ownership. As of the publication of this article, the contact page for Shari’s website is down and the Shari’s Management Corp. has not responded to the Lynnwood Times’ inquiries.
Just last year, Shari’s closed all 42 locations in its home state of Oregon followed by closures in both Idaho and Wyoming.
Many Oregon-based Shari’s locations offered video lottery games using equipment provided by the Oregon State Lottery, to generate additional revenue, but the restaurants failed to pay their weekly electric fund transfer draw resulting in accruing over $900,000 in debt, the state lottery said last fall. That debt entered collections earlier this month.
Additional to this, more than 15 separate landlord companies in Oregon filed lawsuits against the company for failure to pay rent – amounting to more than $4 million owed based on rental contracts.
Since January of 2024 more than 10 unlawful detainers have been filed against the pacific northwest chain in Washington Superior Courts, according to the News Tribune who first reported the story, including debt collection notices in at least 11 counties, three tax warrant issues between October and December of 2023, and numerous eviction notices for unpaid rent.
The unpaid rent notices date back to early on in the pandemic but stretched through last summer.
The Shari’s location in Lynnwood has been a staple community gathering place since opening in 1993, known for its pies, bottomless coffee, and oversized breakfasts. The 24-hour diner was a 3,900 square foot building that underwent an energy saving retrofit in 2012.
Washington State Superior Court documents have no filings in Snohomish County so it’s unclear whether the Lynnwood location fell behind on its rent payments. According to the Secretary of State’s office, its business license is still active.
Shari’s Restaurants, later renamed Shari’s Cafe and Pies, was initially founded in Beaverton, Oregon, in 1978 by husband-and-wife duo Ron and Sharon “Shari” Bergquist. The two ran the restaurants until 1999 when it was acquired by Fairmont Capitol Inc. for $60 million. At the time of the acquisition, Shari’s Restaurants were the ninth largest family restaurant chain in the U.S. by sales and had 96 locations in seven states.
Sam Borgese was named CEO of the chain in 2017.
By early October of 2024, the number of operational Shari’s restaurants dropped to 49 locations and by the end of that same month the number of locations dropped to just 17.
Author: Kienan Briscoe
2 Responses
Hi, just some corrections to the article: The location is *James Village* Shopping Center in Lynnwood, not Jamestown. Another fix needed is the inconsistent information in the story: At the beginning the author wrote that the Shari’s locations that hadn’t closed and were still serving were located in Vancouver, Bellingham, Moses Lake, Olympia and Puyallup. However, scrolling through the article, one finds a picture of a poster on the door of the Lynnwood Shari’s pointing patrons to another location that is still open in *Shoreline* on Aurora Ave. N. at 15252.
It was pretty clear for the last couple years that this was inevitable. This location was consistently short staffed and had poor quality food. Corporate cutting corners killed this location. It had a pretty consistent customer base with plenty of tables full. But when they made one waiter bounce between 12 tables and only provided frozen slop from a truck to serve, what can we expect? I’d rather go to the 112th Street Diner.