The last Hooters restaurant in Jacksonville has permanently closed its doors, posting a sign announcing the shutdown at its location on San Jose Boulevard at Baymeadows Road. The site also displayed a public health and safety notice dated September 29, 2026, even though the restaurant was still listed on the Hooters company website as recently as October 2.
The closure marks the complete exit of the orange-and-white sports bar chain from a market where it once operated at least six locations across Duval and Clay counties, according to News4JAX. Those outposts once stretched across Arlington, Jacksonville Beach, Orange Park, Jacksonville Landing, Tinseltown, and San Jose Boulevard, per the Jax Daily Record, which traced the chain's dominance in Northeast Florida before its steady decline. The San Jose location had kept posting on social media as recently as September 24, when it shared a note about a new menu item, according to the report.
A Decade of Local Closures Led to This Moment
The downtown flagship at Jacksonville Landing was the first major domino to fall, closing in June 2019 after 32 years in business when the city paid a $303,333.31 lease buyout to clear the riverfront complex for demolition, as reported by First Coast News. Five years later, the Orange Park restaurant at 1740 Wells Road shut down in June 2024 after nearly 24 years in operation, an early step in what became a multi-year downsizing documented by the Jax Daily Record.
Then came the Tinseltown location at 4521 Southside Boulevard, which closed abruptly on June 4, 2025, after 18 years, leaving San Jose Boulevard as the city's sole remaining Hooters. That former Tinseltown building didn't sit empty for long. By March 2026, New Jersey-based Supra Revolving Sushi Bar had leased the 6,430-square-foot space to convert it into a conveyor-belt dining concept, a transition Hoodline detailed in its earlier report, Supra Sushi Snags Hooters Spot.
Bankruptcy and a National Retrenchment
The chain's local contraction tracked a much larger financial reckoning. Hooters of America, LLC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Texas on March 31, 2025, weighed down by roughly $380 million in funded debt, according to court filings tracked by Kroll Restructuring Administration. The company said at the time it was focused on restructuring and had already closed several locations across Florida and other states.
Hooters completed its Chapter 11 restructuring on October 31, 2025, transferring restaurant assets and franchise management to a franchisee group led by the chain's original founders, per Ropes & Gray. Even after that ownership shift, the closures didn't stop. The company continued shuttering underperforming restaurants nationwide through 2026, completely pulling out of states including Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Minnesota by July, according to the Washington Times.
A Long Slide in Unit Count Nationwide
The scale of the pullback shows up in the numbers. Hooters finished 2024 with 251 domestic locations, a 16.1% single-year unit drop and a 29% decline from the 354 U.S. restaurants it operated 20 years earlier in 2004, according to industry data from Technomic cited by Nation's Restaurant News. Jacksonville's full exit from the chain fits squarely within that long-running national contraction.
The San Jose Boulevard building carries its own recent history beyond the Hooters brand. The restaurant sat directly along Goodby's Creek with dock access, and in July 2026 the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office opened an investigation after a deceased woman was discovered on the creek bank behind the building, as Hoodline reported in Mystery Woman Found Dead Behind Hooters. With the final sign now posted and the last Jacksonville location dark, the building's next chapter, like the one at Tinseltown before it, remains to be seen.
