6 American Restaurants That Have Been Around for More Than 150 Years It’s no secret that the restaurant business has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic. Restaurants thrive on social interaction and dining room capacity limits and the on-again-off-again bans on indoor service have shrunk their customer base, and forced an increasing number of them to make the difficult decision to close for good. Here, for example, are the saddest restaurant closings of 2020. Particularly lamentable is the demise of institutions that have served their communities for generations, often under the same family ownership -- places like the 84-year-old Louis’ in San Francisco, the 87-year-old El Chapultepec in Denver, the 91-year-old “21” Club in Manhattan, and downtown L.A.’s century-old Pacific Dining Car.