Manhattan’s First Carl’s Jr. Location Shutters After Less Than 5 Months

After less than five months in operation, the first Manhattan location of Carl’s Jr. has unceremoniously closed.

The burger chain best known for its long “slutburger” campaign opened a two-floor Midtown West location at the end of January, its debut met with both a long line and animal rights protestors.

Now, tipsters say that the restaurant at 425-427 Seventh Avenue, between 33rd and 34th streets, is dark. Nobody is picking up the phone, and a staffer at a remaining Coney Island outpost says that the Midtown West location shut down as early as a month ago. Eater has reached out to the company’s representatives.

Though Carl’s Jr. has been around since 1945, it hasn’t had a huge NYC presence, and for this new location, the chain went hard on promotion. For the launch, the company created a 25-minute Off-Broadway play called “Written in the Stars,” where Carl’s Jr.’s mascot Happy Star tries “to make it in the big city.” At the time that parent company CKE Restaurant Holdings announced the new restaurant, a broker working with CKE even claimed it planned to open several more locations throughout the city.

But New York is a city with plenty of fast burger options, and Carl’s Jr. always faced steep competition. In a first look at the place, critic Robert Sietsema declared the chain’s burgers “uniformly awful.”