The first Raising Cane’s in New Hampshire opened in Manchester this March, and the lines stretched out the door. People waited hours for chicken fingers. By the end of 2025, a second location had popped up in Concord. A third is already being discussed. The appetite for something new, it seems, remains insatiable.
But the story of New Hampshire’s restaurant scene in 2025 is not just about expansion. It’s about replacement. For every bright opening, a darkened window. For every new menu, a final check.
At least 44 restaurants opened across the state last year—pizza joints, Mexican kitchens, Mediterranean cafes, coffee shops, sandwich spots. Tostimo’s Pizza Kitchen brought its second location to Portsmouth. Zizza Authentic Pizzeria fired up its ovens in Manchester. La Fiamma opened in Hampstead. The options multiplied. The map filled in.
And yet, by July, 16 establishments had already called it quits. The Franklin, a Portsmouth oyster bar that had spent a decade building its reputation, announced in January that it would not see spring. “We made the difficult decision,” the owners wrote on Facebook, the passive voice doing heavy lifting. The doors locked for good at the end of March.
Harvey’s Bakery and Coffee Shop in Dover lasted longer—nearly a century longer. Founded in 1932, the bakery served generations of customers before the family announced their retirement in 2025. Some closures are tragedies of economics. Others are simply time catching up.
The reasons accumulate like dishes in a sink: rising costs, lease endings, labor shortages, shifting consumer habits, the slow erosion of margin that defines the restaurant business. Owners cite multiple factors, but the pattern is singular. The industry is contracting at the same moment it appears to be blooming.
Two of the 2025 openings didn’t even survive the year. They opened, served, closed, and now exist only as entries on lists like this one—cautionary tales written in menu paper and lease agreements.
The survivors face the same pressures. A new restaurant in New Hampshire must compete not just with established local favorites but with the ghost of every place that didn’t make it. The customer who might have tried your Thai fusion spot is still mourning the Italian place that closed last spring. Loyalty, in this business, is a finite resource.
And yet they keep coming. The entrepreneurs, the dreamers, the chefs convinced their concept will break the pattern. The Raising Cane’s franchisees who looked at Manchester and saw opportunity where others saw risk. The pizza makers who believe their dough, their sauce, their particular combination of cheese and ambition will be the one that sticks.
There is something admirable in this persistence, and something heartbreaking. The restaurant industry runs on optimism—the belief that tonight will be busy, that the reviews will be kind, that the numbers will finally work. Most of the time, they don’t. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that roughly 30% of new restaurants fail within the first year. By year five, that number climbs to 60%.
New Hampshire’s 2025 class of restaurants is entering those odds with eyes wide open, or perhaps willfully shut. The Franklin’s owners knew the business. Ten years is a lifetime in restaurant years. They closed anyway. Harvey’s knew their customers. Ninety-three years of proof. They closed too.
What remains is the cycle. New spots open. Some find their footing. Others join the list of places people still talk about in the past tense. The chicken fingers get eaten. The pizza gets sliced. The leases get signed and broken and signed again.
The restaurant scene in New Hampshire is not thriving, and it is not dying. It is turning over, as it always has, as it always will, the new replacing the old in a rhythm that looks like progress only if you don’t count the casualties.