Cracker Barrel Was In This West Coast State For Just 7 Years Before Closing All Locations

Cracker Barrel has long been a fixture in the American dining landscape as a familiar sight along highways and byways, and a favorite among local devotees from all walks of life. The restaurants beckon with rocking chairs on the porch, buttery biscuits on tables, and a gift shop full of retro candies, kitsch decor, baking mixes, and cheddar cheese straws. The Tennessee-based chain has expanded to over 40 states across the U.S., but it's Southern comfort-food menu and "home-away-from-home" formula never quite took off in one West Coast state: Oregon.

Cracker Barrel's Oregon story began with much anticipation and a rustling of folks familiar with the company's famous food and ambiance. The first West Coast restaurant opened near Interstate 5 in Tualatin, Oregon, on April 17, 2017, drawing around 100 hungry patrons for its 6 a.m. opening. That first store, just outside of the Portland area, also brought roughly 180 jobs to the region, indicating a solid opening and further expansion plans in the state. Things were looking up.

After that first opening, it didn't come as a surprise that Cracker Barrel planned to add three more Oregon locations within the following year, two in the Portland metro area alone. Over time, the chain operated restaurants in not just Tualatin, but also Beaverton, Bend, Jantzen Beach, and Medford — but the expansion was short-lived. It wasn't long before the closures began.

Since opening the first Cracker Barrel store in 1969, the company now operates at least 650 stores. With its down-home cooking and nostalgia-heavy vibe, it's somewhat surprising that Oregonians didn't more readily embrace the concept. Exact reasons are a bit elusive, but indicators and local reporting point to potential issues. The Jantzen Beach restaurant was one of the early major Oregon locations to go, shuttering abruptly in late summer 2022.

Local NBC affiliate KGW8 reported at the time, via employees, that potential reasons included safety and security issues, with locals confirming what they described as problems with theft and drugs in the area. Then, in the spring of 2023, Cracker Barrel permanently closed its restaurants in Beaverton, Tualatin, and Bend, citing impact from the COVID-19 pandemic, according to local reporting. Medford was the last Oregon Cracker Barrel standing after the 2023 closures, but that location closed in April 2024 after more than five years in business, making it the final Oregon-based Cracker Barrel to shut down.

With Medford gone, the chain's entire Oregon experiment ended just seven years after the Tualatin opening. Cracker Barrel regularly evaluates restaurant performance and uses multiple criteria to decide whether locations continue to meet the needs of guests and the business. Portland apparently wasn't reaching that bar, for both regional reasons and broader company struggles. Cracker Barrel's 2022 Q4 financial report, as a publicly traded company, noted that fewer travelers, higher gasoline prices, reduced visits from older guests, and the impact of inflation on those with lower incomes may have been contributing factors.

Online comments suggest mixed feelings from Oregon locals about Cracker Barrel's exit. In one Reddit thread about the final Oregon closure, one user criticized the Beaverton restaurant's hours, writing, "On weekdays they closed at 6 p.m. 6! That's peak dinner service for normal restaurants!" On another thread, one Redditor noted, "Having eaten at both a Cracker Barrel and the restaurants in Portland, I don't think it's the crime. There's a certain expected quality of the food in Portland..." Others were more direct. "Can't say I'm surprised," wrote another Reddit user in a thread about Medford. "The food was bland, the soda was watered down, and the biscuits were like hockey pucks."

Cracker Barrel's ongoing American journey is a complicated one. On the opposite coast, the state with the highest number of Cracker Barrel locations is actually Florida. And, including Oregon, there are actually seven U.S. states total without a single Cracker Barrel. That doesn't even include the lack of a CB presence in Washington D.C. or U.S. territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. No doubt, the absence of Cracker Barrel in Oregon is a tragedy, but it's certainly not for a lack of trying on the chain's part.