Customers have slammed Kevin Hart’s vegan fast food chain days after the restaurant closed all of its locations just two years after its debut.
Hart House closed its four Southern California locations on Tuesday and posted a farewell message on Instagram that read: “Thank you. A heartfelt goodbye for now as we begin a new chapter.”
The chain launched in 2022 amid a surge in plant-based burger options in Los Angeles and set out to offer a traditional fast-food experience without animal products at a good price.
Now some diners are cheering Hart House’s closure, criticizing its menu and saying there are better vegan restaurants out there.
“The food was horrible. It tasted like cardboard,” one person said in a TikTok About the closing.
Kevin Hart’s vegan fast food chain has closed all of its California locations just two years after its debut.
Some diners are glad Hart House is closing and criticise its menu, saying it is not on par with other vegan restaurants.
“The food was incredibly greasy and tasteless,” said another reviewer.
“The food was horrible. All salty,” said one diner. “It’s disgusting. I went there the first day it opened. It was sooo disgusting,” said a fourth person.
One person suggested that Hart House may have failed because its menu items were not as good as those of other vegan fast food chains.
“The food was awful, especially if you’ve had really good vegan food, like at slutty vegan,” the person said, referring to another popular vegan spot.
Slutty Vegan was opened in 2018 in New York by its owner Pinky Cole and has expanded to other cities in Georgia and Alabama.
Hart House was about 50 percent owned by Hart and led by CEO Andy Hooper, the former president of &Pizza.
Its launch followed Hart’s public commitment to a primarily plant-based diet in 2020.
It was only in January that Hart House announced plans to expand by adding four to six more locations and exploring markets in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta.
In May 2023, a flagship location opened at the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue, which was the chain’s first to offer a drive-thru.
At the time, Hooper described the Hollywood site as symbolic of the brand’s aspirations: “Opening on the corner of Sunset and Highland, across from Hollywood High School, next to a Chick-fil-A and just feet from an In-N-Out, (inside) a former McDonald’s building is about as emblematic as it gets of our aspiration to be the future of quick-service restaurants.”
Hooper set out to establish a “sustainable employment experience” at Hart House, with higher wages and widespread benefits to encourage staff to stay.
Employees received health care, a lifestyle spending account, and an interest-bearing savings account to which the company contributed.