page_title: Childs Restaurants
section_title: Decline and rebirth
hierarchical_section_title: Childs Restaurants / History / Decline and rebirth
caption_attribution_description: Childs Restaurant menu cover c1943 illustrated with a US Navy photo of the USS San Francisco (CA38), a New Orleans class heavy cruiser (1934-1946)
context_page_description: Childs Restaurants was one of the first national dining chains in the United States and Canada, having peaked in the 1920s and 1930s with about 125 locations in dozens of markets, serving over 50,000,000 meals a year, with over $37 million in assets at the time. Childs was a pioneer in a number of areas, including design, service, sanitation, and labor relations. It was a contemporary of food service companies such as Horn & Hardart, and a predecessor of companies such as McDonald's.
context_section_description: In the 1930s, no longer under the direction of the Childs family, the chain returned meat to its menus, introduced alcohol at many locations (after the repeal of Prohibition), and launched a new subsidiary division called "The Host", meant to be lower-priced than Childs.  The company also obtained the hot dog vending license for the 1939 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, which turned out a financial mistake.
  In August 1943, under pressure of significant debt maturity, the company filed for bankruptcy reorganization.  Childs emerged from bankruptcy in 1947, and continued to operate through the 1940s and 1950s.
  By 1950, the company had shrunk to only 53 locations, and was losing money.  Nonetheless, it managed to acquire the candy and ice cream maker Louis Sherry Inc., and announced several significant operational changes, including "returning to its old custom of flap-jack making in the windows" and the introduction of prepared meats, to eliminate the need for butchering on-site.
  In 1955, a young hotelier named A.M. "Sonny" Sonnabend assumed the presidency of the Childs company, and pointed the enterprise in a new direction.  In a series of coordinated transactions, the company's name was changed to Hotel Corporation of America, it acquired the Plaza Hotel in New York (across the street from the Savoy-Plaza Hotel, which Childs had developed), and entered into long-term leases for three other hotels in Boston, Cleveland, and Chicago.  The company was then structured into three divisions: restaurants, manufacturing and distribution of packaged foods (via subsidiaries Receipe Foods, Fred Fear, and Louis Sherry), and hotels.
  In 1961, substantially all of the remaining Childs restaurant operations, now greatly diminished in number and considered part of the company's past, were sold to the Riese Organization (National Restaurants Management Inc.), which as of 2009 operates more than 100 restaurants throughout New York City, including franchised units of Dunkin' Donuts, KFC, Pizza Hut, T.G.I. Friday's and Houlihan's.  A number of the Riese properties are former Childs Restaurants.
  In 1970, Hotel Corporation of America (formerly Childs) was again renamed, to Sonesta International Hotels Corporation (NASDAQ: SNSTA).  As of 2009, the company operates 25 hotels on 3 continents, and owns several cruise ships, and is still led by the Sonnabend family.
caption: Childs WWII era menu cover c1943
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