Restaurants are like living things. They are born and, sooner or later, they die. Much as with people who mind their health, the variable that owners seek to control is the amount of time between those two events. For some restaurants, that period is tragically abbreviated.
When a restaurant closes, usually another hopeful owner comes along and tries again in the same spot. In some cases, different concepts fail repeatedly in the exact same location until the right one breaks the cycle — or the space is finally deemed entirely unsuitable for a restaurant and ends up housing a different type of business.
When a restaurant starts to fail, or never catches on to begin with, owners can’t seem to get off the path to doom. It’s as if they’re in a roller-coaster car, locked to the rails until they helplessly wind up at the bottom of the hill. Really, though, as long as there are still funds available, an existing owner should be able to do the same things a new one would.