The Unmaking of Sbarro: The Pizza Empire That Died With the American Mall

For nearly thirty years, the busiest Italian kitchen in America had no front door of its own. It took no reservations, employed no waiters, and sat inside somebody else's building. On a good Saturday afternoon it fed more people than a hundred white tablecloth dining rooms combined. Then, in February 2014, one hundred and fifty five of those kitchens went dark in a matter of weeks. Nobody killed Sbarro. There was no scandal, no recall, and no rival that ever beat them on price or on the thing they were actually selling. The company simply woke up one morning to find that the world it had been standing inside for forty years was being quietly dismantled around it, and that it had never learned how to stand anywhere else. Fallen Flavors tells the stories of the factories, chains, and empires that built America's golden age of food, and the scandals, buyouts, and betrayals that killed them. The recipes were legendary. The brands went to the grave.