This seafood restaurant has served generations of Boiseans since 1977. Now it’s closed
Skipper’s Fish & Chips opened its first Boise-area restaurant on Overland Road in 1976, America’s bicentennial year.
A two-piece fish dinner with coleslaw, chips and clam chowder sold for $2.09. Its Tuesday all-you-could-eat special went for $1.99. The concept was so novel a newspaper ad explained that British chips were the same as french fries, but thicker.
Soon, three more restaurants opened, on Fairview and Broadway avenues in Boise and Caldwell Boulevard in Nampa.
Now, after 44 years, the last remaining Idaho Skipper’s, at 5588 W. Fairview Ave., has closed. It’s unclear when the restaurant closed, but it had suffered from a dwindling number of customers for several years, long before the coronavirus pandemic struck Idaho.
“That’s sad to hear,” Emmett resident Amy Nash Mitchell said on a Faccebook post. “I loved Skipper’s. They had the best clam chowder.”
The property is listed for lease for $1,700 a month, according to a listing from NAISelect, a Boise commercial real estate company.
On its Facebook page, the Boise Skipper’s listed the business for sale on June 27, including all equipment. That post does not list a price.
The owner did not return an email seeking comment.
“License transfer to be paid by buyer,” the post said. “Owner will train for 2 weeks to get you going. All permits must be up and going by new owner, and must get rental agreement with the landlord.”
The chain, founded in 1969 by Herb Rosen in Bellevue, Washington, operated more than 200 restaurants in the Northwest in its heyday in the mid-1980s.
Now known as Skipper’s Seafood & Chowder House, the chain declined beginning in the late ‘80s, after Rosen sold the company to National Pizza Co., the largest franchise owner of Pizza Hut and Wendy’s restaurants in the U.S. NPC ditched fish that was cut and battered in-house for a frozen style that went straight from the freezer to the fryer.
“By sacrificing quality for convenience, this led to public outcry, and regular patrons demanded the original fish back,” according to an online history by the operator of a Vancouver, Washington, Skipper’s. Over the years, Skipper’s was sold several more times. It declared bankruptcy in 2006.
Today, there are six remaining Skipper’s: in Monmouth, Oregon, and in Kennewick, Spokane, Vancouver, Puyallup and Silverdale, Washington. Current owner Starwood Restaurants of Bellevue, Washington, also operates 62 grab-and-go locations with a limited menu inside convenience stores, gas stations, grocery stores and pubs, all in Washington state.
This story was originally published July 23, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
