Honest Burgers Leeds: Cloth Hall Street restaurant permanently closes only a year after opening

Honest Burgers closed its site on Cloth Hall Street, near the Corn Exchange, on Thursday (August 3) – just over a year after it opened. The business said the closure was due to a “change in customer demand” in the city.

A household name in London, the burger chain was founded by friends Tom Barton and Philip Eeles in Brighton in 2009. The Leeds restaurant opened in July last year and served beer from Northern Monk Brewery.

A spokesperson for Honest Burgers told the Yorkshire Evening Post: “We have recently closed the doors of our Leeds restaurant. Like many businesses in the hospitality sector, we are continually reviewing our portfolio and at the current time, we have chosen to close this particular site after a change in customer demand in the area.

"Honest Burgers continues to trade well. We’d like to thank our fantastic customers in Leeds and apologise that we won’t have a site in that community for now. We hope that they’ll still get the chance to visit us at one of the other 42 Honest Burgers restaurants across the UK.

"We’d also like to take this opportunity to thank our amazing team in Leeds and wish them well for the future.”

It come as JD Wetherspoon scrapped plans to open a new pub in Wetherby, just months after taking over an Italian restaurant. The pub giant confirmed it’s selling the property due to sensitive “commercial reasons” and the changing landscape of the hospitality industry.