Six years after a splashy opening in West Oakland and five years after getting national attention and a Food & Wine Best New Chefs honor, pitmaster Matt Horn's Bay Area businesses are now all closed.

Horn Barbecue in Lafayette is officially closed, as the Chronicle reports today — a week after the paper reported that Horn Barbecue's Elk Grove location, near Sacramento, had closed, and the Oakland location on 8th Street also appeared closed.

A rep for Horn, Seneca Scott, confirmed to the Chronicle that the Oakland location — in the space that previously housed Horn's short-lived sit-down restaurant Matty's Old Fashioned — is "temporarily" closed, but offered no explanation for this. The restaurant had recently cut back hours from five days a week to three, and a handwritten sign on the restaurant door in recent weeks, which reportedly remained up for a week, had claimed it closed early due to selling out.

As Scott told the Chronicle last week, "Horn Barbecue is not a scandal — it is a working business navigating those same realities while continuing to rebuild after a devastating fire." He added, "There is no perfect playbook in this climate."

But scandal has seemed to follow Horn, and the Lafayette closure comes with the indignity of an eviction notice on the door, and a suspension of the restaurant's liquor license — which was originally in the name of the previous tenant, All the Smoke BBQ.

Furthermore, the building's owner, David Roberson, told the Chronicle that the restaurant "will not reopen as Horn Barbecue nor [with] anyone affiliated with Matt Horn," but he declined to elaborate.

The earlier Elk Grove closure also came with a nontice of repossession by the building owner, who told the Chronicle that this came after several months of unpaid rent.

Meanwhile, a Fresno location of Horn Barbecue just opened last week — though its existence is still not mentioned on the Horn Barbecue website, which still lists the Elk Grove location as "new."

Chef Matt Horn himself is in San Francisco today participating in a barbecue-themed, pre-Super Bowl party at The Ramp in Mission Bay, hosted by Live Fire Republic. He has not commented on the closures.

Horn began his "West Coast Barbecue" business as a pop-up, and quickly gained attention from the Chronicle, who named him a Rising Star Chef in 2019. His brick-and-mortar business on Mandela Parkway in Oakland opened to immediate lines in mid-2020, and seemed to thrive in that takeout-heavy moment in the food scene.

Within a year, Horn was named in the prestigious Best New Chefs issue of Food & Wine, and in early 2022, he was already opening his second restaurant in West Oakland, the short-lived, fried-chicken-focused Kowbird. That would be followed a year later by Matty's Old Fashioned, in Old Oakland.

Also in 2022, wage-theft allegations were made public by former employees, and those were followed by a lawsuit from a meat vendor, and further allegations of unsafe work conditions by employees.

A devastating fire destroyed the original Horn Barbecue in November 2023, and Horn publicly declared this an act of arson, after some thefts and conflicts he had in the neighborhood.

It's not clear if these legal troubles were the reason, or just a decline in the food itself, but the Chronicle notably snubbed Horn Barbecue last summer when it published a list of the best barbecue spots in the Bay, and left Horn out.