This Italian Restaurant Group Just Filed For Bankruptcy And The Reason Is Clear

On August 18, 2025, Bravo Brio Restaurants LLC, the Orlando company that owns Bravo! Italian Kitchen and Brio Italian Grille, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Florida. It wasn't making enough money, and the brand had been through this process before. In 2020, when Bravo! Italian Kitchen and Brio Italian Grille were owned by FoodFirst Global Restaurants, the company filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. After that case, Earl Enterprises bought the brands and became the new owner in June 2020. 

"In addition, ongoing inflationary pressure, rising food and labor costs, and a softening in discretionary consumer spending have contributed to underperformance, especially in shopping centers with high vacancies and declining foot traffic," Bravo Brio said in a statement, per Nation's Restaurant News. The company said it is using the bankruptcy process to reorganize its finances and bring in new investment partners, with the goal of keeping the restaurants open for business. It also underlined that this is not a shutdown but a step to steady its balance sheet. Meanwhile, it will close underperforming locations.

Bravo Brio Restaurants is now on the list of several restaurant chains that have either closed locations or filed for bankruptcy between 2024 and 2025, showing a larger trend in the industry. For example, TGI Friday's, a well-known family restaurant chain, filed for bankruptcy in November 2024. Then there's Subway, America's largest fast food chain, which closed many stores in 2025. This pattern suggests that more restaurant brands are struggling because of higher costs, weaker demand, and other market pressures during this period.

In 2025, when Bravo Brio filed for bankruptcy, inflation made it more expensive to run a restaurant. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average price for eating out rose 3.9% from July 2024 to July 2025, with full-service restaurant prices up 4.4%. It also got more expensive for restaurants to borrow money. The key federal interest rate used by banks, according to FRED, went up from 0.08% in January 2021 to 4.33% in August 2025. This means that many businesses paid more for loans, and companies like Bravo Brio could not cover the costs while staying afloat. These reasons are also why so many restaurant chains struggled in 2024.

Beyond food costs and loan rates, many of its restaurants are in shopping centers that have seen fewer customers in 2025. Cushman & Wakefield data shows that shopping center vacancies in the U.S. reached 5.8% in the second quarter of 2025, which is higher than last year. And according to Globest, Placer.ai data shows that visits to open-air shopping centers dropped by 1.6% in June 2025 compared to June 2024. The visits to outlet centers also dropped by 4.4% over the same period. Bravo Brio closed seven restaurants before it filed for bankruptcy at a time when enclosed malls (a shopping center where all the stores are in a single building) were bringing in fewer shoppers, and rents were high. At the time of filing, 48 restaurants remained open.