Two Moe's Southwest Grill restaurants in Lee and Collier are on the closing list in a Chapter 11 filed by the chain's largest franchisee, which has already shut 31 stores since 2021

Two Southwest Florida restaurants are on the closing list in the bankruptcy of the largest Moe's Southwest Grill franchisee in the country, and the court file explains the arithmetic behind them better than the storefronts do.

Quality Fresca I, LLC filed for chapter 11 on August 4 in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Florida, case number 26-20345, before Judge Erik P. Kimball. Gulfshore Business reported on Tuesday that the restaurants at Gulf Coast Town Center, 10021 Gulf Center Drive in south Fort Myers, and at Berkshire Place, 7335 Radio Road near the northwest corner of Santa Barbara Boulevard in Collier County, are among 14 Florida locations closing, with two more in Georgia and Virginia.

The company's chief restructuring officer, G. Michael Verdisco, filed a declaration on the day of the petition setting out how the business reached this point. Quality Fresca bought 67 franchised Moe's restaurants in March 2020, days before the pandemic closed dining rooms, and added two more in August 2021 to reach 69. It closed 19 of them between May 2021 and the end of 2025, and has closed 12 more since. That leaves 38 restaurants across Florida, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington D.C., of which the declaration places six in the group it calls Fort Myers and Naples.

The finances sit in the same document. The company reported net sales of $58,941,831 for fiscal 2025 and a total negative consolidated EBITDA of $111,204. Its balance sheet at December 31 showed roughly $44m of assets against roughly $52m of liabilities. About $15,200,000 of principal was still outstanding on the credit facility taken out to buy the restaurants in 2020, alongside a $700,000 second loan and a $100,000 third loan made this summer, and trade payables of about $2,100,000.

The declaration attributes the decline to a loss of foot traffic after the pandemic that was not matched by any fall in rent or debt service, then to shipping and food costs, the availability of labour and inflation. The franchisor, Moe's Franchisor SPV LLC, an affiliate of GoTo Foods, notified the company that it was in default under all of its franchise agreements on August 5 last year.

The company employs about 603 people, 554 of them paid hourly and 589 of them working in the restaurants themselves. The filing does not break those numbers down by location.

The mechanism that closes a specific restaurant is an omnibus motion to reject leases, filed the same day and effective as of the petition date. The exhibit listing the individual leases is not among the documents available in the public archive, so the two Southwest Florida addresses here rest on the Gulfshore Business report rather than on the court file.

The franchisor's own store locator has already dropped the Gulf Center Drive restaurant, whose page now returns as missing, and lists three remaining Fort Myers addresses on Paul J Doherty Parkway, South Tamiami Trail and Forum Boulevard. The Radio Road restaurant is still listed there with hours posted, alongside the one on Naples Boulevard. A locator is not a court record and it is no guide to a closing date.

The stated purpose of the case is to close and exit unprofitable locations, rationalise what the company calls its lease portfolio and cost structure, and come out of it smaller.