Portillo’s plans to close some underperforming restaurants outside Chicago area

Portillo’s plans to close “a mid-to-high single-digit number of underperforming restaurants outside of Chicagoland,” most of them in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2026, the company said Nov. 5 in its third-quarter earnings release.The company did not say which restaurants will close or where they are.“We evaluated every restaurant in the system and made the decision to close a select group of underperforming locations outside of Chicagoland,” CEO Brett Patterson said in the release.The company said it judged each restaurant on sales, restaurant-level margins and projected performance. Portillo’s expects “material cash and non-cash charges” from the closures but did not give a dollar figure.The closures are part of a strategic plan Portillo’s introduced alongside its quarterly results. Patterson told Nation’s Restaurant News the company confronted a “hard reality: Portillo’s does not deliver the returns our investors expected.”For the quarter ended Sept. 27, Portillo’s reported revenue o