Seafood Chain Closing More Spots Than Expected, Illinois Included

Just a little over 90 days ago, America's biggest and best known seafood restaurant change made an announcement that pretty much confirmed all the rumors that had been swirling around about the company's overall health and ability to continue operations.

Red Lobster's Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing on May 19th stated that Red Lobster would be closing up around 100 locations across the country, including 2 Illinois Red Lobster restaurants--and that's what happened. 99 locations in 28 states closed their doors, including spots in both Danville and Bloomingdale here in Illinois.

At first, those locations were listed as being closed temporarily, but that status has been changed to "permanently closed."

Now comes word from a filing last week that Red Lobster is going to close even more stores, and Illinois locations will be part of the closing plans.

Part Of Red Lobster's Chapter 11 Bankruptcy Filing Involved A Court Agreeing To Certain Conditions Regarding Possible Closures

The conditions we're talking about here are the status of the leases of certain Red Lobster locations across the country, according to a report at ABC7Chicago.com:

The new list of restaurants leases identified to be closed "are likely to continue to drive losses" and the company does "not anticipate needing in order to operate their business going forward and can be rejected," the filing said.

After their initial closure of nearly 100 restaurants nationally (including Illinois), Red Lobster is now about to close even more than they had originally expected to.

The New Series Of Closings Is Expected To Happen This Week, This Weekend At The Latest

Red Lobster has identified and targeted 23 more locations in 15 states for closure, and they're not going to wait around much to do it. All of the newly-announced closures should be finalized by this coming Saturday, August 31st.

And, those closures include 4 more Illinois locations:

• 902 Commons Drive, Geneva
• 4625 N. Sterling Ave., Peoria
• 1901 N. Prospect Ave., Champaign
• 1604 N. State Road 50, Bourbonnais

Once this round of store closings is complete, Red Lobster will be down to around 500 locations nationally, which is a pretty big drop-off from the 650 locations they had last year at this time.