El Torito, the Mexican restaurant chain founded in 1954, has shuttered more than 150 locations over the past several decades and recently closed its Irvine, California, outpost, leaving the once-national brand clinging to roughly two dozen spots in a single state. The chain that once spanned 25 states now operates only in California, a slow-motion collapse that mirrors a broader reckoning across the sit-down restaurant industry.
The numbers are stark. At its peak in the late 1980s, El Torito ran nearly 200 restaurants. By 2005, an SEC filing showed the chain had already shrunk to 75 locations across California, Arizona, and Oregon. It kept contracting, eventually pulling out of Arizona and Oregon entirely. Today, El Torito's own website lists just 21 locations, all in California, according to a detailed account from TheStreet.
The recent closures have hit Orange County hard. The Orange County Register reported that El Torito shuttered longtime locations in Dana Point, Laguna Hills, Orange, Westminster, and Tustin over the past three years. Its Anaheim location has been temporarily closed since 2024 due to a fire. Now Irvine is gone, too.
El Torito's decline is all the more striking because of where the chain once stood. In 1989, when a Restaurants & Institutions survey called "Choice of Chains" polled 2,000 households on which of 75 listed chains they had visited and how well they liked them, El Torito earned the best overall ranking among Mexican restaurants. The Los Angeles Times reported the honor at the time, noting the chain was then owned by Restaurant Enterprises Group in Irvine.
Taco Bell finished second in that survey. Today, Taco Bell is the largest Mexican chain in the country, and El Torito is fighting for survival under the ownership of Xperience Restaurant Group, also known as XRG. Neither El Torito nor XRG has publicly explained the Irvine closure.
Jonathan Maze of Restaurant Business Online summed up the competitive landscape bluntly:
"In the fast-food Mexican business, there's Taco Bell, and there's everyone else."
El Torito is far from alone. The Mexican restaurant segment, sit-down chains in particular, has been battered by a string of bankruptcy filings and mass closures that show no sign of slowing down.
On the Border Mexican Grill & Cantina filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025 after years of declining sales. The chain had operated about 120 restaurants as recently as 2023 but had already closed 40 underperforming locations by the time of its filing, leaving roughly 80 units. Tijuana Flats filed Chapter 11 in April 2024, closed 11 restaurants during restructuring, and was eventually sold to new ownership.
Rubio's Coastal Grill filed its own Chapter 11 case in 2024 and closed 48 locations before emerging under new owners. Abuelo's Mexican Restaurant filed for bankruptcy in September 2025, operating just 16 locations across seven states, down from a peak of about 40. The pattern is consistent: contraction, bankruptcy, and a dramatically smaller footprint, if the brand survives at all.
El Torito's story fits neatly alongside the broader wave of major restaurant chain closures mounting through 2026.
The forces pressing down on these chains are not mysterious. They are the predictable consequences of an inflationary environment that Washington failed to prevent and has been slow to address.
S&P Global Data reported that consumer prices for food away from home increased 39.3% from January 2019 to January 2026. For perspective, the same index rose only 19.2% across the previous seven-year period, from January 2012 to January 2019. That means restaurant prices roughly doubled their rate of increase in the post-pandemic era.
Consumers noticed. The same S&P Global report found:
"Survey data shows that three out of 10 Americans have reduced their spending at retail stores and are dining out at restaurants less frequently than a year ago."
The National Restaurant Association's monthly tracking survey put a finer point on the damage: 46% of restaurant operators reported lower traffic in March, compared to 30% in February. That is not a gradual drift. That is a sharp, month-over-month deterioration in customer visits.
Even Chipotle, the second-largest Mexican chain in the country behind Taco Bell, has not been immune. In its second-quarter 2024 earnings, Chipotle reported that food, beverage, and packaging costs reached 30.6% of total revenue, up from 29.7% a year earlier. The company attributed the increase to inflation across ingredient costs, primarily avocados and dairy, along with higher ingredient usage and a protein mix shift from its Smoked Brisket limited-time offer.
If a company with Chipotle's scale and pricing power feels the squeeze, smaller sit-down chains with higher labor costs and lower volume have little margin for error.
Daniel Kline, co-editor-in-chief of TheStreet and a journalist who has covered the restaurant industry for decades, framed the current environment in terms that should concern anyone who eats out, or anyone who works in a restaurant kitchen:
"In more than three decades covering restaurants, I've rarely seen operators face a combination of elevated costs, cautious consumers, and economic uncertainty at the same time."
That combination is precisely what makes this moment different from prior downturns. Restaurants have weathered recessions before. They have absorbed ingredient price spikes before. But the simultaneous arrival of cost inflation, consumer pullback, and broader economic anxiety has created conditions that legacy brands, brands built on a different cost structure in a different era, simply cannot survive.
The pattern is not limited to Mexican restaurants. Pizza Hut, Wendy's, and Red Robin have all shrunk their footprints as hundreds of locations go dark across the country.
The irony is that Mexican food itself has never been more popular in the United States. Pew Research Center, analyzing data from SafeGraph and Yelp, found that roughly 11% of all restaurants in the country serve Mexican food. Eighty-five percent of U.S. counties have at least one Mexican restaurant. The 15% that do not are sparsely populated areas home to about 4 million people, just 1% of the total U.S. population.
Demand is not the problem. The problem is that the economics of running a sit-down restaurant, with its higher labor costs, larger footprints, and thinner margins, have become punishing in an era of persistent inflation. Fast-casual and fast-food operators can adjust portion sizes, automate ordering, and keep labor lean. A full-service chain like El Torito, built around table service and a dining-room experience, has fewer levers to pull.
Other legacy brands have faced the same math. Long John Silver's has contracted to a fraction of its former size as rising costs hollow out restaurant chains that once blanketed the country.
And the problem extends beyond domestic brands. Australian chain Guzman y Gomez shut down every U.S. location after six years of struggle, wiping out its entire American presence.
The closures are not abstract business stories. Every shuttered El Torito location means cooks, servers, bussers, and managers who lost their jobs. Every bankrupt On the Border or Rubio's leaves workers scrambling and landlords holding empty leases in strip malls that are already struggling. Smokey Bones BBQ workers were blindsided when that chain filed for bankruptcy and closed restaurants across six states.
The people who built their livelihoods around these restaurants, and the communities that relied on them as gathering places, are the ones absorbing the cost of an inflationary spiral that policymakers spent years dismissing as "transitory."
El Torito lasted 72 years. It survived recessions, changing tastes, and fierce competition. What it could not survive was a cost environment that made feeding families at a sit-down restaurant a luxury fewer Americans can afford. That is not a failure of the restaurant. That is a failure of the economy those restaurants were asked to operate in.
When a 72-year-old brand shrinks from 187 locations in 25 states to 21 locations in one, the market is sending a message. The question is whether anyone in Washington is listening.