WHERE CAFÉ FIORELLO'S MONEY WENT BEFORE BUBBA GUMP'S OWNER BOUGHT IT OUT OF BANKRUPTCY

If you've ever eaten a plate off the antipasto bar at Café Fiorello before a curtain at the Met, you've eaten at the oldest restaurant in Shelly Fireman's group. It opened on Broadway, across from Lincoln Center, in 1974. Fireman lived upstairs. He died on Oct. 9, 2025, at 93. Ten months later, on a Sunday in August, the company he built filed for bankruptcy with nine restaurants, more than 800 workers and less than $100,000 in available cash. In October an auction ended with Landry's, Tilman Fertitta's Houston company and the owner of Bubba Gump Shrimp, taking Fiorello, Trattoria Dell'Arte and Bond 45 out of a $22.2 million deal. The sale is the headline. The filing is the story, because it shows where the money went first.

Fireman started with the Hip Bagel on MacDougal Street in 1963, a place jazz musicians and painters used, after teaching himself the business, by the Times' account, at the New York Public Library. His idea for the rest of his career was plain: put the restaurant where the audience already is. Fiorello went across from Lincoln Center. Trattoria Dell'Arte, opened in 1988, went across from Carnegie Hall, with Milton Glaser's sculptures of noses and lips on the walls. Bond 45 went into the Theater District in 2005. Redeye Grill and Brooklyn Diner went onto West 57th Street. He wasn't chasing critics. He was chasing the 7:15 seating.

At Fiorello that meant breakfast to late night, housemade ravioli, fried artichokes, thin-crust pizzas New York magazine once called the city's best, and an antipasto bar Fireman brought back from a trip to Capri. Today the bar runs three vegetables for $28 or five for $38: eggplant caponata, cauliflower milanese, broccoli rabe, stuffed artichoke. The restaurant is open right now, noon to 11 most weeknights, with a Thanksgiving menu already posted for Nov. 26. The privacy link at the bottom of its website already points to a Landry's domain.

The group's chief restructuring officer, Jordan Meyers, laid out the slide in the first filings, as FSR reported them. The company went into the pandemic already carrying debt from construction cost overruns at several restaurants and losses from a fire at one of them. Then Broadway closed, tourists stopped coming and Midtown offices emptied. A group built on curtain times was built on exactly the traffic that disappeared, and by the filing's account that traffic didn't get back to pre-pandemic levels until the last three months of 2025.

To get through, the company took PPP and EIDL loans and fell behind with some landlords. Starting in 2025 it borrowed $4.5 million in unsecured loans from investors, members and friends of the Fireman family and associates of CEO Benjamin Grossman. It fell behind on sales taxes starting in October 2025, the month Fireman died. The balance sheet dated December 2025 showed $26.1 million in assets against $39.1 million in liabilities, a $13 million hole. Secured claims came to about $9.98 million: $6.14 million to FHGRF LLC, a lender in which Grossman held a 35.8 percent stake, $2.76 million to BankUnited and about $1.04 million in SBA disaster loans.

In spring 2024 the group started taking merchant cash advances. If you've never run a restaurant, here's how they work: a lender hands you cash now and takes its money back as a cut of your card sales, often every day, until it has its money plus a fee. They're fast, they skip the bank, and that's why restaurants short on cash use them and why they cost so much. By March the Fireman group had more than 30 of them from 11 lenders, with at least $5.5 million owed. New advances went partly to pay down old ones, and the filing says the repayments ate a growing share of revenue.

The company now argues those advances carried an effective interest rate so high that they amount to criminal usury under New York law, which would make them unenforceable. No court has ruled on that. The filing, as reported, doesn't name the 11 lenders or what each is owed, and we won't guess.

This is where the money went. With the cash-advance lenders and the company fighting over who got paid first, the card processors stopped sending the restaurants their money. American Express was holding at least $3.3 million. Toast, the restaurant payment company, was holding at least $2.56 million. Stripe had nearly $102,000. Together that's at least $5.96 million of Fiorello's and its sister restaurants' own sales, already paid for by diners, sitting with the companies that ran the cards. By late July the holds were essentially total. The processors hadn't paid the lenders either, and appeared to be waiting for a court order or for the claims to be sorted out.

That's how nine busy restaurants end up with less than $100,000 in the bank. Weekly payroll ran about $515,000 for hourly workers and nearly $175,000 for salaried staff. FHGRF advanced at least $2.38 million after the processors stopped paying out at the end of July. Meyers told the court the restaurants "will be unable to fund payroll for their more than 800 employees" without relief, and that the alternative was liquidation.

Then there's the rent. FSR's reading of the filing puts the money owed to landlords at about $2.36 million. NRN, reading the unsecured claims, reported nearly $6 million in rent owed across the group. The two numbers don't match, and we're giving you both until the docket settles it.

In September a Landry's affiliate set a $9.5 million floor price as the opening bid, Bloomberg Law reported. FHGRF, the lender tied to Grossman, put in a competing bid that would have kept him as CEO. Landry's won the auction at $22.2 million, and FSR reported the court had approved the sale by Oct. 22. Landry's takes Café Fiorello, Trattoria Dell'Arte and Bond 45. A second group takes Paris Bar, Le Jardin, Café Paradiso, Brooklyn Diner and Brooklyn Delicatessen. FSR names it as TREW Capital Management. NRN, citing the Post, named Jeff Crivello's Ciao Hospitality, and Crivello said leases were still being negotiated and that there were no plans to turn the restaurants into other concepts. Fiorello's Washington outpost closes after service Oct. 28, and Fiorella at National Harbor on Oct. 29.

Landry's hasn't said anything in public about what it plans for Fiorello: the menu, the staff, the name on the awning. Neither Landry's nor the Fireman group answered NRN's questions. FSR reported that some officers and employees have offers from the new owners, and that Grossman isn't expected to get one.

Before the bid, then, the money went three places. Into cash-advance repayments that took a cut of every day's sales. Into back rent and back taxes. And at the end, into holds at American Express and Toast that left nine restaurants with less than $100,000. By the filing's own account the diners had come back by late 2025. The debt was older than the pandemic, and the fix the group reached for, fast money borrowed against tomorrow's card sales, turned a hole into a collapse. A $22 million sale for a company that owed $39 million doesn't make the lenders, the landlords or the tax office whole. It keeps the antipasto bar open across from the Met, under a Houston company that sells shrimp in Times Square, and it leaves the people who ate there for 52 years to find out what Landry's thinks Fiorello is.

SOURCING

Nation's Restaurant News, Aug. 10, 2026: the filing, nine restaurants, about 800 workers, CRO Jordan Meyers, nearly $6 million in rent owed. nrn.com

FSR Magazine, Aug. 11, 2026: cash on hand, balance sheet, processor holds, cash advances, landlord debt, secured claims, investor loans, payroll, sales taxes, Meyers quote. fsrmagazine.com

Bloomberg Law, Sept. 23, 2026: the $9.5 million floor bid. news.bloomberglaw.com

Nation's Restaurant News, Oct. 21, 2026: the $22 million bid, Landry's brands, Crivello and Ciao, D.C. closings. nrn.com

FSR Magazine, Oct. 22, 2026: the $22.2 million winning bid, court approval, TREW Capital, FHGRF's competing bid, offers to staff. fsrmagazine.com

WhatNow, Oct. 22, 2026: D.C. closing dates. whatnow.com

The New York Times obituary via The Boston Globe, Oct. 23, 2025: Fireman's death at 93, Fiorello in 1974, Capri, Trattoria 1988, Bond 45 2005, Hip Bagel. bostonglobe.com

Nation's Restaurant News, Nov. 9, 2010: Landry's buys Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. nrn.com

Café Fiorello: about, hours and menus. cafefiorello.com

Photos: Pexels. Illustrative, not taken at Café Fiorello.