Twin Peaks is about to open a restaurant in Kissimmee, Florida. | Photo courtesy of Twin Peaks.
The past couple of weeks have been big for Twin Peaks. There have been some major sporting events during that period to bring customers to the sports bar chain, including the NHL’s Stanley Cup playoffs, the NBA championship, a UFC event at the White House, and the World Cup is in the U.S.—bringing with it tourists eager to try U.S. restaurants.
Oh, and the company has emerged from bankruptcy protection with new owners backed by a group of franchisees.
“Everything is going really, really well,” Roger Gondek, the company’s president, said in an interview. “We’re poised for growth.”
The sale, finalized by a bankruptcy court earlier this week, had to be a relief following a five-year stretch that could only be described as a roller-coaster. The brand was sold, resumed strong growth and then was spun off in an IPO.
But it then watched top executives leave, financial problems mount and sales start to suffer, just before the company landed in bankruptcy, due entirely to debt taken out by Fat Brands, which bought the chain in 2021.
“It’s been challenging,” Gondek said. “Probably the biggest challenge was trying to keep everybody calm through the process, because people don’t like change and they don’t like uncertainty. And of course what we’ve been going through since January 27 is a lot of uncertainty.”
Yet make no mistake, Twin Peaks shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place.
The breastaurant
The chain was founded in 2005, by Randy DeWitt and Scott Gordon, both longtime restaurant industry veterans. The restaurant was a sports bar with a mountain lodge theme, featuring a wait staff of young women wearing skimpy outfits, including tops with a black-and-red checkerboard pattern. Its logo features dual mountain peaks that are a nod to its buxom-themed branding.
It was one of a number of breastaurant chains that emerged as competitors to Hooters and would prove one of the more successful. Indeed, in 2011 it would attract a group of former Hooters executives, including former CEO Coby Brooks, that signed on as franchisees under La Cima Restaurants. Gondek came to Twin Peaks as part of that group.
Twin Peaks was later sold to the private-equity firm Garnett Station Partners, which grew the brand to more than 80 locations by 2021, when it sold the chain to Fat Brands, the company founded in 2017 by Andy Wiederhorn.
Fat Brands acquired mostly small, mostly struggling brands at relatively low prices using creative financing. But it then started making large-scale deals with lots of debt in 2020 and 2021. During that period the company acquired Johnny Rockets, Fazoli’s, Global Franchise Group, and then Twin Peaks.
Fat Brands paid $300 million for Twin Peaks. “I thought it was going to be great,” Gondek said. “Obviously, that wasn’t the case.”
Fat Brands used debt, in the form of bonds sold to investors that are backed by the assets of the chains it bought. It would amass more than $1 billion worth of such debt. Wiederhorn in a presentation earlier this year acknowledged that the company initially planned to refinance that debt in around 2022, but rising interest rates prevented that from happening.
That debt drove Fat Brands into bankruptcy, taking Twin Peaks with it.
Financial challenges
There were plenty of signs of stress at Twin Peaks under Fat Brands’ ownership.
Fat Brands acquired Smokey Bones, a former Darden-owned casual-dining barbecue chain, in 2023 with the explicit plan to convert its locations to Twin Peaks, banking on the latter chain’s higher volumes and the relatively low cost of conversions.
But many Smokey Bones locations couldn’t ultimately be converted because they were in shopping areas that didn’t want a sports bar chain with a 48% alcohol mix.
Twin Peaks was spun off as a public company in early 2025. Two months later, CEO Joe Hummel—another member of the La Cima Group—stepped down, along with the company’s chief legal officer, Clay Mingus.
His replacement, Kim Boerema, lasted six months. Boerema would be replaced by Wiederhorn himself in early January. Wiederhorn largely left the day-to-day operations to Gondek, who was given the title of brand president of Twin Peaks. “It’s not a huge lift for me to step into the CEO role, because as chairman of the board I was giving guidance on strategy,” Wiederhorn said back in January. “It’s kept the management team calm through too much change.”
Legal filings and then the bankruptcy all described a difficult environment for the chains under Fat Brands ownership as its financial problems mounted.
A group of Twin Peaks franchisees in a court filing said that it had “much ground to cover with the new owner of the business to remedy past defects and performance failures under prior management …”
Twin Peaks’ same-store sales started declining. The company’s losses grew, particularly as Smokey Bones’ struggles worsened. And the burden of that debt took a toll. In the first nine months of last year, for instance, interest expense on the company’s debt was $34 million. By comparison, occupancy costs were $18.7 million.
Twin Peaks system sales and average unit volumes both fell last year, for the first time since 2020. Smokey Bones, meanwhile, closed restaurants last year, and shuttered the rest of them this year.
Ongoing growth
Despite all that, Twin Peaks enjoys some real advantages. A typical Twin Peaks generates more than $5 million, with nearly half of that coming from its bar business. Those volumes are up 31% since 2019, according to Technomic.
Nearly 92% of the company’s customers rate their satisfaction as “excellent” or “good,” according to Technomic data. More than three-quarters of the company’s customers are millennials or Gen Z. And, yes, the bulk are male, 71%, according to Technomic.
And despite the financial problems and bankruptcy, Twin Peaks kept pushing growth. It’s adding a bunch of new locations right now. It has opened stores in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Omaha, Nebraska, and is opening two stores in the next two weeks, one in Kissimmee, Florida, which is a company location, and another in Mexico.
“We’re very excited about Kissimmee,” Gondek said. “We think that’s going to be a great location. We do very well in Florida, as a matter of fact. Our highest volume stores are in Florida.”
Twin Peaks was sold out of bankruptcy to a group of the company’s bondholders, which opted to convert their debt to equity. The technical value of the deal was just under $360 million.
While such deals out of bankruptcy are relatively common, it’s less common to see investors in bonds take ownership. In this case, they’re buying the company with the backing of a group of franchisees, 3BMgmnt, JEB Food Group, and Operadora 2 Montes, the latter being a franchisee in Mexico.
Gondek called it “brilliant.” The group plans to ultimately buy the company from the bondholders, though there is no timeline to do so. For Twin Peaks, it’s a good outcome.
“The three franchisees are really well-versed in our operations, our standards, and our systems,” he said. “When we found out that they were going to be advisors to the bondholders, I actually got very excited, because I like working with all three of them, and we’re working together closely.”
The new owners are also keeping in place existing management, led by Gondek, Chief Marketing Officer Melissa Fry, Chief People Officer Lexi Burns, and Chief Financial Officer Scott Gray. Fry and Burns were appointed last year.
Twin Peaks just upgraded its beverage menu with items like this Jack Blackberry Lemonade.
A World Cup boost
The World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, but it’s never been that big of an event in the U.S.
It is this year, in part because the country is cohosting the event. But also because of the time zone. “The best part about having it in North America is the time zones,” Gondek said. “When it’s over in Europe or Asia, a lot of times the games are at eight in the morning, nine in the morning. And we’ll be open for those games, but you don’t get a lot of people.
“So the time zones matchup has been outstanding for us, and so we’re seeing a huge lift in sales.”
It’s also been big in places like Dallas, Miami or Atlanta, which are host cities and where Twin Peaks has a presence.
In Dallas in particular, visiting fans from Croatia marched on the streets with giant flags, rooting on their teams.
Meanwhile, the company continues to develop its menu. It added new items to its bar, including more zero-proof options such as a Strawberry Pineapple Fizz mocktail. In March it added several new menu items in advance of the March Madness NCAA basketball tournaments, including a Turkey Cheddar Melt, Crispy Fish Sandwich, Sweet Heat Shrimp Tacos, and Twice-Baked Potatoes.
The tournament is one of two times during the year when Twin Peaks debuts new menu items. It also adds new items before football season and is working on those items now.
The company under Gondek is also bringing back handheld menus to replace the QR codes the company adopted during the pandemic. It also tested billboards, putting up seven of them around Dallas, and is testing television ads for the first time in its history.
Gondek himself plans to work more closely with franchisees, who operate about three-quarters of the chain’s locations.
“We have a strong relationship with our franchisees, and now that I’m in this position, I plan to collaborate with them more than maybe in the past,” he said. “I think that’s going to help us with our growth, allow them to have more input.”
And simply getting out from under the burden of bankruptcy should help, too.
“We have so much white space to grow in,” Gondek said, “and now we have the financial resources to excel at that growth.”
