Fireman Hospitality Group sells to Landry's out of Chapter 11
Three of Sheldon Fireman's New York dining rooms are heading to a Houston buyer, a year after his death and a cash crunch fed by merchant cash advances.
Fireman Hospitality Group is selling three of its New York dining rooms to Landry's for $22 million, as the company once built by Sheldon "Shelly" Fireman clears Chapter 11 through a bankruptcy auction.
The Houston-based group and co-bidder Jeff Crivello of Ciao Hospitality are seeking Café Fiorello, Trattoria Dell'Arte and Bond 45, Nation's Restaurant News reported on 21 October. The offer still needs approval from the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York before any sale closes.
Fireman Hospitality Group, also known as Café Concepts, filed for Chapter 11 in August, less than a year after its 93-year-old founder died. Sheldon Fireman opened his first restaurant, The Hip Bagel, in Greenwich Village in 1963, and built one of the dining rooms now featured in our guide to eating in New York. At filing, the group ran nine restaurants and employed more than 800 people.
A $22 million bid keeps three of New York's oldest dining rooms lit, not necessarily open.
Merchant cash advances drained the cash
Court filings trace the collapse to a stack of merchant cash advances taken on from spring 2024. By March 2026, the company had drawn more than 30 advances from 11 lenders, carrying at least $5.5 million in obligations. When several lenders ordered payment processors to withhold card revenue, American Express held back $3.3 million, Toast $2.56 million and Stripe nearly $102,000 — leaving the company with under $100,000 in available cash.
Chief restructuring officer Jordan Meyers told the court the group would "be unable to fund payroll for their more than 800 employees" without relief, and warned it would otherwise be "forced to pivot to a liquidation." It is the latest operator to lean on merchant cash advances before collapsing, following Yardbird's bankruptcy filing earlier this year.
The debt predates the cash squeeze. Construction overruns and a fire at one location strained finances before the pandemic, and Fireman's restaurants — clustered around Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall and Broadway — depended on tourist and theatre traffic that did not return to pre-pandemic levels until the fourth quarter of 2025.
Fireman Hospitality's three surviving rooms
Of the nine restaurants, two are already gone: Redeye Grill, open near Carnegie Hall for roughly 30 years, closed in July, along with one Brooklyn Diner location. The Landry's bid covers Café Fiorello, across from Lincoln Center for more than 50 years, Trattoria Dell'Arte, near Carnegie Hall for nearly 40, and Bond 45, the Theater District steakhouse designed by Hamilton's scenic designer David Korins.
Neither Landry's nor the court filings say what happens to the rest of the group — Brooklyn Diner, Paris Bar, Le Jardin, Café Paradiso and the Washington, DC outpost of Café Fiorello. A bankruptcy judge still has to sign off on the winning bid.
