Boston Blackie's restaurants file for bankruptcy

Boston Blackie's restaurants, which advertised with a lovable jazz singer who's broke but sings of those big, fat burgers, filed bankruptcy for each of its eight restaurants in Chicago and the suburbs with debt and liabilities reaching $8 million.

The company filed separate Chapter 11 documents on Nov. 24 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Chicago for each restaurant and for its Chicago-based management company, led by Nick Giannis. The company has three restaurants in Chicago and others in Skokie, Glencoe, Deerfield, Naperville and Arlington Heights.

Each of the restaurants will remain open during the reorganization, company officials said.

Overextended by expansions and a tough economy forced the restaurant group to seek relief, said its lawyer, Robert Benjamin, of Querrey & Harrow Ltd. in Chicago.

"Restaurants often operate on small margins and in this tight economy, those margins were squeezed even further," said Benjamin.

Boston Blackie's opened its first restaurant on Grand Avenue near Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago in the late 1990s. It has since grown to eight locations with about 600 employees. Three more restaurants were being planned, but are now on hold, Benjamin said.

The combined filings for the eight restaurants and the management company listed a total of $1 million in assets and about $8 million in liabilities.

Individually, Boston Blackie's Management Co. Inc., parent of the restaurants, said it had $16,956 in assets and about $6.4 million in liabilities, which included about $5.6 million to major creditor GE Capital Corp. in Scottsdale, Ariz., according to court documents.

The Arlington Heights restaurant, on Algonquin Road, listed its assets at $140,583 with liabilities at around $1.4 million. The Naperville restaurant, on Route 59, listed assets at $224,821 and liabilities at $814,798. Both showed hundreds of thousands of dollars owed to the Illinois Department of Employment Securities and the Illinois Department of Revenue.

Employees and banks with overdrawn checking accounts, are all owed hundreds of thousands of dollars, court documents said.

Also, Boston Blackie's has hired a restructuring firm that will look closely at reducing overhead and create more efficiencies to keep the company viable. Such cutbacks may include reducing the management ranks but retaining the wait staff to ensure full service to customers, Benjamin said.

"Any decision to close any of the locations now is premature," he said.

The company could make such decisions in January, Benjamin said.