Walk into an Outback on a Friday night and nothing about it looks like a company in trouble. The waiting area is full, the Bloomin’ Onion is still the loudest thing on the table, and somebody at the bar is arguing about whether medium-rare means what the kitchen thinks it means. The 38-year-old chain has been coasting on that feeling for a long time. Behind the scenes, its parent company has been going down the list of buildings deciding which ones are worth keeping, and the answer came out to more than 40 restaurants: 21 underperforming restaurants shut in a single week in October 2025, plus 22 more locations where the lease will simply be allowed to run out.
The closures come in two different flavors
The 21 restaurants were the fast part. Bloomin’ closed them across roughly a week in October 2025, the kind of closing where the sign comes down and regulars find out from the parking lot. The company never said how many of them were Outbacks, only that the closures spanned three of its brands. The other 22 are slower. Those are locations where Bloomin’ Brands has decided not to sign a new lease, and most of those leases expire over the next four years, which means the goodbye is scheduled rather than sudden.
That wave was not the first one, either. The 21-plus-22 announcement followed the closure of 41 restaurants across Bloomin’s portfolio, announced in February 2024. Closings have kept trickling out through 2026, a few at a time, including franchised locations that had been open for two decades.
Shutting restaurants is the cheap part of the plan
Bloomin’ Brands is putting about $75 million into fixing Outback over three years, with roughly $50 million of it landing in 2026. That money breaks down in a way that tells you exactly what management thinks is broken: about $25 million for steak quality and a redesigned menu, $7 million for a new service model, $8 million for managing partners, and $10 million for marketing.
To pay for it, the company suspended its dividend to investors and went hunting for savings in the parts of the restaurant you never see. That means renegotiating with suppliers, cutting product choices, killing off unnecessary vendor spending and rewriting labor schedules. The target is about $30 million in savings in 2026 and $80 million between 2026 and 2028.
The CEO listed the problems out loud
Mike Spanos, a former Delta Air Lines executive who took over as chief executive in 2024, did not soften the diagnosis on the earnings call. “We face several critical challenges, including overly complex menus, unclear brand positioning, inconsistent guest experiences, a gap in steak quality, and diminishing value perception,” he said.
The numbers underneath that were rough. Bloomin’ posted a net loss of $45.9 million, or 54 cents per share, for the quarter that ended Sept. 28, 2025. Restaurant-level margins slipped nearly 2% year over year to 9.2%, dragged down by higher costs for food, labor, supplies and insurance. The stock fell nearly 10% by midday on the day the turnaround plan was announced.
They admitted the steak was the problem
A steakhouse admitting a gap in steak quality is not a small thing to say in public. Half the 2026 spending is aimed at it. Outback rolled out a new steak lineup in November 2025 built around sirloin, bone-in ribeye and a half-pound burger, and it is expanding char grill capacity in every restaurant.
Cooking it right is a separate project. Multi-unit leaders had to finish steak excellence certification training before coaching their own teams, and operators are standing in dining rooms during peak hours checking accuracy and quality. “Simply put, we are getting back to our roots of serious food and a focus on steak,” Spanos said. In the test restaurants, the steak upgrades produced an average 10 percent lift across satisfaction, taste, value, quality perception and intent to reorder.
The marketing will lean on that hard, pushing the thickness, freshness and craftsmanship of the cuts along with the signature Outback seasoning.
Your server is getting two fewer tables
Outback ran a six-tables-per-server model during peak hours and decided it was too much. The new ratio is four, rolling out across the chain starting in the second quarter of 2026, backed by about $7 million. In testing, the change improved scores on intent to return, server attentiveness and whether guests would recommend their server. Staff liked it too, because servers finally had time to actually talk to people.
Technology is doing some of the lifting. Ziosk tabletop tablets are now used by more than 85% of guests to pay, which has cut five to seven minutes off table turn times and bumped up customer scores on order accuracy, value and overall satisfaction. The chain also trimmed its menu SKUs by 10% to 20% and cut back on limited-time offers that made kitchens messy.
Almost every Outback is getting a facelift
The remodel program runs about $350,000 to $400,000 per location and is supposed to touch nearly every Outback by the end of 2028. Money that used to go toward opening new restaurants is being shifted into fixing up the ones that already exist, inside and out, with the focus on the parts guests can see.
Advertising is moving too. Outback is flipping its media mix to 60% digital and 40% traditional television, close to the reverse of where it sat in 2025. “We need to make Outback more relevant,” Spanos said, arguing the brand has plenty of name recognition and not enough of it turning into people actually walking through the door.
The $14.99 deal is carrying the whole thing
The Aussie 3-Course Meal is the reason anyone is talking about a comeback at all. It runs in three tiers at $14.99, $17.99 and $20.99, and about 60% of guests trade up past the cheapest one. Executives credited it directly for pulling sales out of a two-year hole.
The pitch is aimed squarely at what beef costs at the grocery store. Spanos told analysts that guests know they can come in, get a perfectly cooked steak, a couple of sides and a real experience, “but yet it’s almost the same cost as what they’re paying for beef at retail.” His read: Americans still want out of the house, and they will pick casual dining over other spending to get it.
Is any of it working yet
Partly. Outback’s same-store sales turned positive in the third quarter of 2025 for the first time in more than two years, though it was the weakest performer of Bloomin’s four brands. In the fourth quarter of 2025, U.S. same-store sales fell 0.6 percent but traffic grew 0.9 percent, the first positive traffic quarter since the fourth quarter of 2021.
Guest scores moved in the right direction across the board that quarter: brand trust up seven points, food up five, service up five, value up three, atmosphere up three. “Within the Outback principles and beliefs, we commit that close is never good enough for Outbackers,” Spanos said.
The other three brands are in similar shape. Carrabba’s Italian Grill posted a 1.6 percent same-store sales gain in the same quarter with slightly negative traffic. Bonefish Grill comps slipped 0.1 percent on 2.3 percent traffic growth, its first positive traffic since the first quarter of 2022. Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar comps rose 0.1 percent while traffic dropped 2.4 percent. Winter storms then cost the company about 2 percent of U.S. comps in the first quarter of 2026, by its own estimate.
How many Outbacks are actually left
Outback finished 2025 with 666 U.S. restaurants, still the giant of the portfolio. Carrabba’s has 204, Bonefish Grill 158 and Fleming’s 66. Outback counted 679 U.S. restaurants in the third quarter of 2025, before the autumn closures.
Losing 40-plus restaurants out of a base that size will not make Outback hard to find. It will make it hard to find in the specific towns that lose theirs, which is the only version of this that matters to most people reading about it.
The honest verdict
Outback is not collapsing. Closing 43 restaurants out of more than a thousand in the U.S. is pruning, and the company is spending far more on the restaurants it kept than it saved by shutting the ones it did not. Chains in real trouble do not commit $75 million to better steaks and $400,000 remodels. Compare that to what a genuinely bleeding chain looks like: Wendy’s closed about 240 U.S. restaurants in 2024, according to the Associated Press, and blamed outdated buildings in poor-performing trade areas.
What should bother longtime customers is not the closings. It is what the company said while announcing them. Management publicly conceded the menus were too complicated, the experience was inconsistent, the value did not feel like value anymore, and the steak at a steakhouse was not good enough. Those were not critics saying it. That was the CEO.
The fix depends on whether people believe it. Casual dining is under real pressure from climbing beef costs and customers cutting back. Beef and veal prices ran 9.4 percent above a year earlier this July, against 3 percent for food overall. The fourth-quarter sales dip paired with traffic growth meant Outback was getting more people in the door while each check got smaller. A $14.99 three-course deal will do that.
If your local Outback survives the lease list, expect a remodel, a server with four tables instead of six, a thicker sirloin and a tablet on your table. If it does not, the closing may not come with much warning. Twenty-one restaurants went dark in about a week.
