About a dozen former workers protested outside the shuttered Guzman y Gomez restaurant in Evanston on Saturday, a day after the Australia-based fast-casual chain abruptly closed all nine of its Chicago-area locations. The employees said they were caught off guard by the shutdown and were left with no official notice from the company.
One staffer said the first warning came Thursday night in a leaked corporate email, before the restaurants were shut on Friday. The workers said they had received no formal severance pay, though they will be paid through May 31. Some also said their hours had already been cut before the closure, deepening the shock of losing their jobs at once.
Guzman y Gomez opened the Evanston location in March 2025 as part of a U.S. expansion push from a global base of 200-plus eateries. Steven Marks said at the time that the company expected about 60 employees at the site, and on Friday he said the chain had realized it would need significantly more time and capital to make it in the U.S. market. The Chicago-area restaurants, he said, were the start of a major effort that did not succeed.
The shutdown now raises the question of whether the company followed Illinois law. The state WARN Act requires employers with 75 or more full-time employees to give 60 days notice before a closure or mass layoff, and the workers said they believed they were legally entitled to more notice. Yomira Gomez said the staffers were considering legal action and a complaint with the State of Illinois.
The Evanston protest also underscores how crowded and unforgiving the fast-casual Mexican market has become in downtown areas. Guzman y Gomez is the second such restaurant to close downtown recently, after Big Wig Tacos shut its Church Street location earlier in 2025. For the workers outside the locked doors on Saturday, the issue was not expansion strategy or market fit. It was how a restaurant with a new lease on life in March ended with a shut sign, unpaid uncertainty and a possible labor complaint less than three months later.
Whether the closure becomes a broader test of Illinois notice rules may matter as much as the company’s U.S. retreat. For the employees who showed up in Evanston on Saturday, the answer was already personal: they said the company had not given them the notice they were owed.
