The Red Robin at 314 W. Washington St. in East Peoria is set to close after a final day on May 24, the company confirmed, and a second Red Robin at 5582 Spectrum Drive at the Francis Scott Key Mall in Frederick will also close on Sunday, May 24.
The East Peoria restaurant opened in 2013 and was the last Red Robin in the central Illinois area. The Frederick location first opened May 30, 2011, and will shut after almost exactly fifteen years in business. With the East Peoria store gone, the next closest Red Robin is in Davenport, Iowa; locations in Oswego and Edwardsville are each over two hours away from Peoria, increasing travel times for customers who want to keep visiting the chain.
The double closure arrives amid a companywide retrenchment that was announced in late 2024: Red Robin revealed plans to close approximately 70 underperforming locations as part of its North Star plan. In a February earnings call David Pace said the company expected to close around 20 locations this year, a figure that aligns with the pair of May 24 shutdowns in Illinois and Maryland.
At the same time, Red Robin has shown mixed sales signals. The company reported its strongest customer traffic results in three years during the first quarter of 2026, but its same-store sales were down 0.6% year over year through April 19 and traffic had fallen 1.6% during that span, following a 3.6% traffic drop in the previous quarter. Those conflicting indicators — improving traffic trends alongside targeted closures — are central to the company’s restructuring calculus.
The Frederick closure is explicitly part of the effort to cull underperforming sites; the East Peoria shutdown removes the chain’s last footprint in central Illinois. For local customers the practical consequence is immediate: gift cards will still be accepted at the nearby Germantown Red Robin location in Montgomery County, but routine visits will require longer drives to Davenport or to Oswego and Edwardsville, locations that sit more than two hours from Peoria.
The tension inside the numbers is straightforward. Red Robin is reporting traffic lifts in early 2026 even as it pares its estate under the North Star plan. That mix lets the company point to operational improvement while narrowing the market to more profitable or strategically placed restaurants — a move Pace flagged in February when he said the company expected to close around 20 locations this year.
What happens next is clear to customers and investors alike: May 24 will be the final service day at both the East Peoria and Frederick restaurants, and the company’s announced plan means more underperforming sites could be named for closure as the year unfolds. For diners in central Illinois, the most immediate change is geographic — with no Red Robin left in the area, the brand’s nearest door is now across the state line in Davenport.
