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But last year, John Aldecoa noticed the numbers going south for the first time.

He figures they were down by around 6%.聽

"We've never gone backwards since we opened, not including COVID, obviously," he said. "But year-over-year, we've always been growing."

This past year, those numbers dropped even more dramatically.

"Right now, based on the numbers that we've had before the summer hit, we were about 20% down," Aldecoa said Monday, as word spread that the restaurant was closing on Tuesday.

"Now is the most expensive time of the year to operate," he said of the timing. "This is when my electric bill goes through the roof. This is when our sales are typically slower. Tucson summers are rough and they've always been for everybody."

Aldecoa said the key to surviving the summer is to go into the season with "a good cash surplus, then you start up again in the fall and keep going."

But with higher food costs, a dramatic decline in walk-in business and consumer confidence at historic lows, Brother John's downward trend left no cash reserves to fall back on, he said.

Aldecoa and his partner/brother David Aldecoa invested $1 million to renovate the聽10,000-square-foot building at 1801 N. Stone Ave. that was home for 40 years to the popular Wildcat House bar. The bar closed in 2012, and when they took over the space three years later, they found drink glasses on the bar, french fries in a deep-fry basket and records on the turntable in the concrete DJ booth.

The brothers and their chef-partner Patrick Vezino spent seven months renovating the space, including adding a 2,400-square-foot beer garden patio.

For the first nine years or so, business grew each year. Catering flourished to the point that in early 2024,聽Brother John's opened a commissary kitchen in a former Lucky Wishbone restaurant on East 22nd Street and leased in Armory Park to host weddings and other events that were too large for the restaurant's 1,800-square-foot private dining room.

Aldecoa said they broke both leases as the business started going "in the wrong direction" last year.

Several weeks ago, he and his partners started "playing with the numbers" and realized "it's inefficient and not sustainable" to continue operating in聽"that big location with that large overhead."聽 Because they were on a month-to-month lease, which Aldecoa said they negotiated with the landlord a year ago in hopes of cutting costs, they decided to cut their losses ahead of summer.聽聽

Aldecoa said Brother John's still has catering jobs on the books that it will fulfill, "so we're still in business." They also are considering alternate locations "that are more suitable for our concept and have a better demographic to support our concept."

He said they have no timeline for relaunching Brother John's, but "if we could lock something down in the next two months. ideally we'd do something in the fall."