Mountain Mike’s Pizza has been expanding rapidly for the past several years, but one franchisee—Rogue Fare LLC—isn’t doing quite so well.
Rogue Fare, which operates five Mountain Mike’s restaurants in Oregon, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Oregon in Eugene on July 1. Court papers list Rogue Fare’s assets at less than $50,000 and its debts at between $1 million and $10 million.
Rogue Fare operates Mountain Mike’s stores in Medford, Klamath Falls, Grants Pass and Roseburg, Oregon. According to the Chapter 11 petition, the company owes a little more than $2.9 million to First Bank of the Lake and a little more than $1.5 million to First Internet Bank of Indiana—its two largest debtors.No reason for the bankruptcy filing was given in the petition.
In a media statement, Mountain Mike’s Pizza has said, “We are aware of the Chapter 11 filing involving a single Mountain Mike’s Pizza restaurant in Medford, Oregon, operated by one of our longstanding and valued franchise partners. This filing is simply a financial restructuring for that individual location, which remains open and operating as usual with no interruption to guests or business.”
Mountain Mike’s said the filing “is in no way a reflection of the overall strength or performance of the Mountain Mike’s Pizza franchise system, which ended 2025 with record sales and is on track to open over 20 locations by the end of 2026.”
Mountain Mike’s regularly announces new openings via press release, the most recent one being a store that opened this month in El Dorado Hills, California. Altogether, Mountain Mike’s says it has nearly 350 locations in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin. It has also announced plans to develop locations in Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee and Virginia.
At the end of 2025, Mountain Mike’s Pizza was ranked No. 7 among U.S. restaurant chains and No. 9 overall on Yelp’s Most Loved Brands of 2025 list. That same year Mountain Mike’s climbed to No. 89 on Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 list and to No. 4 in the pizza category.
According to Inc., Rogue Fare is the company behind restaurants operated by Mountain Mike’s multi-unit franchisees Jim and Jodee Smith. They opened their fifth store in Oregon in 2024.
Entrepreneur profiled Jim Smith in an August 2023 article, noting that he started out in the restaurant business as a dishwasher in high school, climbed to the position of regional manager and worked with brands like Taco Bell and Starbucks.
In the Entrepreneur interview, Jim Smith said he was first approached “to help evaluate the pricing on a Mountain Mike’s franchise in southern Oregon whose owners were looking to sell it and retire. As I looked into it, I told them, ‘You probably need to find someone else to give you a value because I’m gonna make an offer.’ I closed the deal in 2017 and have just fallen in love with the brand since.”
The Mountain Mike’s store he purchased was struggling at the time, Smith said. “I think, in the 12 months prior to me taking over, it did around $567,000 in top line sales. And then a year later, we were doing around $1.1 million.”
He added that he didn’t originally intend to own multiple Mountain Mike’s stores. “I just thought there was great cash flow in the brand, and I could use it to fund whatever other projects I want to do. But I would talk to out-of-town customers in my first Mountain Mike’s every day, and they’d ask, ‘When is this coming to my city?’ And after hearing that maybe a hundred times, I thought, ‘Why don’t I open more of these?’”
He added that a benefit of being a multi-unit operator was that “as you grow, you have the cash flow to do additional things without driving a lot of debt, which is exciting.”
