Élephante Recovered Almost $1 Million After a Lounge Fire, and Reopened in Under a Day

A Saturday night fire at a busy restaurant

At about 7 p.m. on Saturday, August 9, 2025, servers at Élephante Scottsdale brought out a birthday cake topped with sparklers. The sparklers set a chandelier in the lounge on fire. Three sprinkler heads went off. Guests and staff got out safely, and firefighters arrived.

The lounge took fire and water damage, and water also reached the entrance and parts of the kitchen. The restaurant comped the meals of guests who had been dining, then cancelled the rest of that night's reservations and brunch the next morning.

It was around midnight on the East Coast when Rob Chislett, a partner at Wish You Were Here Group, called WithCoverage. Charlotte Watkins answered, and Phil Wilusz took over first thing the next morning.

Recording the loss as it happened

We opened the claim right away. At the restaurant, a remediation company started work while the team threw out exposed food and logged what was lost. By 3 p.m. Sunday, fire inspectors and sprinkler repair crews had cleared the main restaurant to reopen.

The 84-seat lounge stayed closed. That closed section became the center of a claim that went well beyond repair bills.

Rob sent us a detailed account of the incident and listed what his team needed: confirmation that the claim was open, a carrier contact for the remediation company and guidance on which records to keep. We opened the claim file, uploaded photographs, pushed for an adjuster and a site visit, and put the remediation team in touch with the carrier.

We helped the team build the record while the damage was still visible. With the team on site, we worked to:

• Photograph the physical damage in each affected area
• Estimate repair and replacement costs
• Collect invoices for cleanup and other emergency work
• Measure how much food had spoiled

We set up tracking for lost business from day one. That covered cancelled reservations, comped meals and how long each part of the restaurant was out of use, all backed by sales and expense records. The goal was to capture the impact as it happened, so the client had the evidence ready when the carrier evaluated the claim.

Challenging the carrier's valuation

The carrier's first business income payment was about $100,000. We believed that figure understated the loss by a wide margin. Business income coverage pays for profits a business loses while it can't fully operate. The carrier based its estimate on sales from the few months before the fire, which were a slower stretch for the restaurant. That approach ignored seasonality. The fire cost Élephante part of its busy season, when it expected to earn well above those earlier months.

We disputed that baseline and worked with Wish You Were Here's director of finance to make the case for more. He compared actual sales before the fire with the restaurant's budget, then used that relationship to estimate sales during the affected period. He also looked at how long the disruption lasted, which supported a longer loss period than the carrier first assumed.

The revised analysis used the carrier's own framework. The director of finance built it from sales records and the expense structure in the carrier accountant's model. With that evidence in hand, WithCoverage pressed the adjuster and accountant to reconsider their initial valuation.

Getting the money moving

The claim had to keep moving while that work went on. Adjusters changed, outstanding invoices had to be collected, and the client needed answers on which repairs were approved and when payments would arrive.

When progress stalled, we went to the carrier's large-loss leadership. We brought the people handling the claim back into the conversation and asked three questions: what was approved, what was still outstanding and what information the carrier still needed. We also pushed for payment of the amounts the carrier didn't dispute while the open questions were worked out.

In July 2026, the carrier issued a payment letter for more than $500,000 in additional business income. With the earlier payments for property damage and lost income, the total recovery came to almost $1 million.

That payment didn't mean the carrier had accepted every part of the client's analysis. Before the client accepted the undisputed funds, we asked the carrier to confirm that doing so would preserve the client's right to pursue the amounts still in dispute.

What restaurant owners should know

Élephante's lounge shows a risk many continuity plans miss: losing one part of a property while the rest of it stays open. A closed 84-seat section doesn't shut the restaurant down, but over weeks or months it can cost a lot of revenue. Plan for that before a loss. Keep clean sales records, set realistic budgets and know your current repair costs. Those numbers help you measure your exposure in advance and prove your loss afterward.

At Élephante, the main restaurant reopened in less than a day, but the insurance recovery took months. Wish You Were Here's team brought the operating knowledge and financial detail, and WithCoverage stayed involved through every stage of the carrier's review and payment. Together, they recovered almost $1 million.