801 Chophouse Filed Chapter 11. The Texas Data Says It Won't Be the Last.

The Filing, In Numbers

On April 10, 2026, 801 Restaurant Group, LLC filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Kansas. Case 26-20549, before Judge Robert D. Berger. Debtor's counsel: Frank Wendt of Brown & Ruprecht. The petition lists assets of approximately $15 million against liabilities of approximately $18.7 million — a roughly $3.7 million negative-equity hole.

There's no DIP financing motion. No claims agent. No PE sponsor. Family-owned. The largest single creditor disclosed so far is Simon Property Group — landlord of 801 Chophouse at Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver — which filed a Request for Notice four days after the petition. The U.S. Small Business Administration is in for a $1.8 million claim, almost certainly legacy EIDL.

801 Restaurant Group operates eight 801 Chophouse units (Des Moines, Omaha, Kansas City, Leawood, St. Louis, Denver, Minneapolis, Tysons Corner), one 801 Fish (Clayton, MO), and one 801 Local (Frontenac, MO). The press release is precise about what's filing and what isn't: "The companies that own and operate the restaurants are not in bankruptcy. The purpose of the Chapter 11 is to restructure these and other obligations for which 801 Restaurant Group has liability."

The "other obligations" are lease guarantees. Specifically: a closed 801 Fish at 999 17th Street in downtown Denver (rent unpaid since September 2025, eviction filed December), and a closed 801 on Nicollet at the U.S. Bancorp Center in Minneapolis (opened November 6, 2025; closed in early April; bankruptcy five days later). Two failed urban-box concept extensions. Parent guarantees that survived the closures.

This is a holding-company filing designed to wall off the operating restaurants from the lease tail. It is also, on its facts, a contained event — a small chain, a family operator, no securitization, no PE recovery dance.

The question this article asks is whether it stays contained.

Why Texas Data Reads a Brand With Zero Texas Locations

801 doesn't operate in Texas. None of its 10 units sit inside the state's reporting footprint. So Texas audited Texas beverage sales can't tell us anything about 801's bar program directly.

What it can tell us is whether the segment 801 sat inside is healthy enough to absorb a small-chain stumble — or whether the stumble is the visible part of a wider problem.

Texas requires every venue holding a mixed-beverage permit to report monthly gross alcohol receipts to the Comptroller. The data is published with a 45–60 day lag, which means today (April 18, 2026) we have full coverage through February 2026. That gives us a clean trailing-twelve-month window: March 2025 through February 2026, against a prior-year comparable of March 2024 through February 2025. Same months, same seasonal mix, no calendar noise.

We pulled every Texas unit operated by nine upscale steakhouse brands: The Capital Grille, Ruth's Chris, Fleming's Prime Steakhouse, Del Frisco's Double Eagle, Perry's Steakhouse, Eddie V's, III Forks, Bob's Steak & Chop House, and Morton's. Plus Texas de Brazil — seven active TX units across Addison, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, McAllen, San Antonio, and Tyler — as a churrascaria adjacency comp. That's 61 active venues, 60 of which carry continuous prior-year license history for clean same-store math (the III Forks Addison unit reissued under a new taxpayer license inside the comparable window). Three Bob's Steak & Chop House units that operate inside Omni Hotel properties (Austin Barton Creek, Fort Worth, Dallas Lamar) are present in the brand's footprint but file alcohol receipts under the host-hotel taxpayer entity, so they can't be isolated at the venue level — the Bob's brand math reflects the six independently-filing units. Morton's operates four active TX units — Houston Galleria, Houston Downtown, San Antonio Rivercenter, and The Woodlands "Morton's Grille" smaller-format extension — all of which file under unit-specific Morton's of Chicago LLCs, so the brand reads cleanly at the venue level despite Landry's 2012 acquisition. The Dallas Crescent (Uptown) Morton's filed continuously through January 2025 and went dark thereafter, consistent with a closure inside the window; it's excluded from the same-store math. Pappas Bros. Steakhouse was excluded — its taxpayer entity overlaps with the broader Pappas family of concepts (Pappadeaux, Pappasito's), and the venue counts would inflate in ways that would distort the steakhouse-specific read.

This isn't a same-store sales index. New unit openings inflate the TTM line for some brands — that's why The Capital Grille shows up positive. We'll separate the unit-mix effect from the underlying box trend in the section that matters.

What this analysis is: a segment health check using the only public, venue-level alcohol revenue dataset that exists in this country.

The Segment Is Bleeding

Nine of the ten brands tracked posted negative trailing-twelve-month alcohol receipts versus the prior comparable year. The aggregate moved from $100.5 million to $98.5 million — a 2.0% top-line decline.

That headline number understates what's happening at the unit level. The Capital Grille, the only positive brand at +23.2%, opened new Texas units inside the window. Strip out the unit-mix lift and Capital Grille's same-store performance is roughly flat — Darden's own filings describe fine dining as "still soft" through Q3 FY26, with CFO Raj Vennam noting the segment has not yet "claimed victory" on traffic.

The other nine brands aren't ambiguous. III Forks: −11.0%. Fleming's: −10.0%. Texas de Brazil: −9.5% across all seven active TX units. Eddie V's: −7.9%. Morton's: −7.6% (across four active TX units, with the Dallas Crescent location going dark in early 2025). Del Frisco's: −7.3%. Perry's, the largest Texas-native player at 14 units: −3.6%. Bob's Steak & Chop, viewed across all six independently-filing TX units, is only −1.3% — but that aggregate is held up by the 1993 Lemmon Avenue flagship at +11.1%; strip out the flagship and the other five Bob's units are collectively negative. The median brand-level move is −7.6%. The median venue-level move (looking at the 60 same-store units) sits in the same neighborhood.

Black Box Intelligence's monthly fine dining tracker called this in real time. From May through September 2025, fine dining was the worst-performing same-store sales segment in the U.S. five months running. October 2025 was the first month it returned to growth — against an unusually weak prior-year comp. December 2025 industry SSS turned negative for the first time in ten months. The Black Box editorial framing was direct: "when guests pay more but don't get the same experience they remember, they're less likely to return."

The Texas data doesn't disagree.

The Beef Squeeze

The thesis the dossier kept circling back to — and the one the Texas data quietly supports — is that this segment isn't suffering a demand shock. It's suffering a cost shock that the price ladder can't absorb anymore.

USDA's January 2025 cattle inventory report put the U.S. herd at its lowest level since 1951. Seventy-three years. Ranchers spent 2022 and 2023 culling breeding stock through drought; the rebuild cycle takes three to four years from heifer retention to harvest. The market that exists today is the market that was set in motion two years ago.

Boxed beef cutout values in Q1 2026 are running 35% to 45% above the 2019–2024 average. That's the wholesale benchmark. The cuts that actually matter to a steakhouse — Prime 189A, the chuck-shoulder bone-in ribeye that sits at the heart of a $145 prime ribeye plate — regularly trade $300 to $400 per hundredweight above Choice. Steakhouses are price-takers in a market where the supply curve can't move for another 18 months.

The classical operator response is to push price. Capital Grille rolled out a $35 Wagyu & Wine special. Ruth's Chris launched a $55 three-course prix fixe — Cardenas told analysts on the Q3 FY26 call it was "really resonating" and "we're seeing guests that were lapsed come back." STK locked in beef pricing through September 2026, which CEO Manny Hilario flagged as a deliberate cash-conservation move ahead of what the company described as a year focused on "optimizing our balance sheet."

The unspoken counterpoint: the operators who can engineer those programs are corporate, public, and capitalized. Independent and family-owned steakhouses don't have a procurement desk that can lock in nine months of beef on the futures curve. They eat the cost, raise the menu price, watch the average check tip past the consumer threshold, and then watch the covers move.

That's the squeeze. It's not visible in the Texas alcohol data — Audited doesn't see food cost. But the Texas alcohol data is what shows up when the squeeze starts pulling traffic out of the dining room. Lower covers means lower bottle pours, lower wine-by-the-glass, lower after-dinner cocktails. The bar program is a downstream indicator of the food program. And the bar program is bleeding.

Who's Actually Closing

The unit-level closure activity inside the segment is more significant than the bankruptcy filings alone suggest. Bloomin' Brands closed 41 restaurants across its portfolio in a single Friday in February 2024 — 33 of them on the same day. CEO David Deno cited "older assets with leases from the '90s and early 2000s." The Q3 2025 Bloomin' call layered another 21 Outback closures (October 2025), 22 additional non-renewals through 2029, the suspension of the dividend, and 100 corporate layoffs. Fleming's Houston Upper Kirby — 25 years on the same address — closes April 18, 2026.

Morton's closed its Cincinnati Carew Tower location December 31, 2024 after 32 years; COO Tim Whitlock attributed it to lease expiration. Landry's, which acquired Del Frisco's in 2019 from L Catterton ($650M take-private), has been quietly converting Double Eagle sites into Mastro's — Downtown San Diego and Irvine Spectrum both flipped in early 2025. McCormick & Schmick's, also Landry's, went from 60 units to roughly 13 between 2024 and end of 2025. The Minneapolis Nicollet Mall site that 801 Fish (and then 801 on Nicollet) tried to operate? It hosted a McCormick & Schmick's that COVID closed in 2020.

None of those are bankruptcy filings. Most are quiet portfolio rationalization by parent companies that are themselves under cost pressure. The pattern is consistent: older urban-box leases, fine-dining concepts, sites where the rent structure was set in a different beverage-mix and check-average era.

801 was not the first steakhouse to fail in this cycle. It was the first to file. The distinction matters. Public operators absorb closures inside an asset-base review. Private and family-owned operators run out of road and end up in front of a judge.

The Independent Hospitality Debt Cliff

Sitting underneath the operating numbers is a debt structure that hasn't been re-marked for current cash flow. Three forces are converging.

First, SBA EIDL. The Small Business Administration approved over 3.9 million COVID-era Economic Injury Disaster Loans totaling roughly $390 billion. Original 12-month deferral got pushed to 18, then 24, then 30 months from disbursement. Interest accrued throughout. As of December 2024, SBA had charged off 369,588 EIDLs over $25K, totaling more than $47 billion. Another 96,745 loans, totaling $14.7 billion, were delinquent. The 2025 wind-down of the Hardship Accommodation Plan removed the last operational lifeline for borrowers who'd been treading water on minimum payments. Personal guarantees on EIDL loans above $200K mean default consequences chase the operator, not the LLC. 801's $1.8 million SBA claim is exactly the kind of obligation that survives a corporate restructuring.

Second, commercial real estate. Trepp counts roughly $1.8 trillion in CRE loans maturing through end of 2026. The Mortgage Bankers Association puts 2025 alone at $957 billion — about three times the 20-year average. Trepp's December 2025 CMBS delinquency rate was 7.30% overall, 8.81% including performing matured balloons, and the special servicing rate hit 8.2% — highest since June 2021. The Fed's late-2025 rate cuts (25 bps in September and October) were too small and too late for borrowers staring at refi rates roughly double their 2020–2021 origination coupons. Restaurant operators with maturing 2021-vintage debt are getting "extend and pretend" modifications when they can, eviction notices when they can't.

Third — and the structural one — the Subchapter V ceiling reverted from $7.5 million back to roughly $3 million in mid-2024, narrowing streamlined-reorganization access for the mid-size independents most likely to need it. The operators who built up $4–6 million of pandemic debt now have to file a full Chapter 11, with a full Chapter 11 cost structure, in a court system that prioritizes secured-creditor recoveries.

The 2024–2025 restaurant Chapter 11 docket already runs deep: Red Lobster (May 2024, $294M funded debt). Tijuana Flats (April 2024). TGI Fridays (November 2024, $100M–$500M, securitized). Buca di Beppo (August 2024, converted to Chapter 7 February 2025). BurgerFi (September 2024, $44M sale to TREW). Hooters of America (March 2025, $376M+ funded debt). FAT Brands / Twin Hospitality (January 2026, $1.26–$1.3 billion securitized debt, $2.1M unrestricted cash at filing).

801 sits at the small end of that list. It also sits inside a category — fine-dining steakhouse — that none of the others touch. That's what makes it a leading indicator rather than a tail-end data point.

Flagship Versus Spin-Off

One pattern from the dossier doesn't show up cleanly in the Texas data, but it explains a lot of what's happening at the brand level: the gap between flagship sites and second-generation expansion units.

801's two failures were both spin-off concepts. 801 Fish in Denver opened February 2023; closed roughly 21 months later. 801 Fish Minneapolis opened late 2023; closed mid-2025; got rebranded as 801 on Nicollet in November 2025; closed in April 2026. The flagship 801 Chophouse in Des Moines — operating continuously since 1993 — is staying open. So is the original Omaha and the original Kansas City. The bankruptcy lives in the brand extensions, not the brand.

Bob's Steak & Chop House shows the same pattern in the Texas data. The 1993 Lemmon Avenue Dallas flagship — the original location, 32 years of accumulated brand equity, amortized real estate — is up +11.1% TTM. The newer extensions tell a different story: Austin Downtown −11.3%, San Antonio −9.4%, McKinney −3.8%, Grapevine −3.2%, Plano +1.1%. Five of the six independently-filing units sit at or below flat; the flagship is the entire brand's positive contribution. (A separate Lemmon Avenue filing reissued under a new taxpayer entity mid-window doesn't comp and is excluded from this read.) The publicly observable Texas extensions, the units that scaled out from the original Dallas concept, are where the YoY weakness lives — exactly the pattern 801 just filed against.

Generalize the pattern: in a contracting category, brand extensions carry concentrated risk. The flagship has 25-plus years of accumulated brand equity, regular customers, and amortized lease economics. The second, third, fourth units are paying current rent on current real estate values, on a check the consumer is becoming reluctant to underwrite. When the cycle turns, the math on the extensions breaks first.

801 is a small case study of what that looks like when the parent operator runs out of cash to absorb the extension drag.

What to Watch

Four indicators worth tracking through the back half of 2026:

Q2 2026 audited Texas beverage sales data, available in late August. This is the first month set that captures the post-Easter, early-summer dining patterns under what the NRA's 2026 outlook describes as "softer customer traffic" (60% of operators reported a year-over-year decline in 2025; 42% reported their business wasn't profitable). If the upscale steakhouse aggregate stays flat to negative through Q2, the −7.3% median compresses further toward double digits.

Landry's portfolio behavior. The Mastro's-as-Del-Frisco's-conversion pattern is the clearest signal of how a private parent absorbs underperforming sites without a filing. If those conversions accelerate — or if Landry's starts converting Morton's units the same way — that's the private-equity-style operator validating the segment-contraction thesis without ever going on record.

Darden's Capital Grille trajectory. Capital Grille is the only positive brand in the Texas read, and the lift is largely unit-mix. Watch the Q4 FY26 release (May 2026) for the same-restaurant sales number on the segment. Cardenas told the Street the prix fixe was "resonating." If Q4 SSS is flat or negative on a brand that just opened new units, the segment thesis is confirmed at the corporate-disclosure level.

The next filing. 801 was the first family-owned upscale steakhouse to file in this cycle. The dossier work flagged Morton's lease expirations, McCormick & Schmick's continued attrition, and the small-chain independent steakhouse layer (the regional players too small to make any list) as the most exposed cohort. The base rate of zero filings in this segment ended on April 10. The base rate of one isn't a trend. The base rate of three is.

The Comptroller publishes March 2026 filings in mid-May. Those are the first numbers that will tell us whether the −7.3% median was a floor or a midpoint.

Methodology: audited Texas beverage sales, trailing-twelve-month window of March 2025 through February 2026 vs. prior comparable. 48 active venues across 9 upscale steakhouse brands; 47 with continuous prior-year license history used for same-store YoY (the III Forks Addison unit reissued under a new taxpayer license mid-comparable). Brand assignment via brand_taxpayer_mapping, cross-checked against each brand's official location finder as of April 2026; Pappas Bros. excluded due to taxpayer-entity overlap with non-steakhouse Pappas concepts. Audited captures on-premise alcohol only — food, off-premise, and catering revenue are not visible in this dataset. Beef cost data per USDA NASS January 2025 Cattle Inventory and Q1 2026 boxed beef cutout reports. 801 Restaurant Group case detail per PACER (Case No. 26-20549, D. Kan.) and contemporaneous reporting from BusinessDen, Restaurant Business, USA Today, and Today.com. SBA EIDL portfolio detail per SBA OIG Report 25-23 (August 2025). CRE maturity data per Trepp December 2025 release and MBA 2025 commentary. Black Box Intelligence fine-dining segment data per public 2025 monthly briefs.