Chili's Runs the Biggest Bar in Texas. Its Guests Are Drinking Less.

A CFO says the quiet part

Brinker International reported fourth quarter results Wednesday and held its call at 9 a.m. Central. Chili's comps rose 5.6 percent, the twenty-first consecutive quarter of same-store sales growth, rolling a 23.7 percent gain from a year ago for a three-year cumulative comp CEO Kevin Hochman put at 50 percent and a five-year run the company puts at 71 percent. Then, near the end of the Q&A, CFO Mika Ware said the thing that matters for anyone who runs a bar: "we're feeling a little bit of that macro pressure like everyone else is." She was talking about alcohol. She also claimed top market share in the category.

Both halves of that sentence are true, and the audited Texas ledger can prove it.

Why Texas is the tell

Texas is where Brinker's story is most legible. The company was founded on Greenville Avenue in Dallas in 1975, sits today in Coppell, and operates more Chili's in Texas than in any other state, roughly one in six of its domestic restaurants. The remodel prototype central to its fiscal 2027 capital plan is debuting in Dallas. And Texas is the one state where beverage revenue is audited and filed venue by venue, month by month, which means the bar side of the turnaround can be checked against a ledger nobody gets to characterize. What follows reads Wednesday's print, and the call that followed it, against that ledger.

The ledger

In fiscal 2026, which on Brinker's calendar means roughly July 2025 through June 2026, Chili's produced $99.8 million in audited beverage revenue across its Texas restaurants. That is the largest figure of any major casual dining chain in the state. Texas Roadhouse follows at $71.4 million, Twin Peaks at $60.1 million, Buffalo Wild Wings at $51.0 million, Saltgrass at $36.6 million, Chuy's at $32.4 million, Applebee's at $29.2 million, Olive Garden at $24.3 million.

The trend behind that ranking is the turnaround itself. Chili's Texas beverage revenue ran $89.4 million in fiscal 2024, $95.8 million in fiscal 2025, and $99.8 million in fiscal 2026, while its share of the Texas casual bar-and-grill set's beverage dollars climbed from 12.5 percent in fiscal 2022, the year Hochman arrived, to 13.6 percent in fiscal 2024 to 16.3 percent in fiscal 2026. The peer set's beverage revenue shrank from $566 million to $511 million over the same period. Chili's grew from $89 million to $100 million. This is what "top in market share" looks like when the venue itself files the number.

Now the pressure. In the April-to-June window that maps to Brinker's fiscal fourth quarter, Chili's Texas same-store beverage revenue rose 0.9 percent across 212 comparable restaurants. Liquor slipped 1.1 percent, wine fell 2.7 percent, beer rose 5.3 percent. Against menu pricing of 4.3 percent, a 1.1 percent decline in liquor dollars implies liquor volume down mid single digits. Ware told analysts the quarter's negative mix was "driven by alcohol and appetizers," a little check management. The filings show the shape of it: guests kept the visit and skipped the second drink.

Flat is still a win here. The Texas bar-and-grill peer set fell 2.7 percent same-store over the same window. The Italian set fell 4.0 percent. Maggiano's nine Texas locations fell 7.1 percent, a harder number than the brand's reported negative 2.5 comp and consistent with a turnaround Hochman conceded is "happening slower than we had planned." He also gave the sharper context: Maggiano's is now 8 percent of company sales, and the licensed international Chili's business is expected to pass it in profit contribution this fiscal year. Ware built fiscal 2027 guidance on flat Maggiano's revenue and flat profit, which reads less like a forecast and more like breathing room.

The monthly filings add texture the quarterly print flattens. Fiscal 2026 opened hot, with July 2025 same-store beverage revenue up 14.5 percent as the brand lapped into its own momentum, cooled through the fall, dipped negative in October, spiked in November, then ground through a soft winter, with January down 5.7 percent, before flattening through spring and turning up 2.6 percent in June. Liquor did the swinging, from plus 18 to minus 8 across the year. Beer did the compounding: beer revenue rose in eleven of twelve months and was flat in the twelfth, running between 4 and 12 percent throughout. A brand marketing burgers and chicken sandwiches against fast food has built a beer trade underneath the margarita story, and June's liquor line turning positive, up 1.0 percent, is the first green shoot heading into the July acceleration management described.

Inside the alcohol mix, liquor is still the franchise. Spirits carried 65 percent of Chili's Texas beverage revenue in fiscal 2026, beer about a third, wine a rounding error, and that spirits share tells you why the margarita program is the marketing surface. Which makes the next pattern the most useful thing in the filings: event margaritas move the ledger, and the loyalty wrapper did not. November 2025, the month of the witch-themed margarita, spiked same-store liquor 18.2 percent; the company has said that drink sold about 1.5 million more margaritas than a typical monthly feature, and the Texas filings are what that looks like in audited form. The Margarita of the Month Club launched in February; February liquor fell 2.9 percent and March fell 5.3 percent. Hochman's own framing matched the data. The prior team saw the program as drink attachment, he said, and the new marketing team has turned certain months into a second growth lever aimed at "total box traffic, not just alcohol attachment," with the witch margs and July's Bombshell as the proof points. The filings agree on both counts. The events register. The membership wrapper, so far, does not.

One structural note. Chili's wins the state on fleet, not bar intensity. Its Texas restaurants averaged roughly $464,000 in beverage revenue each over fiscal 2026, against about $840,000 at Texas Roadhouse, $660,000 at Chuy's, and $601,000 at Saltgrass. Set against the $5 million average unit volume Ware cited, up from $4.5 million a year ago, beverage runs a little over 9 percent of the box. That is the context for the remodel program: the reimages Brinker will scale to 60 to 80 restaurants in fiscal 2027 open up the bar, in some cases removing a wall to do it, and Ware noted the fleet still sits at about 80 percent of its historical guest-count capacity. The company is spending capital to raise a 9 percent line inside boxes that have room for the traffic.

The menu

Pourcast's verified menu pricing corpus shows how deliberately that 9 percent line is priced. The Margarita of the Month appears at exactly $6.00 on every current Texas Chili's listing in the corpus. The median listed margarita at Chili's is $8.99, with the middle half of listings between $7.99 and $10.99, and the Presidente holds at $9.99. Across the Texas bar-and-grill set, the median listed margarita is $9.99. The program marg sits four dollars under the market and three dollars under Chili's own median, priced for the role Hochman described on the call: an entry price point and, increasingly, a traffic play.

The food side shows how deliberately the value position is engineered. Hochman said Chili's runs $3 to $4 below competitors on per-person spend. At the item level, the corpus shows parity: the median Chili's burger in Texas lists at $11.99, and so does the median burger across the peer set. The discount lives in the architecture. The 3 For Me platform holds its $10.99 floor across current Texas listings, and the tier mechanics work like a conveyor. When the Big Crispy arrived at $10.99, the Big Smasher moved up to $12.99, exactly the rotation Ware described, and the corpus catches both prices in the wild. Ware said just over 21 percent of guests opt into 3 For Me, about 40 percent of those at the $10.99 tier, figures she called "very stable" quarter after quarter. The corpus agrees with the stability. Chili's holds the burger at market and puts the value into the bundle, and the margarita is priced with the same intent.

The Big Crispy itself is the tell on where the menu is going. Four months after launch, Chili's is selling 55 chicken sandwiches per restaurant per day against 20 before, a 175 percent increase Hochman said is still building, on a curve he described as the Smasher and QP trajectory, only higher. In the corpus it already appears on more than 500 current Texas listings, from a $7.49 base build up through the tiers. Meanwhile the platform it joined keeps working: Ware said the Triple Dipper has grown every year of the turnaround and is up again in the current quarter, and trade reporting has put the brand's five core items, once the Triple Dipper joined burgers, margaritas, fajitas, and Crispers, at 58 percent of sales.

The margins of the menu are moving too, in ways that connect to the check-management story. The negative mix Ware attributed to alcohol and appetizers was partly offset by desserts, where Chili's turned a social phenomenon it did not start, guests ordering a Molten on top of a skillet cookie, into a trained, keyed-in menu item, upgraded the cookie and the ice cream, and reversed a category decline. A new kids menu is rolling out behind it. None of that is a beverage line, but all of it is the same playbook the $6 marg runs: meet the guest where the internet already is, price the entry low, and let the box do the rest.

The cost tape

Ware's inflation commentary maps cleanly onto the current tape. She named beef as the fourth quarter's drag, and retail beef is running hot: ground beef up 14.3 percent year over year in the June data, steaks up 16.7 percent, roasts up 18.8 percent, even as July wholesale prints cooled, with the boxed Choice cutout down 4.4 percent month over month. She said the tomato spike from the late Florida freeze "remained elevated longer than expected" but has normalized and will not touch the fiscal first quarter, and the July terminal prints agree, with romas down 10.3 percent month over month and field-grown retail tomatoes down 13.5 percent in June.

What she did not say is that the Big Crispy launched into a collapsing chicken market. Wholesale boneless breast is down 42.4 percent year over year, tenders down 36.2 percent, wings down 35.2 percent. "Ride the chicken sandwich all year" is a traffic plan that happens to rotate the marketing calendar from beef-anchored heroes onto the one center-of-plate protein that is deflating. The pork side rhymes: Chili's invested in meatier ribs and thicker bacon as quality plays, and pork back ribs are down 7.0 percent year over year, which means the remade Baby Back Ribs jingle is advertising a cost line that is getting cheaper. The pricing plan sits on top of all of this at a deliberate lag: Ware guided menu pricing to just over 3 percent for the year, front-loaded at roughly 4 in the first quarter and 3 thereafter, against restaurant margin improvement of 20 to 40 basis points on a 52-week basis, with the 53rd week worth up to 10 more.

For fiscal 2027, Ware guided commodity inflation at roughly 4 percent in the first quarter, then 3, then 2, then 1. Brinker doesn't publish its commodity weights, so Pourcast built a spend-weighted cost index from its own forward curves, weighted three separate ways to make sure the answer didn't depend on the recipe, and it didn't. A forecast vintage frozen before this guidance existed, scored against federal data published afterward, beat carry-forward by 23 percent and seasonal naive by 53 percent on one-month error across 22 price series.

The verdict is validation. Her cadence sits inside the index's forecast band in all four quarters, and once the curves are re-priced the way a chain actually buys, with most of the basket locked at trailing contract prices, the index reads 4.5, 3.4, 2.8 and 1.1 against her 4, 3, 2 and 1, agreement to about the precision of her own round numbers. For an operator, the readable part is the shape underneath: chicken and pork forwards sit flat to negative, which is why riding the Big Crispy and the ribs is cheap, while beef middle meats firm up mid fiscal year, which is when a beef-heavy menu wants its prices locked. Pourcast runs the same curves for any menu in the state.

The operations engine

The reason any of this shows up as traffic is the part of the call that got the least attention. Hochman spent his prepared remarks on cycle time: shift line checks cut from eight pages to one, which he valued at 30 minutes of manager time per restaurant per day, a loyalty redemption rebuilt so the Ziosk applies the reward like a supermarket card instead of flagging down a manager, a host-stand overhaul aimed at the 15-to-20-minute waits, and a dessert queue fix so servers will actually sell the Molten. His operating principle for the weekend rush was six words: "turning tables is traffic in the till." The general manager bonus now keys on sales and profits, the VPs of operations chose traffic as their obsession metric for a third straight year, and the to-go business, a quarter of sales, is the next frontier he named. The Texas filings are the downstream reading of all of it. Traffic-first operations plus a $6 door plus a flat check equals beverage revenue that holds while the peer set's falls.

What to watch

Three dates, all inside six weeks. July's Texas filings land within days of August 20, and management says sales and traffic "significantly accelerated" in July and August behind the Big Crispy and the Bombshell Marg, the July feature Hochman credited with drawing younger guests; November's precedent shows exactly what a viral margarita looks like in an audited filing, so the claim is testable on arrival, and The Well will report what the ledger shows. Brinker's fiscal 2026 annual report is due on or before August 24, and any commodity-weight disclosure there would replace the estimated scaffold in our index. And the 12-restaurant franchise acquisition in Alabama and Mississippi closes around August 27, worth roughly $30 million in incremental revenue at a flat earnings effect by Ware's math, with real estate included on six sites. Behind those sits the September 17 Investor Day in Dallas, where the remodel economics, the unit-growth ramp toward fiscal 2028, and the bar-forward prototype get their numbers.

About the data

Beverage figures are audited Texas beverage revenue filed monthly by venues, through June 2026; they are beverage dollars, not drink counts, and same-store comparisons include only restaurants filing every comparable month. The April-to-June window approximates Brinker's fiscal quarter ended June 24. Menu figures are medians from Pourcast's verified menu pricing corpus of current Texas listings. Forward cost paths and index weights are Pourcast estimates; Brinker does not disclose its commodity basket, and the contract-coverage figures are an illustration, not a model of the company's positions. Company figures are from Brinker's August 12, 2026 release and earnings call.

Pourcast is a Texas hospitality intelligence platform. All Pourcast analysis is derived from public records. pourcast.ai