Chuy's Has More Texas Locations Than Mi Cocina and Pappasito's Combined. It Still Lost the Per-Venue Race to Both.

What Darden Buried, and What the Filing Data Shows

When Darden closed its $605 million acquisition of Chuy's Holdings on October 11, 2024, it folded the chain's Texas restaurants into a reporting segment called "Other Business" — the same segment that contains Cheddar's Scratch Kitchen, Yard House, Seasons 52, The Capital Grille, Eddie V's, and Bahama Breeze. Seven brands, one line item. Chuy's has no stand-alone revenue line in Darden's 10-Q. It won't be included in Darden's consolidated same-restaurant sales metric until Q4 FY2026 at the earliest — sixteen months after the deal closed.

The deal valued Chuy's at roughly 10.3x trailing EBITDA — a premium multiple for a casual-dining chain in 2024, and a bet that Darden's supply-chain scale, real-estate discipline, and bar-program expertise could lift the brand's margins. Darden's press release at signing cited "attractive unit economics" and "significant whitespace." What it didn't cite was how Chuy's bar program compared to the independent Tex-Mex operators it competes against in its home state.

For that window of opacity, one data source shows what Darden bought.

The Texas Comptroller publishes monthly audited Texas beverage sales for every establishment in the state with a mixed-beverage permit. The reports separate liquor, wine, and beer. They are filed under penalty of perjury. They go back nineteen years. Unlike Darden's 10-Q, they are not consolidated, not segmented, and not delayed.

As of April 2026, Chuy's operates 50 open Texas locations — confirmed via chuys.com — with a 51st (Bastrop) opening May 18, 2026, and at least four more under construction (Leander, Argyle, Manor, McKinney). Pourcast's trailing-twelve-month data for the period ending February 2026 captures 49 of those venues in audited sales filings. Willis, the newest opening, has not yet filed. Three Fort Worth venues operating under the name "Chuy's Mexican Restaurant" were excluded from this analysis — they are an independent family-owned business (Adame family, est. 1982) unrelated to Darden's Chuy's Opco, Inc. The two businesses reached a coexistence agreement in 1997.

The total dataset for this analysis: 111,895 monthly audited sales records across 22 brands, 570+ venues, every historical month available. It is the most granular full-service Tex-Mex competitive dataset ever assembled from public filings.

The Scale Leader Is the Per-Venue Laggard

Chuy's operates 50 open Texas locations, the largest footprint in the full-service Tex-Mex category. Per-venue TTM alcohol revenue, calculated on the 48 venues with a full twelve months of filing data: $670,407.

Mi Cocina, 22 active Texas venues, concentrated almost entirely in DFW's affluent suburbs — Park Cities, Southlake, Plano, Fort Worth — averages $1,423,273 per venue. Mi Cocina is privately held by M Crowd Restaurant Group, a DFW-based operator that has run the brand since 1991. It does not franchise. Every venue is company-operated and located in a high-income trade area. The per-venue gap: 2.12x.

Pappasito's Cantina, 17 active venues, family-owned by the Pappas brothers (who also operate Pappadeaux, Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, and Pappas Seafood): $1,382,214 per venue. Pappasito's was born in Houston in 1983 and has never taken outside capital. The Pappas organization is one of the last large-scale family restaurant groups in Texas and operates with a vertically integrated commissary model that most chains abandoned in the 1990s.

Gringo's Mexican Kitchen, 16 active venues in the Houston suburbs, PE-backed since 2021: $1,228,267. Los Tios, 8 active Houston venues, family-owned: $1,170,846. El Tiempo Cantina, 12 active Houston venues, Laurenzo family: $1,169,220. Maudie's, 6 active Austin venues: $1,021,403. The Original Ninfa's, 6 active venues, Legacy Restaurants: $1,004,915. Lupe Tortilla, 34 active venues across Houston, Austin, DFW, and San Antonio: $852,512.

Every major scratch-kitchen Tex-Mex competitor in Texas out-earns Chuy's per location by margins ranging from 27% (Lupe Tortilla) to 112% (Mi Cocina).

The dataset doesn't tell us what Chuy's overall AUV looks like — Audited captures only alcohol — and Chuy's disclosed in its last 10-K as a public company (FY2023) that alcohol runs roughly 14% of total sales. A rough back-of-envelope: $670K alcohol ÷ 0.14 = $4.8M implied total AUV. That is consistent with the $4.5M–$4.6M range the company reported in 2023 SEC filings. The issue isn't that Chuy's restaurants are failing. They're not. They're doing what Chuy's has always done: running a mid-check volume business with strong traffic and a moderate bar attachment.

The issue is that Darden paid $605 million — 10.3x EBITDA — to buy into a category where the brands that aren't Chuy's run harder bar programs on smaller footprints. If Darden wants to take Chuy's bar attachment from mid-single-digits of alcohol category share to something closer to Pappasito's or Mi Cocina, that is a three-to-five-year operating project. It is not a synergy line item you can model in a deal book.

Houston Is the Market Chuy's Doesn't Own

Broken out by metro, Chuy's Texas performance is unevenly distributed. Austin-metro Chuy's — 11 venues including Cedar Park, Round Rock, Hutto, San Marcos, and New Braunfels — averages $915K per venue. These are Chuy's strongest stores. The original Barton Springs Road location (#6001, opened 1982) still runs one of the highest per-venue figures in the system. Austin is the market Chuy's was built for: a price-conscious, high-frequency college-town customer who wants big portions, strong margaritas, and a loud room.

DFW — 13 venues including Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington, Plano, Frisco, Southlake, and the newly opened Mansfield and Hudson Oaks — averages $743K on the 12 with full TTM data. In DFW, Chuy's competes directly with Mi Cocina, which operates in a completely different price bracket and trade-area profile. Mi Cocina's Park Cities location alone does more alcohol revenue than most Chuy's in the state.

San Antonio — 4 venues including Selma — averages $485K. The local leader is El Mirasol, a San Antonio institution since the 1960s, which does $2.71M in TTM alcohol from a single venue — 5.6× Chuy's SA average. San Antonio is the weakest full-size metro for Chuy's, and the El Mirasol comp makes the gap harder to explain away as a sample-size issue.

Houston-metro Chuy's — 12 venues including the city proper, Katy, Sugar Land, Webster, Humble, New Caney, Pasadena, and Shenandoah, plus Willis which has not yet filed — averages $472K on the 11 with data. The lowest of any major Texas market.

Houston is the epicenter of full-service Tex-Mex in the United States. The fajita was commercialized in Houston — first at Ninfa's on Navigation Boulevard in the 1970s, then at the original Pappasito's on Richmond Avenue. The Laurenzo family (El Tiempo) and the Pappas brothers built their empires here. The Houston Tex-Mex consumer expects a specific product: tableside guacamole, wood-grilled fajitas, and a bar program anchored by top-shelf margaritas and añejo tequila.

Pappasito's, founded in Houston in 1983 and still family-owned, averages $1.38M per Texas venue — nearly three times Houston Chuy's. Gringo's averages $1.23M. Los Tios, a smaller Houston-local chain, does $1.17M. El Tiempo, the Laurenzo family's expansion vehicle after the Ninfa's bankruptcy, does $1.17M.

In the city that invented fajitas, Chuy's is a distant import playing on someone else's home field. Chuy's opened its first Houston location in 2001 — nearly two decades after its Austin founding. The brand has expanded aggressively in the Houston suburbs since the late 2010s, adding New Caney, Pasadena, Willis, and other outer-ring locations. But distribution is not the same as relevance. Darden did not buy a Houston brand. Darden bought an Austin brand with Houston distribution.

The Wine Program Is the Hidden Structural Gap

Chuy's TTM wine revenue across its Texas venues: $375,899. As a share of total alcohol revenue: 1.2%. It is the lowest wine mix in the full-service competitive set.

Pappasito's: 1.6%. El Tiempo: 2.1%. Gringo's: 2.0%. Mi Cocina: 4.9%. Lupe Tortilla: 4.2%. Maudie's: 3.7%. Los Tios: 3.2%. Ninfa's: 1.6%. Escalante's — a smaller, upscale-leaning Tex-Mex concept — runs 8.7%.

The more surprising comp is at the other end of the category. Torchy's Tacos — fast-casual, counter-service, the opposite end of the Tex-Mex spectrum — posted $5,342,145 in TTM wine revenue. That is 27.9% of Torchy's total alcohol mix. It is roughly fourteen times Chuy's wine revenue in absolute dollars across a comparable Texas footprint.

Torchy's is not running an Italian-restaurant wine-bottle program. Most of Torchy's wine revenue comes from canned wine, wine-based margarita alternatives, and spritz formats — the category that has quietly become beverage's growth engine in operator-friendly formats. Torchy's embraced the canned cocktail and wine trend earlier and more aggressively than any other Tex-Mex operator in the state. The gap between Torchy's and the rest of the category is Torchy's own choice — and the category data suggests guests will buy wine in a Tex-Mex context if the operator puts it on the menu in an accessible format.

The spritz category — Aperol spritzes, ranch water variations, wine-based seltzers — has grown double digits nationally over the past two years per industry tracking data. These are high-margin, low-labor products that don't require trained bartenders to execute. For a chain like Chuy's with a high-volume, fast-turn bar, they represent the easiest path to wine-program revenue.

For Darden, this is a specific operating lever. A Chuy's wine program that got to Mi Cocina's 4.9% — not aggressive, not a reinvention, just category-competitive — would add roughly $1.2 million in annual wine revenue across the Texas footprint at current run rate. The math: $32.2M current TTM alcohol × (4.9% - 1.2%) = $1.19M incremental wine revenue. At typical wine margins (70–75% gross margin vs 65–70% for spirits), that's worth multiples of the revenue figure at the unit-economics level.

Wine is the growth lane Chuy's hasn't entered. Darden, which runs some of the highest-volume wine programs in casual dining (Olive Garden alone moves an estimated 26 million glasses per year), has the procurement scale and menu-engineering expertise to build one. Whether they will is a different question.

Inside Chuy's, There Are Two Different Businesses

The beer-mix data tells a story about the Chuy's concept that isn't in any investor deck.

Urban Chuy's — the Austin flagships, Cedar Park, Round Rock, College Station — runs a beer mix between 9.1% and 11.9%. These are margarita destinations. Guests order Texas Martinis and on-the-rocks house margs. Spirits dominate. The Barton Springs original clocks in at 9.1% beer. Mueller, the newest Austin location, runs 10.5%. Cedar Park: 10.2%. River Oaks (Houston's one affluent-trade-area location): 9.8%.

The pattern is consistent: when Chuy's operates in a dense, urban, higher-income trade area, the bar program functions like a cocktail bar that happens to serve enchiladas. The spirits mix runs 78–80% of alcohol revenue. Beer is an afterthought.

Rural and tertiary-market Chuy's — Amarillo, Longview, Hudson Oaks (east of Fort Worth), Terrell, Lubbock, Pasadena — runs beer mix between 15.9% and 21.3%. Amarillo is the outlier at 21.3% beer. Longview runs 19.8%. Hudson Oaks, which opened in August 2025, is already tracking at 20.1%. These are weeknight casual-dining Mexican restaurants. Guests order pitchers and enchilada plates. The spirits mix drops to 66–72%.

Same brand, same menu, same chip basket. The bar program splits in half.

The midrange — Waco (14.9%), Corpus Christi (15.4%), College Station (15.9%) — suggests the split isn't binary. It's a gradient, and it tracks closely with median household income and trade-area density. Urban affluent markets produce cocktail bars. Exurban and rural markets produce beer-and-dinner joints. The midrange — Waco (14.9%), Corpus Christi (15.4%), College Station (15.9%) — suggests the split isn't binary. It's a gradient, and it tracks closely with median household income and trade-area density. Urban affluent markets produce cocktail bars. Exurban and rural markets produce beer-and-dinner joints. The same format looks like two different businesses depending on where the pin drops.

The question for Darden is which business it thought it was buying. If the answer is "the Austin cocktail-bar version," then the operating playbook is about extending that bar program to the 25+ venues that currently function as casual-dining Mexican restaurants. If the answer is "both, and we'll optimize each one differently," then the management complexity — menu engineering, pricing tiers, staff training, procurement splits — is materially harder than running Olive Garden's nationally standardized bar.

The Closed-Venue Graveyard Is Its Own Data Point

The Pourcast data room contains audited sales records for 110 closed competitor venues in Texas. The numbers tell their own story about category stability.

On The Border: 60 closed Texas venues. The brand, once the largest Tex-Mex chain in the state, has been through three ownership changes since 2010. It filed Chapter 11 in 2020, emerged under new PE ownership, and has continued to shrink. It now operates fewer Texas venues than Chuy's, Lupe Tortilla, or Torchy's. The closures span every major metro.

Fuzzy's Taco Shop: 39 closed. Dine Brands (the IHOP/Applebee's parent) acquired Fuzzy's in 2022 at what was widely seen as a distressed valuation. The brand has continued to contract under Dine Brands ownership, closing nearly 40% of its Texas footprint since the acquisition. Most closures have been in DFW suburban locations.

Freebirds World Burrito: 21 closed. Los Cucos: 18. Velvet Taco: 18 — a surprising number for a brand that was considered a fast-casual darling as recently as 2022. Velvet Taco's retrenchment has been concentrated in out-of-state markets, but several Texas closures have also occurred. Ninfa's: 16.

Chuy's closed venues in Texas: 3. El Paso closed permanently in April 2025 — a Darden spokesperson called it "a difficult business decision." Houston Westchase (9350 Westheimer) closed in early 2023, before the Darden acquisition. The Dallas Knox District location (4544 McKinney Ave) closed April 20, 2025, but reopened eight days later at 1520 Greenville Avenue — a relocation, not a permanent closure.

The closure rate is the one number in the dataset that gives Darden a clear win. Chuy's doesn't churn units. Whatever the per-venue limitations of the concept, the venues that exist stay open. That is real operating discipline, and it is worth something — particularly in a category where On The Border, Fuzzy's, and Freebirds have collectively closed 120 Texas locations over the past decade.

What it is not worth is $605 million without a plan to lift the underlying bar economics to Tex-Mex category norms. Mi Cocina continues expanding across DFW, with each new venue likely to do north of $1.4M in alcohol per door. Pappasito's will open five or six more Texas venues and do $1.38M. El Tiempo is expanding into Austin, San Antonio, and DFW. The category isn't waiting for Darden to figure out the integration. And each new Mi Cocina or Pappasito's opening in a market where Chuy's already operates makes the per-venue gap harder to close.

What This Data Can and Cannot Tell Us

audited Texas beverage sales captures on-premise alcohol only. It doesn't capture food, doesn't capture off-premise, doesn't capture catering. Chuy's disclosed at the 2024 10-K that off-premise runs 27% of total sales — that's revenue Audited never sees. A venue that over-indexes on to-go will look weaker on Audited than on a topline AUV basis. This is a structural limitation, not a flaw in the analysis — but it means the per-venue gaps documented above may narrow somewhat when food revenue is included.

It also doesn't capture the 58 Chuy's locations outside Texas. As of Darden's Q2 FY2026 filing (November 23, 2025), the system-wide count stands at 108 company-owned locations across 15-plus states. Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, Indiana, Florida, and the rest of the national footprint are invisible here. This is a Texas read, not a national one.

But Texas is 46% of Chuy's units, and the full-service Tex-Mex competitive set operates almost entirely in Texas. For the question that matters to Darden investors — how does Chuy's stack up against the brands that actually compete with it — this is the cleanest comparison available anywhere, and it will be the only one available until Darden starts reporting Chuy's same-restaurant sales in Q4 FY2026 at the earliest.

One data note: a completely separate family-owned restaurant called "Chuy's Mexican Restaurant" has operated in the Fort Worth area since 1982, the same year the Austin chain launched. Founded by Jesus "Chuy" Adame, it now has four locations (two in Fort Worth, one in Haltom City, one in Richland Hills) with its own website at chuysftw.com. The two businesses reached a coexistence agreement in 1997. Any Comptroller data search for "Chuy's" risks picking up these independent venues — which would inflate, not deflate, the count. This analysis filters by the taxpayer entity Chuy's Opco, Inc. (Darden subsidiary) to avoid contamination. The Fort Worth locations are good restaurants. They are not Darden properties.

On the expansion pipeline: the Bastrop location (TX #51) opens May 18, 2026. Beyond that, Leander (July 2026), Argyle (August 24, 2026), Manor (August 2026), and McKinney (December 2026) are all confirmed through TDLR construction permits. Darden's FY2026 capital plan calls for 60–65 new restaurant openings across all brands, with Chuy's designated as a growth concept. The growth strategy is real. The question is whether growth at current bar economics will close the per-venue gap or simply scale it.

The Texas Comptroller will publish February 2026 filings in May. Those will tell us everything.

Methodology: audited Texas beverage sales, trailing twelve months ending February 2026. 22 brands, 111,895 monthly records. Chuy's venue count: 50 open per chuys.com (April 2026), 49 with audited sales filings, 48 with full TTM data. Full competitive data room available on request.