The Bar Tape Behind the Ojos Locos CEO Hire

A Roll, On Paper

Ojos Locos introduced Joe Hummel as chief executive this week with the language of a brand on a roll. The audited Texas filings describe something else: mature stores poured 22% less this March than a year ago.

Both numbers are real. The gap between them explains the hire better than the press release does.

Hummel ran Twin Peaks for roughly eight years, growing it from a franchisee project into 115 lodges before taking the parent public in January 2025. Clay Mingus, his chief legal officer across that entire run, moved with him. One detail worth keeping straight: the announcement is new, the executives are not. Both joined Ojos Locos in April 2025. The public unveiling came fourteen months later, three days before the World Cup opened. We don't think that timing is an accident.

What the Receipts Show

Pourcast tracks every full-bar venue in Texas through the state's audited monthly beverage filings. Ojos Locos operates 24 cantinas in the state, and the filings reconcile to the company's own location list ZIP for ZIP.

The brand collected $70.0 million in beverage receipts over the twelve months through March, down 9.3% from the prior twelve. The single-month picture is worse. At the 16 mature stores we can measure cleanly, March receipts fell 22% from a year earlier. Of 18 clean store-level comparisons, 17 were negative. On the clean mature-store basis, receipts have run negative every month since at least last June, and the last three complete months are all worse than 20%.

Here is what makes this a hire worth studying rather than a brand obituary. Per unit, Ojos Locos still runs the best bar business in Texas sports dining: about $243,000 a month per cantina, against roughly $197,000 at Twin Peaks, the chain Hummel just left. A 23% gap, in favor of the brand with one-fifth the footprint. The engine is intact. The trend is the problem.

And the trend is not unique to Ojos. Twin Peaks comped −11.6% in March. Bombshells' trailing-twelve receipts are down 21.6%, Hooters' down roughly 30% through its bankruptcy. The wing-led concepts held up: Pluckers grew 4.7% over the same trailing twelve, and Buffalo Wild Wings fell just 7.5%. Texans haven't stopped going out for wings. They've pulled back hardest at the big-box, bar-first formats, and Ojos, the most bar-first of them all, is falling fastest.

The usual caveats: these filings capture beverage only, not food, and the dollars are nominal. One methodology note we'd flag for anyone reading the raw data: starting in April 2025, four Houston stores began filing zero-dollar returns while one Austin permit tripled to over $1 million a month. The stores are open. The receipts moved permits, not markets, and our same-store math treats the five as one unit. Naive venue-level reads would see four phantom closures.

The World Cup Test

Ojos opened its first cantina in Dallas in spring 2010, just before that summer's World Cup, the tournament co-founder Rich Hicks later called the "magic point" that proved the demand. Sixteen years later the tournament has come to it. Dallas hosts nine matches, more than any city. Houston hosts seven. Thirteen of the 24 Texas cantinas sit in those two metros.

History says the lift is real when the kickoff times are. In 2014, the last World Cup played in US-friendly hours, June and July receipts ran 20% above the surrounding months at the four stores then operating. In 2018, with morning kickoffs, the lift vanished. A month-long tournament in evening slots, with Mexico in the field and the home market hosting more matches than anywhere on earth, is the strongest version of this setup that has ever existed.

So Hummel's first public quarter comes with a tailwind no operator can repeat. The honest scoreboard arrives in the September and October filings, when the tournament is gone and the receipts have to stand on their own. We'll publish it either way.

Methodology

Pourcast aggregation of audited Texas beverage sales data (monthly Comptroller filings; latest complete month March 2026, April excluded as still arriving). Same-store math uses matched venues, excludes stores open under twelve months at the prior period, and treats the consolidated five-store filing cluster as one unit. Company history: Nation's Restaurant News, FSR Magazine, Dallas Observer, SEC filings.