Postino at 25: The Texas Data

The Founding Bet, in the Data

Postino Wine Cafe turns 25 this week. The Phoenix-born wine bar opened on April 4, 2001, in a vacant 1940s brick post office at 3939 East Campbell Avenue, in the Arcadia neighborhood on the east side of the city. Craig and Kris DeMarco had run out of money before the furniture arrived, so Craig pulled the couch out of his own living room and put it in the dining room. That is the founding story everyone has told.

What the audited data adds is the part that hasn't been part of the conversation.

We pulled 267 monthly audited Texas beverage sales filings from the Texas Comptroller, covering all 12 Postino locations in Texas and $26.0 million in lifetime on-premise alcohol receipts. Every bar and restaurant in Texas that holds a mixed beverage permit reports these monthly, under audit. There is no marketing in the dataset. There is no survey methodology. There is only what every restaurant's registers actually did, as reported to the state.

The filings say that 65.3% of Postino's Texas on-premise alcohol revenue comes from wine. The Texas on-premise industry average is roughly 13%. Postino is selling wine at five times the rate of the category it competes in.

That finding is the entire thesis of this article. The rest is what it means.

The Consistency of the Finding

The 65.3% wine mix is a chain-wide average, which could, in theory, hide wide variation across the 12 locations. It does not. The range across all 12 Texas Postinos runs from 69.5% at Postino Heights in Houston to 59.6% at Postino Woodlands. That is a 9.9-point spread across a dataset covering four Texas metros and roughly 1,000 miles of geography, with most locations clustered between 64% and 68%.

Most multi-unit restaurant brands cannot hold their beverage mix that tight across two locations in the same city, let alone across Houston, Austin, Dallas, and San Antonio. At every one of those 12 locations, wine is the dominant category by a wide margin, followed by liquor at roughly one-quarter of the mix and beer at roughly one-tenth. The pattern does not break. It repeats.

Consistency of that kind is diagnostic of something specific: a brand where the core positioning was made early, committed to publicly, and never unwound by operators trying to chase better margins or different customer segments. Postino could have added a bigger liquor program at any point in the last 25 years to lift average checks. Most wine bars that have scaled eventually do. Postino did not. The 2024 addition of cocktails in Texas is the first meaningful shift in the program, and even after that expansion, wine still accounts for roughly two-thirds of beverage revenue at every location in the system.

The founding bet, in other words, is still the operating model.

How the Wine Mix Compares to Wine-Forward Competitors

The interesting comparison is not to polished-casual chains at large, where wine mix typically runs 10% to 20%. It is to other explicitly wine-forward concepts in Texas, pulled from the same audited sales dataset.

Sixty Vines, the closest direct competitor in the Texas wine-bar category, runs 72.9% wine mix across 5 Texas locations, with average monthly alcohol receipts of approximately $275,000 per location. That is both a higher wine mix and a meaningfully higher per-location volume than Postino. Fleming's Prime Steakhouse, which brands itself partly as a wine bar, runs 66.5% wine mix at its 6 Texas locations at average monthly volumes of about $98,000. Barcelona Wine Bar runs 70.1% across its 2 Texas locations in Dallas and Houston, averaging about $120,000 per month.

On beverage mix alone, Postino is not unusual within that set. It sits comfortably in the middle of the wine-bar distribution.

What makes Postino unusual is the price point it is running those numbers at. Sixty Vines is explicitly positioned as an upscale wine-focused destination. Fleming's is a steakhouse where the wine mix is supported by $200 Cabernets ordered alongside $58 ribeyes. Barcelona is a tapas concept with entrees in the high teens to low thirties. Postino's average check is approximately $25 per person, per the company's public statements to FSR Magazine earlier this year.

Hitting a wine-bar wine-mix percentage at a casual-dining check is a very different business than hitting it at a wine-bar check. The unit economics are driven by beverage attach at lower average tickets, which requires higher volume, which requires a trade-area and patio strategy that can move wine in quantity at lunch and early dinner rather than at the nightly special-occasion peak. Every piece of Postino's operating model is downstream of a decision to sell wine-bar volumes at casual-dining prices. The rollup garage doors. The patios Bailey has called "100 percent non-negotiable." The weekday Board & Bottle program. The $5 lunch glass from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. that has been running since 2001.

That decision was made in 2001. The Texas filings show it still working in 2026.

The Rim

The second finding worth pulling out of the data concerns one specific Texas location.

Postino The Rim, at 17627 La Cantera Parkway in San Antonio, opened in January 2024. Over its 22 months of reporting, it has averaged $152,000 per month in Audited alcohol receipts. That is 56% above the Texas chain average of roughly $97,000. It carries a 4.8-star Google rating on 1,191 reviews.

The Rim is running the same playbook as every other Postino. Its wine mix is 64.3%, just below the chain average. Its liquor mix is 25.3%. Its beer mix is 10.4%. There is no unique menu, no custom pricing, no alternative beverage program. The Rim is not winning because it is running a different version of Postino. It is winning because it is running the standard version of Postino in a trade area where the standard version fits.

To translate The Rim's Audited figure into total revenue, the cleanest approach is to use Postino's publicly reported mix of 22% wine, 9% liquor, and 4% beer as shares of total sales, which implies alcohol at approximately 35% of a total check. Dividing The Rim's $152,000 monthly alcohol figure by 0.35 implies total monthly sales of roughly $435,000, or approximately $5.2 million annualized. That is within striking distance of the Phoenix AUV benchmark of $5.5 million that Technomic reports Upward Projects' eight mature Arizona locations are hitting. The Rim has done that in under two years.

Applying the same gross-up math to the chain-wide Texas figure yields roughly $3.3 million in annualized total sales per Texas location, blended across all 12 locations and weighted by their varying operating histories. The gap between the Texas blended figure and The Rim is a combination of two things: the younger Texas locations are still on their ramp curves, and most Texas trade areas are earlier than The Rim's in terms of Postino brand recognition. Both of those gaps close over time. The Rim is what the Postino Texas locations are likely moving toward as they mature, not what makes The Rim special.

The implication for the broader footprint: if most of the existing 12 Texas locations eventually converge toward mature unit economics in the $4 million to $5 million range, there are several million dollars per year in revenue embedded in the existing Texas footprint, before Postino opens a single new Texas location. Same locations. Same model. Just older.

Seasonality: The Patio Tax, in Reverse

One pattern in the data that surprised me, once I indexed monthly revenue across the full brand, is how sharply Postino's year turns on weather. April is the peak month at an index of 109 against a baseline of 100. May and June follow at 106 each. January is the trough at 90. August and November are at 96.

The shape of that seasonality curve is not the shape of a typical restaurant brand. Most full-service concepts in Texas peak around the year-end holidays (November and December) and again in the summer heat. Postino's curve is explicitly spring-forward and summer-soft, with a second small bump in December. That is what a patio-heavy brand looks like in the Texas climate: the operating model breaks when it is 105 degrees outside and guests cannot comfortably sit under the rollup doors, and it rebuilds when spring returns. The August and September softness is not a demand problem. It is a weather problem, visible in the audited filings because Postino has optimized for indoor-outdoor flow rather than hiding behind central air.

I mention this because it matters for the expansion strategy. Postino has 35 locations across seven states, and the ones that will outperform are the ones where the patio is usable for more months per year. Arizona's Phoenix locations clear a roughly 10-month patio season. Austin and Houston clear roughly 9. Nashville, Denver, and Charlotte clear meaningfully fewer. The 25th anniversary question is not just whether the wine mix will hold in new markets. It is whether the patio-hours per location can stay high enough to make the model work north of the Sun Belt.

The Buildings Are the Moat

One thing the audited sales data cannot measure is the reason guests choose Postino over a competitor with a similar wine list at a similar price point. For that, the explanation has to come from somewhere other than alcohol receipts.

Every Postino is built inside something that used to be something else. The original Arcadia location was a post office. Postino Central in Phoenix was Katz's Deli. Postino Annex in Tempe was a 1946 schoolhouse where Lauren Bailey had taken art classes as an ASU undergraduate. Postino Highland in Scottsdale occupies a 1960s Valley National Bank branch designed by Frank Henry, an architect who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West; Upward Projects's team studied Henry's archives at the ASU Library before the renovation and sourced 10,000 vintage matchbooks from guests and the community to build the interior art wall.

In Texas, the two most thematically distinctive locations are Postino Montrose in Houston and Postino Bryker Woods in Austin. Postino Montrose, at 805 Pacific Street, occupies a 1920 commercial building that housed the Montrose Mining Company, Houston's longest-running gay bar, from 1978 to 2016. When Upward Projects took over the space, the team preserved the building's role in the city's LGBTQ history through an interior art wall built with posters and photographs researched via JD Doyle's Houston LGBT History archive. A patio mural by Toronto artist Jacquie Comrie reads "Love. Period." Postino Montrose runs $107,000 per month in Audited, second-highest in the Texas system, at a 67.4% wine mix, with a 4.6-star Google rating on more than 1,100 reviews.

Postino Bryker Woods is newer, the 12th and most recent Texas location, opened on 35th Street in Austin in August 2025. It has only seven months of filings to date and is not yet showing a stable revenue pattern. What its menu does show is the full expression of the Postino beverage model as it exists in 2026: 175 verified menu items, 68 wines, 11 cocktails including a $6 brunch mimosa and a $6 bellini that function as brunch-daypart loss leaders against a dinner cocktail floor of $14. Median wine-by-the-bottle runs in the low-$50s; glass pours run $11 to $20 with a $6 happy hour floor until 5 p.m. The menu is the 25-year founding bet translated into modern inventory.

Adaptive reuse is usually written about as an aesthetic choice. In Postino's case, the P&L effect is meaningful. Polished-casual new-builds in 2026 run $500 to $700 per square foot. Adaptive reuse of structurally intact buildings typically runs 30% to 50% less per square foot. Postino trades the savings for a depth of local story that competitors opening in new construction cannot match.

The moat is not the wine list. The wine list is the monetization layer. The moat is the fact that a Chili's can be cloned in 90 days and a Frank Henry-designed bank branch cannot.

The Brentwood Clock

Brentwood Associates, the Los Angeles private equity firm whose portfolio has included Lazy Dog, Blaze Pizza, and Snooze AM Eatery, took a significant stake in Upward Projects in November 2017. Terms were not disclosed. The founders retained a substantial ownership position.

Typical private equity hold periods run five to seven years. Brentwood is at nine.

In the April 2026 Phoenix New Times anniversary profile of the company, Lauren Bailey said this: "We have a very rare experience with private equity. Brentwood has been phenomenal. At some point they'll have to realize their investment."

That sentence is the most consequential piece of public commentary about Postino's future that has run in any 25th-anniversary coverage. It does not announce a sale. It does not hint at an IPO. It simply confirms, from the CEO directly, that a transaction is on the roadmap. The executive additions Upward Projects has made in the last two years read like a company being prepared for a transaction rather than a company settling into long-term independence: a new CFO from Back of House Restaurant Group, a new Chief Development Officer from Cava, board members from bartaco and Dutch Bros.

The audited Texas beverage sales data does not say what the transaction will be. What it does say is what the transaction is pricing. If Texas mature unit economics converge toward The Rim's trajectory, and if the wine mix continues to hold at 5x category across every location the company opens, the Postino that Brentwood will eventually sell is worth meaningfully more than the Postino Brentwood bought in 2017. The consistency of the founding bet is, at this point, a financial asset.

The 25-Year Observation

The reason Postino's 25-year story holds up to data analysis is that the operating reality never drifted from the founding decisions. Wine flights were cut from the original 2001 menu because Craig DeMarco thought they felt stuffy. Wine was $5 a glass from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. from opening day. The Monday-Tuesday $25 Board & Bottle special was never a promotion. It was a positioning statement.

Twenty-five years later, every one of those decisions is legible in audited Texas state filings.

Most 25-year-old restaurant groups drift. They add LTOs that test better than the core menu. They tilt toward whatever category is posting comp growth. They eventually become versions of themselves that the founders would not recognize. Postino has not done that. The Texas data is the proof.

Craig DeMarco's stated mission has not changed in 25 years: "All we ever wanted was to create spaces and experiences where people can connect."

The harder observation, documented in the audited sales filings, is that he and Lauren Bailey built the P&L to back the mission, and they never let it drift. That is rare in any industry. In this one, it is nearly unheard of.