Red Robin Sold 116 Stores and Kept Texas. The Texas Bar Is Half What It Was.

Red Robin completed a $96 million refranchising on September 1, handing 116 company restaurants to three buyers and paying down a credit facility that matures in September 2027. The deal covered eleven states. It did not cover Texas, where the chain runs 25 filing locations and where per-store audited beverage receipts have halved since 2017.

That omission matters because of what management said about the stores it’s keeping. On the February 2025 call, then-CEO G.J. Hart said closing the weak ones would “allow the strength of our remaining portfolio to become clear over time.” The company has since sorted its portfolio into three piles: up to about 50 stores closing as leases expire, 116 sold, and roughly 270 kept. Every Texas Red Robin is in the third pile.

At the bar, the third pile looks like this.

The number

Per-store beverage receipts at Texas Red Robins ran $205,900 in 2017. In 2025 they ran $105,900.

That’s an index of 51 against a 2017 base, and it’s nominal. Chili’s finished 2025 at 116 on the same base. Texas Roadhouse, which was never a bar concept, is at 139. Applebee’s, the brand most often filed next to Red Robin in the obituaries, is at 81. Chuy’s and Cheddar’s are both at 66. Red Robin is last in the set.

The decline isn’t a pandemic artifact. The index read 83 in 2018 and 76 in 2019, before anyone had closed a dining room. Covid took it to 43. The recovery topped out at 62 in 2023 and has given ground every year since.

The last twelve months

Same-site beverage receipts at Texas Red Robins fell 6.4% in the twelve months through July 2026. Twenty-five stores clear the bar for that comparison, meaning each filed all twelve months in both windows.

The Texas casual-dining peer pool, 644 same-site locations across 14 brands, fell 2.9% over the same window. Chili’s grew 1.2% on 207 stores. Hopdoddy grew 1.5% on 27.

Two years out the gap widens. Red Robin’s Texas stores have lost 15.1% of same-site beverage receipts since the twelve months ending July 2024.

The scale problem

The rate of decline is one story. The base it’s declining from is another.

A Texas Red Robin now averages $101,500 a year in beverage receipts. A Texas Chili’s averages $465,500. Hopdoddy, a counter-service burger concept where you order at the register, averages $324,500. The Red Robin bar does about a fifth of the Chili’s bar and a third of the Hopdoddy bar.

Red Robin’s alcohol mix has historically run in the single digits, so a beverage line this thin is a narrow window into the box. None of these are store sales figures. What they show is that the bar program the company spent 2013 and 2014 rebuilding, with beer milkshakes, can-crafted cocktails and its first TV spot for an alcoholic drink, has been rebuilt in reverse.

What’s left in Texas

Six Texas Red Robins have stopped filing receipts since 2021: Longview and a Houston Westchase location in early 2021, Sunset Valley and Grapevine in 2023, Spring in April 2025, and Pasadena last October. All six were on corporate permits. The 2019 footprint peaked at 31 filing stores. Today it’s 25.

Four of the 25, in Arlington, Cedar Hill, Flower Mound and Garland, moved to Lehigh Valley Restaurant Brands in late 2025 and are the only Texas units the company describes as franchised. The remaining stores span Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, the Panhandle, and the Valley.

Why it matters for the refinancing

Red Robin’s credit facility carried $167.2 million in mid-July and matures in September 2027. The company has retained Jefferies to refinance it. Pro forma for the sale, long-term debt drops to about $67 million, which is a real improvement.

The pitch to whoever writes the next loan will lean on the roughly 270 company stores it still runs being the good ones. In Texas, on the one line item a lender can audit at the store level without asking the company, the kept stores are shrinking at twice the market’s pace from a base that was already the smallest in this peer set.

Red Robin’s next earnings report, for the quarter ending early October, will show the first period with the sale fully closed. The Texas beverage line won’t be in it. It will be here.

Receipts are audited on-premise alcohol only and carry no food. Every comparison above is same-site with a full-twelve-month filing requirement in both windows. The peer set is name-matched casual dining, not a curated competitive ring, and it includes formats with structurally higher beverage mixes than a burger house.