Best Taco Chain of 2026, in Month Twenty-Five of the Decline

Both things are true

On August 20, Reviewed named Torchy’s Tacos the best taco chain in the country. The company posted the news to LinkedIn the next day, under the line “Officially one of the best taco chains in the country,” with a thank you to everyone who voted.

In that same month, Torchy’s trailing-twelve-month audited beverage revenue across its Texas system came to $240,664 per selling location. That figure has now declined in twenty-five consecutive months. It sits 34.9% below the brand’s February 2023 peak of $369,509.

Both things are true. The gap between them is the story.

Audited Texas beverage receipts cover alcohol sales only. They say nothing about food, nothing about total sales, nothing about margin. What they do provide is an audited, venue-level, monthly series that runs back nineteen years across more than 57,000 Texas venues, filed by every venue licensed to sell liquor in the state. For a brand built on a bar program, that series is the closest thing to a public read on operating momentum that exists.

Right now it reads badly.

The numbers

All chain-level figures below cover the twelve months ending July 2026, drawn from audited Texas beverage receipts across 80 Torchy’s filing locations, 78.9 of them recording sales in an average month. Prior-period comparisons run against the twelve months ending July 2025.

| | TTM to Jul 2026 | TTM to Jul 2025 | Change | |---|---|---|---| | Texas beverage revenue | $18,992,412 | $20,575,310 | -7.7% | | Per selling location | $240,664 | $264,068 | -8.9% |

The peak was $369,509 per selling location, on the twelve months ending February 2023. Forty-one months have passed since then. Thirty-nine of them declined. The current unbroken run started in July 2024 and has not been interrupted since.

Adjust for price and it gets worse. CPI for alcoholic beverages away from home ran 3.6% higher year over year through July 2026. Against that, Torchy’s nominal 7.7% decline is closer to 10.9% in real terms.

Input costs are not the culprit. The producer price index for distilled liquor excluding brandy was flat year over year in July 2026 and sits 3.2% below its 2019 level. The distilleries index is 10.8% below 2019. Menu pricing for alcohol away from home is up 28.2% over the same span. Whatever is happening at Torchy’s bars, it isn’t a cost squeeze. The spread between what a margarita costs to make and what it sells for is about as wide as it has been.

The market grew

Across all Texas filers, statewide audited beverage receipts totaled $10.40 billion in the twelve months to July 2026, against $10.25 billion the year before. That’s growth of 1.5%, across an average of 21,858 reporting locations.

So Torchy’s lost 7.7% into a market that gained 1.5%.

Its share of the Texas total tells the same story over a longer horizon:

| Year | Share of Texas beverage receipts | |---|---| | 2021 | 26.9 bps | | 2022 | 26.5 bps | | 2023 | 24.5 bps | | 2024 | 22.6 bps | | 2025 | 19.1 bps | | 2026 YTD | 18.4 bps |

Down 32% from 2021. We use 2021 as the base rather than 2020, when bar closures inflated every restaurant’s share of a shrunken denominator.

There is a genuine category headwind here and it deserves acknowledging. Gallup’s self-reported drinking rate fell from 62% in 2023 to 54% in 2025, with the decline concentrated among adults under 35. EY-Parthenon found that 44% of GLP-1 users drink less after starting treatment, and that 82% keep the habit after stopping. Any brand selling margaritas to young adults in 2026 is selling into a smaller room.

But Circana’s work cuts against the simple version of that thesis: GLP-1 users increase restaurant spending, with casual-dining spend up 4.1%, while cutting alcohol. The category is compressing drink attach, not visits. And a 7.7% single-brand decline into a market that grew 1.5% is a fourteen-point spread against peers facing the identical headwind. The category takes something off the top for everyone. It does not account for a fourteen-point gap between brands drinking from the same well.

The footprint held. The volume didn’t.

Torchy’s has been contracting nationally. The chain peaked at 131 units at the end of 2024, closed six locations in late 2025, closed seven more effective early February 2026, and now operates 120 restaurants across 16 states. CEO Paul Macaluso, in the job since February 2025, has set a target of roughly 75 new restaurants by 2030.

Almost none of that contraction happened in Texas. The filing footprint here has been flat: 80 locations in 2024, 81 in 2025, 80 in 2026. Two stopped filing in 2024, two in 2025, none so far in 2026.

So the Texas decline runs through the average location rather than the unit count. Roughly the same number of Texas restaurants generated $1.58 million less beverage revenue over the last twelve months than they did the year before. The average location is doing less business.

Market-level readings sharpen it. These cells run from three to ten venues each, well below our reporting floor of 25, so we publish them as descriptive readings rather than rate claims. Torchy’s per-unit change is shown against the change in per-location beverage receipts across all filers in the same city.

| Market | Torchy’s units | TTM per unit | Torchy’s change | City market change | |---|---|---|---|---| | Fort Worth | 3 | $278,773 | -8.6% | +4.8% | | San Antonio | 6 | $181,392 | -16.1% | -2.2% | | Austin | 10 | $172,176 | -0.1% | -1.2% | | Dallas | 4 | $172,005 | -13.0% | +1.6% | | Houston | 9 | $163,808 | -12.3% | +0.1% |

Torchy’s underperformed its own city market in every major Texas metro. Fort Worth shows the widest gap, with the market up 4.8% per location and Torchy’s down 8.6%.

The decline is also broad rather than concentrated. Of the 76 Texas locations with a full twelve months of receipts in both periods, seven grew year over year and 69 declined. Thirty-eight fell by more than 10%. The median location lost 10.0%. This is not a handful of failing restaurants dragging an otherwise healthy average. It’s most of the system moving the same direction at once.

Austin

Austin appears stable in that table only because it has already bottomed.

Across 78 Texas locations with a full twelve months of receipts, the median location generated $19,993 a month. The five lowest-volume locations in the entire Texas system are all in Austin. All five run below $4,200 a month. The weakest of them clears $1,739.

We checked whether those are a different format, a beer-and-wine prototype or a bar-light build. They aren’t. Beverage mix is close to uniform across all 81 Texas venues, with liquor share running from 54% to 79% and a median of 69%. The Austin stores at the bottom of the table pour the same program as the ones at the top. They just pour a tenth as much of it.

Their Google ratings run from 4.3 to 4.7.

The city has been taking pieces off the board for a while. The Guadalupe Street location near the University of Texas campus, the second brick-and-mortar Torchy’s ever opened, closed on November 19, 2024 after roughly sixteen years, with the company citing rent and planned changes along the light-rail corridor. Our receipts show its final filing month as November 2024, which is the kind of corroboration that makes the rest of the series worth trusting. A month earlier, Austin City Council had denied Torchy’s a waiver to serve alcohol at its South Congress restaurant, which sits about 142 feet from a middle school athletic field. A company attorney told council the location might have to close without it. It’s still open, and still dry.

The brand that Austin made is now weakest in Austin.

What the receipts saw before Stafford closed

On February 3, 2026, Torchy’s closed its Stafford, Texas restaurant as part of a seven-unit round.

Here is what the filings show for that location: $7,984 in January 2026, $1,311 in February, zero from March forward. And for the fourteen months before that, roughly half the chain median, month after month, without variation.

Stafford is not an isolated pattern. Every Texas Torchy’s that has gone dark since 2024 was running far below the chain median for at least a year first. Measured as the average ratio of monthly receipts to the chain median across a location’s final twelve filing months, the units that stopped filing land between 0.27 and 0.58. Not one of them was near the middle of the pack when it went.

Fifteen of the 78 currently operating Texas locations sit below 0.58 today. Nine sit below 0.40.

We aren’t going to name them. A low beverage number is not a closure notice, and a list like that becomes self-fulfilling the moment it’s published. What we will say is that the band exists, that it has been predictive in every Texas case we can check, and that it currently contains roughly one in five Torchy’s restaurants in the state.

The counterexample

The most useful comparison in the segment isn’t a brand that’s growing. It’s a brand that shrank on purpose.

Fuzzy’s Taco Shop, which Dine Brands acquired in 2022, is in worse shape than Torchy’s by almost every external measure. Its parent reported domestic same-restaurant sales down 9.3% in 2024 and down 7.0% in 2025, took a $7.1 million goodwill impairment on the brand in the fourth quarter of 2024, and finished 2025 with 105 franchised restaurants, down from roughly 146 at the end of 2019.

In Texas, Fuzzy’s filing footprint fell from about 64 locations in mid-2024 to about 45 in July 2026, a cut of nearly a third.

And its per-location beverage receipts rose 5.9% year over year.

That is what pruning looks like on the tape. Fuzzy’s closed the units that were dragging the average and the average recovered. Torchy’s held its Texas count flat and the average kept falling for twenty-five months.

Velvet Taco runs the other experiment. Majority-owned by Leonard Green & Partners since November 2021, it added Texas locations through the period and now operates around 54 restaurants nationally, with Clay Dover departing as chief executive in November 2025 and Chris Schultz arriving in December. Its Texas beverage receipts per location fell 25.6% year over year and are down roughly 47% from mid-2024. That decline is gradual and continuous, with no single-month break, which is what distinguishes a demand trend from a filing artifact. It is also our finding alone. We have not found external reporting that corroborates it, and readers should weigh it accordingly.

Who’s actually gaining

The segment is not uniformly sinking, and two brands in our corpus are worth naming. Both operate below our 25-venue reporting floor, so these are descriptive readings rather than rate claims.

Tacodeli, founded in Austin in 1999, runs about 14 Texas locations. Its beverage revenue per location rose 8.9% year over year and 23.9% over two years, the best two-year reading of any brand we track in the segment. Across its eight Austin venues specifically, per-location revenue rose 7.9%.

That figure deserves a moment. Torchy’s Austin restaurants are the weakest in its Texas system, and Austin’s overall beverage market was down 1.2% per location. An Austin taco brand grew in Austin anyway, on a footprint it barely changed. Whatever is happening to Torchy’s in its hometown, “Austin stopped drinking” isn’t it.

El Fenix, the Dallas Tex-Mex house that opened in 1918 and is the oldest brand in this analysis, runs 15 Texas locations and has run 15 for the entire period. Per-location beverage revenue rose 24.1% year over year and 10.8% over two years, with the acceleration starting in November 2025 and holding through July. No unit growth, no new markets, no filing discontinuity. Just more business per restaurant, in the same buildings, at 108 years old.

Neither brand is a threat to Torchy’s at scale. Tacodeli’s entire Texas beverage business is smaller than nine Torchy’s locations. That’s the point. Nothing about the size of the box or the age of the concept determined which direction these numbers went.

Ranked on Texas beverage revenue per selling location for the twelve months to July 2026:

| Brand | Per selling location | Change | Selling locations | |---|---|---|---| | Chuy’s | $671,005 | -4.4% | 48.8 | | Torchy’s Tacos | $240,664 | -8.9% | 78.9 | | Velvet Taco | $216,772 | -25.6% | 34.3 | | Fuzzy’s Taco Shop | $215,092 | +5.9% | 52.7 | | Rusty Taco | $145,269 | -5.8% | 7.4 | | Taco Cabana | $9,299 | -11.4% | 117.7 |

And ranked by change rather than level, the order inverts:

| Brand | Change in per-location revenue | Selling locations | |---|---|---| | El Fenix | +24.1% | 15.0 | | Tacodeli | +8.9% | 14.4 | | Fuzzy’s Taco Shop | +5.9% | 52.7 | | Chuy’s | -4.4% | 48.8 | | Torchy’s Tacos | -8.9% | 78.9 | | Taco Cabana | -11.4% | 117.7 | | Velvet Taco | -25.6% | 34.3 |

In March we wrote that Velvet Taco was posting higher per-unit numbers than Torchy’s and catching more fish. On Texas beverage receipts that is no longer true, and the gap is widening in Torchy’s favor every month. We were reading a brand at the top of its arc.

Why the award is real, and still tells you nothing

Torchy’s has 213,029 Google ratings across its 86 Texas venue records, with a median of 2,572 ratings per location. That’s the largest per-venue review base of any taco brand we track in the state, ahead of Chuy’s, Velvet Taco, Fuzzy’s, and Taco Cabana. Its average rating is 4.46.

That is a real asset, and it’s exactly the asset that wins an open online reader vote. Reviewed’s award closed voting on August 12 and published on August 20. It reports no vote totals. Its single quantitative disclosure is that Torchy’s took “over a third of our responses.” Its named expert panel consists of two travel writers, whose role appears to be nominating rather than selecting. Reviewed itself was shut down by Gannett effective November 1, 2024 and relaunched by the affiliate-commerce platform StackCommerce in January 2025, and its accolade badges are licensed to brands for a fee through an agent, EVG Media. We have no evidence Torchy’s licensed a badge, and none that it paid anything. The structure is worth knowing anyway, and it’s a longer story than this one.

Here is the part that matters for operators. Across 81 Torchy’s Texas locations, the correlation between a venue’s Google rating and its trailing-twelve-month beverage revenue is 0.07. Effectively zero.

Sentiment separates brands from each other. Inside a brand, it explains nothing.

The Austin location rated 4.7 turns $1,739 a month. Tyler, rated 4.0, turns $55,908. Tyler is a single location and we report it descriptively rather than as a rate, but the direction is not subtle: it is the highest-volume Torchy’s bar in Texas, in a market of about 107,000 people, with no other Torchy’s inside seventy miles. Nobody voted for Tyler. Tyler is just the only Torchy’s for an hour in any direction, and that turns out to be worth more than affection.

A correction

In March we published “Damn Good Numbers,” which described Torchy’s beverage mix as 66% liquor, 29% wine, and 5% beer, and characterized the brand as a margarita business that also sells tacos.

The mix figures were accurate as filed and wrong as interpreted. In August 2024, Torchy’s beer share across Texas went from 25.4% in July to 5.5% in August, while wine went from 4.2% to 25.9%. Combined wine and beer dollars barely moved. All 79 venues filing that month shifted together, which is less remarkable than it sounds: every Torchy’s in Texas files under a single taxpayer.

Four things tell us not to read that as customer behavior. No other brand in our corpus moved. Chuy’s beer share went from 13.0% to 13.1% across the same boundary, Fuzzy’s from 31.5% to 30.9%, Velvet Taco from 14.2% to 15.1%. Gross receipts show no break at all, which they would if a chain stopped selling roughly $400,000 a month of beer. The same filer produced a similar two-month episode in December 2019 and January 2020, when beer share ran at 65% and liquor at 28% before both snapped back in February. And Torchy’s launched Hooky Hour in 2025, discounting house margaritas and beer, a year after its filings showed beer at 4% of beverage revenue.

We can’t determine what changed in August 2024, and it isn’t our place to guess in print. What we can say is that our March window sat entirely on the far side of that break, and we treated one window as a structural finding when the series behind it says otherwise. The long-run mix through July 2024 was closer to 70% liquor, 25% beer, and 5% wine.

The broader conclusion survives. Liquor share has held above 60% since 2020 and stands at 67.7% today. Torchy’s really is a liquor-led operator. But “beer is just 5%” was our error, and a dated correction now sits on the March piece.

We publish this because the alternative is worse. A data platform that can’t correct itself in public has no business asking anyone to trust a number.

What this does not say

Audited Texas beverage receipts are alcohol revenue. They are not sales, they are not traffic, and they are not margin. Torchy’s food business could be growing while its bar shrinks, and nothing here would show it. The company is entirely corporate-owned, publishes no franchise disclosure document, and discloses no same-store sales, so no public source can settle the question either way.

The trade estimate of roughly $530 million in 2024 systemwide sales comes from Technomic and covers all 16 states. It is not audited and it is not ours.

What we can say is narrower and, for anyone running a bar program in this segment, more useful. In Texas, where Torchy’s operates two thirds of its restaurants, the beverage business has declined for twenty-five straight months while the market grew, while input costs fell, and while a 108-year-old competitor down the road grew 24% per restaurant without opening a single new one.

Affection is not a leading indicator. The receipts are.

Sources and methodology

Primary data: Audited Texas beverage receipts, venue-month grain, canonical month July 2026. Torchy’s cut covers 86 permits ever attributed to the brand, 80 filing locations and 78.9 average selling locations in the twelve months to July 2026. Chain-level rate claims rest on 78 to 80 venues and clear Pourcast’s reporting floor of 25. Market-level and single-venue figures are labeled descriptive. Statewide denominators cover all Texas filers, 21,858 average reporting locations. All receipts figures are nominal and cover alcohol only.

Menu and profile data: Google profile snapshots across 86 Torchy’s Texas venue records. Beverage price census covers 371 venues statewide; Torchy’s beverage coverage is one trusted row, which is why no Torchy’s drink price appears in this piece.

Cost and macro series: BLS producer price indexes for distilled liquor excluding brandy, distilleries, and breweries; BLS CPI for alcoholic beverages away from home. All through July 2026.

External sources: Reviewed.com Readers’ Choice Awards, Best Taco Chain of 2026, published August 20, 2026. Dine Brands Global 10-K filings, fiscal 2024 and 2025. Restaurant Business Online. Nation’s Restaurant News. Community Impact. Austin City Council records, October 2024. Technomic Top 500. Gallup Consumption Habits, August 2026. EY-Parthenon GLP-1 Consumer Survey, March 2025. Circana, November 2025.

Reporting floor: Chain-level Torchy’s claims rest on 76 to 81 venues. Brand-level readings for Tacodeli (14.4 selling locations), El Fenix (15.0), and all market-level cells fall below the 25-venue floor and are published as descriptive.

Corrections: This piece corrects the beverage mix characterization published in “Damn Good Numbers” on March 18, 2026. See the dated correction on that article.

Pourcast tracks 57,000+ Texas venues across 19 years of audited beverage receipts. Location-level Torchy’s data is available on the platform.