Competitive — The Well

  • 67 of 68 First Watch Locations in Texas Sold Less Alcohol This Year 2026-08-26 First Watch trimmed full-year EBITDA guidance because guests ordered more steak than the model expected. Texas audited filings show the other half of that mix story: same-store alcohol receipts down 14.8% in January through July, with 67 of 68 comparable locations declining, the third consecutive decline for that window.
  • Best Taco Chain of 2026, in Month Twenty-Five of the Decline 2026-08-23 On August 20, Reviewed named Torchy’s Tacos the best taco chain in the country. In that same month, trailing-twelve-month audited beverage revenue across its Texas system came to $240,664 per selling location, down for twenty-five consecutive months and 34.9% below the February 2023 peak. The Texas market grew 1.5% over the same window.
  • The Margarita That Saved Taco Cabana Also Shrank It: Forty-Eight Years of Tex-Mex, One $2 Decision 2026-08-22 Taco Cabana opened in a dead Dairy Queen in 1978, won a Supreme Court trade-dress case in 1992, and has been sold three times since 2000. Today its food prices with the fast-casual pack and its margarita sits at the 4th percentile of Texas prices. The $2 drive-thru margarita of April 2020 made the chain 4.2% of every audited beverage dollar in the state — and the audited alcohol line has never recovered, down 85% from 2019 while 33 liquor permits went dark in twelve months.
  • The Statute Nobody Used 2026-08-18 At 12:01 a.m. Eastern on August 19, a 50% duty lands on Canadian whisky with no trade-agreement exemption behind it. Crown Royal is fully in scope. On verified Texas menus it pours at a median $7.75, and the number that matters next is how long the distributor lag holds.
  • Salad and Go’s Texas Leases Just Sold for $3.57 Each 2026-08-18 Dutch Bros agreed to pay $2.06 million a door for Salad and Go’s open Arizona and Nevada leases and $50 for the entire closed Texas and Oklahoma bundle. Read against verified Texas menu prices, a commissary built for 500 stores, and the lettuce tape, the Texas number is the honest one.
  • Dave & Buster’s hired an airport bar veteran as COO. Texas receipts say the bar isn’t the problem. 2026-08-18 Dave & Buster’s named Amanda Busby Chief Operations Officer in August, the same month its CFO became its CEO, ending a seven-month stretch without anyone in the operations seat. Her resume is bars and kitchens: 19 years at Red Robin, then a $1.1 billion airport food and beverage operation at SSP America. The audited Texas filings say she’s arriving at a company whose bar is already working. Same-store beverage receipts at the chain’s 13 comparable Texas venues have now grown nine straight months.
  • The Two Prices of Jameson 2026-08-14 Jameson sits on Texas happy hour boards at $4.50 to $5.50 and on standard lists at a median $8, with the Midleton ladder climbing to $50 a pour. The specials tier recruits; the standard list carries the margin.
  • Chili's Runs the Biggest Bar in Texas. Its Guests Are Drinking Less. 2026-08-13 Chili's booked $99.8M in audited Texas beverage revenue in fiscal 2026, more than any casual dining chain in the state. In the fourth quarter that line grew 0.9% against 4.3% menu pricing: guests kept the visit and skipped the second drink.
  • Everyone wrote Topgolf off. Texas bar tabs say otherwise. 2026-08-10 Topgolf lost roughly half its valuation, cut hundreds of jobs and went private in January. Then its 13 comparable Texas venues grew alcohol receipts 11.0%, every single one of them, while six of nine competitor brands shrank.
  • The Dollarita worked. It didn't matter. 2026-07-10 Applebee's 2023 Dollarita produced the biggest October spirits month in nineteen years of Texas filings. Then the bill came due. Meanwhile Chili's, running $6 margaritas and monthly new recipes, quietly passed Applebee's for good.
  • The Salad Company Just Bought a Bar Business That Wasn't Supposed to Exist 2026-07-02 Hopdoddy runs real bars at the entrance of every restaurant. The audited Texas receipts show four straight years of same-store growth through the hardest stretch the American drinking occasion has faced in a generation, plus a 12.6-point mix migration toward margaritas.
  • The Iced Tea Acquisition 2026-06-30 Local Favorite Restaurants paid for more than 40 dining rooms and a chicken-fried-steak audience. The audited receipts say so plainly: Cotton Patch is 36.7% of the new group's locations and 4.8% of its beverage revenue.
  • The bar M Crowd actually bought 2026-06-29 M Crowd paid $18.8M for bankrupt Razzoo’s and named the bar as the first fix. The audited Texas beverage receipts show why Mi Cocina’s parent did it.
  • The menu overhaul that announced a decline 2026-06-13 Pappas closed every company-owned On The Border on June 12, six weeks after announcing a turnaround. The audited Texas beverage receipts had already settled the question.
  • The Bar Tape Behind the Ojos Locos CEO Hire 2026-06-12 Ojos Locos unveiled Joe Hummel as CEO this week. The audited Texas filings tell a sharper story: mature stores poured 22% less this March than a year ago, even as per-unit revenue still leads Twin Peaks by 23%. The World Cup arrives three days later in the brand's two biggest markets.
  • The Bar Tab Doesn't Lie: What 19 Years of Alcohol Receipts Reveal About P.F. Chang's $8.99 Bet 2026-06-02 P.F. Chang's per-venue Texas alcohol revenue has fallen 59% from its 2007 peak. The September 2025 $8.99 Cocktail Collection relaunch produced no detectable signal in its first season — neither a turnaround nor further decline. Across 26 locations and 4,695 monthly filings, the durable story is a 19-year mix shift from wine to liquor.
  • The Suburbs Are Winning 2026-05-07 In 2018, JINYA founder Tomo Takahashi told Restaurant Development + Design that the brand's next chapter was suburban. Seven years of Texas Comptroller mixed-beverage filings let us check that hypothesis with audited math. The answer is unambiguous. JINYA's Texas suburbs are out-billing its urban cores, and the gap is widening by multiples — not margins.
  • Red Robin's New CFO Ran a Bar-Led Recovery. Texas Says He Just Inherited the Opposite. 2026-05-05 Red Robin named Mark Graff CFO effective May 4, the third Bloomin' Brands alum in the senior chair rotation in 18 months. Graff just spent two years running Bonefish Grill, where Martini Mondays and Bang Wednesdays drove the brand's first positive traffic comp since Q1 2022. The Texas data on what he's walking into: per-venue beverage receipts down 42% since 2017, beer down 36%, wine down 56%, and an 89-venue competitor set in the same ZIPs running 5.6× Red Robin's median.
  • Brinker Said Maggiano's Reversed a Ten-Year Alcohol Decline. The Texas Receipts Say the Cocktails Worked and the Wine Program Didn't. 2026-05-04 Maggiano's launched the Mixologist Collection in July 2024 and Kevin Hochman told the market it had reversed a ten-year alcohol decline. The Texas Comptroller filings agree on the cocktails — liquor receipts up 17% and still positive. They disagree on the wine program. By March 2026, TTM beverage receipts had rolled back to -0.7% YoY and 8 of 9 Texas Maggiano's posted negative beverage prints in Q3 FY26.
  • Topgolf Is Peeling Away From the Pack 2026-04-23 Twelve of fifteen mature Texas Topgolf venues are positive on TTM same-store receipts. Every other major eatertainment brand in the state is flat or negative. The category aggregate is down 2.3% — and TopGolf, up 13.5%, is the only thing keeping it from collapse.
  • The Man Who Invented Bombshells Is Now Trying to Sell It 2026-04-22 Travis Reese built Bombshells in 2013 for RCI Hospitality Holdings. Twelve years, a peak, a pandemic surge, a 46% per-unit collapse, and a 79-count federal indictment of his former CEO later, he is back as Interim CEO — tasked with selling what remains of the chain to private equity at a valuation the Texas Comptroller filings make harder to justify with every cycle.
  • Ten Years on Belt Line Road 2026-04-21 Lazy Dog's Addison store has been filing Audited returns longer than any other location in Texas — and now ranks last. Trailing twelve-month revenue at $817,752, down 13.3% YoY, with three consecutive years of decline. The DFW legacy stores are softening while Houston's newer footprint carries the portfolio. A unit-level look at how casual dining brands age in markets where they were once novel.
  • Chuy's Has More Texas Locations Than Mi Cocina and Pappasito's Combined. It Still Lost the Per-Venue Race to Both. 2026-04-16 Darden acquired Chuy's for $605M and folded it into an opaque reporting segment. audited Texas beverage sales data reveals that every major scratch-kitchen Tex-Mex competitor in the state out-earns Chuy's per location — by margins ranging from 27% to 112%.
  • Postino at 25: The Texas Data 2026-04-08 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. The filings say that 65.3% of Postino's Texas on-premise alcohol revenue comes from wine. The Texas industry average is roughly 13%. Postino is selling wine at five times the rate of the category it competes in.
  • The Brand-Level Split: What 21,500 Monthly Filings Reveal About Dave & Buster's and Main Event 2026-04-06 Dave & Buster's Entertainment reports both chains as a single operating segment. audited Texas beverage sales filings separate them. We pulled the complete filing history for 213 eatertainment venues across 13 brands, 21,500 monthly data points, to build the first independent, brand-level performance analysis of the D&B/Main Event platform.
  • Wine Revenue Per Location Has Been Cut in Half at America's Biggest Italian Restaurant Chain 2026-04-04 In the brand description section of Darden Restaurants' most recent 10-K, between the entree price ranges and the children's menu description, is a single data point: alcoholic beverages accounted for 4.7 percent of Olive Garden's sales in fiscal 2025. The prior year, it was 5.0 percent. The year before that, higher still.
  • First Watch Just Fired Its COO. Our Data Shows Why That's a Gamble. 2026-04-01 First Watch eliminated its COO role the same week it reported record expansion. Across 74 Texas locations and 4,309 monthly audited sales filings, the data reveals a 3x location-level revenue spread, a beverage mix that contradicts the brand's own marketing, and a 4x AUV gap with every major breakfast competitor.
  • The Beer Test: What $10.6 Million in Texas Alcohol Receipts Reveal About the Brand Dine Brands Misread 2026-03-30 Fuzzy's Taco Shop generated $10.6 million in trailing-twelve-month alcohol revenue across 57 active Texas locations, a 14.2% decline from the prior year. But the real story is in the beer mix: 31.1% of revenue comes from beer, against 4.5% at Torchy's. That number changes the competitive map entirely.
  • Perry's Steakhouse: $91 Million in Beverage Sales, $7 Million Recovered, and the Math That Doesn't Add Up 2026-03-29 A federal court awarded $21.3 million to 707 Perry's servers for an illegal tip pool. But when you cross-reference the damages against 19 years of Texas Comptroller data and SEC filings from every publicly traded steakhouse, the $7 million in misappropriated tips covers barely half of what was actually diverted.
  • The Bar Tab Doesn’t Lie: What 13,000 Alcohol Receipts Reveal About Red Lobster’s Two-Speed Turnaround 2026-03-27 Bloomberg reported sales 20% below pre-bankruptcy levels. We used 13,217 monthly alcohol receipts across 70 Texas locations to examine what the turnaround looks like at the unit level.
  • The Wine Steakhouse: How Saltgrass Hides Fine-Dining DNA in a Casual Body 2026-03-25 Saltgrass Steak House runs a 19% wine share — closer to fine dining than casual steakhouse. The explanation: Landry's VP of Wine came from Morton's, and the centralized beverage program serves Caymus and Jordan alongside $7.50 house pours. Only audited sales data reveals this hidden strategy.
  • Applebee's Is Still Huge in Texas — But the Trend Is Down 2026-03-23 Applebee's remains America's largest bar-and-grill by unit count, but its Texas footprint tells the contraction story: ~87 active locations, alcohol mix eroding from 14–15% to 10–12%, and Chili's AUVs now 64% higher. The brand that invented the Dollarita is investing in dirty sodas.
  • Twin Peaks Filed for Bankruptcy. The Texas Data Says the Brand Isn't Broken. 2026-02-16 Twin Peaks' parent company filed Chapter 11. The headlines say crisis. The Texas Comptroller data says $203K per location per month — 4x Buffalo Wild Wings and Hooters. This is a balance sheet problem, not a brand problem.
  • The Commuters Shaping Dallas Happy Hour 2026-01-22 Return-to-office mandates are transforming when and where Dallas professionals drink. Our ZIP-code-level analysis reveals which neighborhoods are winning the happy hour battle—and how smart operators are adjusting.
  • Anatomy of a Top-Grossing Texas Venue: What the $10M+ Club Looks Like 2025-04-02 Most Texas bars do well under $1M in annual alcohol sales. A handful clear $10M+. Using state audited sales filings, we identify who they are, what formats they operate, where they cluster, and, critically, which traits are replicable by operators who don't own a stadium.