How Texas Roadhouse Is Beating LongHorn and Outback in the Chain Steakhouse Game

If pressed to name the top restaurant chains in America, your mind might zoom straight to fast food joints: McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Burger King. And while fast food does dominate the list of the country’s top 10 most profitable restaurants, just outside those rankings sit a couple full-service sit-down restaurants whose annual sales sit comfortably in the billions. One is Olive Garden, with 908 restaurants and earnings totaling $5.1 billion in 2023. The other, perhaps unexpectedly, is Texas Roadhouse, the 19th biggest restaurant chain in America with $4.8 billion in sales last year. 

These numbers come to us from the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report, an annual data set of each brand’s total sales the previous calendar year, plus the total unit count, or number of locations, the restaurant operated in that year. The 2024 report has just been released, and while the top 10 list remains identical from last year and much of the top 50 contains only incremental changes in each restaurant’s ranking, Texas Roadhouse gained a notable four places in the rankings this time around, climbing from 23rd to 19th.

Now in the top 20, Texas Roadhouse’s reported 2023 sales were $800 million higher than the previous year, or a year-over-year growth of 16%. Its 2022 sales were also 16% higher than 2021, when it was only in 27th place. It’s no easy feat for a restaurant — particularly a full-service steakhouse — to gain so many slots so high up on the list in two short years when the economy is making people think harder and harder about where to spend their dollars. The restaurant is also pulling ahead of both Outback and LongHorn in the chain steakhouse space. 

It might be surprising to hear that America has a sustained interest in something as highfalutin as steak at a moment when so many diners are pulling back on discretionary spending. But Texas Roadhouse has made sure to highlight its affordability, promoting $30-$50 Family Value meal bundles of proteins, sides, salads, and rolls for pickup. According to CEO Jerry Morgan, emphasizing value has led to highly favorable Q1 results in 2024. 

Plus, people just love steakhouses, full stop. Texas Roadhouse regularly tops the American Customer Satisfaction Index in the full-service restaurant category, another ranking in which it’s often neck-and-neck with its beefy brethren, LongHorn and Outback. Chain steakhouses occupy a crucial niche in the American restaurant landscape, providing a consensus option at which it’s easy to seat large groups, celebrate special occasions, or stretch one’s wallet for an otherwise meaningful and (hopefully) memorable meal. 

Texas Roadhouse doesn’t claim to be fancy by any means, but alongside your steak, you’ll also receive the free entertainment of every server performing a line dance and baskets brimming with all the free bread and cinnamon butter you can eat. That’s a very particular type of value — and the American consumer seems to recognize that.