While plenty of restaurant chains are trimming locations and retreating from markets, Texas Roadhouse is moving in the opposite direction, planning roughly 20 new steakhouses in 2026 and pushing a digital overhaul into every kitchen in its fleet. The Louisville-based chain is doubling down on growth at a time when many casual dining competitors are pulling back, and the strategy says something about what works in American restaurants right now.
The 20 new Texas Roadhouse-branded steakhouses are part of a broader push to open 35 company-owned restaurants across the company's portfolio, which also includes Bubba's 33 and Jaggers, The U.S. Sun reported. That follows 30 new locations the chain opened in 2025 alone.
The new restaurants won't just be more of the same. Texas Roadhouse is layering in technology it has been testing for years, digital kitchen systems that replace paper tickets with screens, handheld tablets for servers, and Roadhouse Pay kiosks that let diners settle up by card at the table without flagging down a waiter. The company wants all of it running chainwide by the end of this year.
Named locations for the 2026 expansion include Cypress, Texas, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Houston, where construction was already underway in January, along with North Manheim, Pennsylvania; Lancaster, California; Mount Juliet, Tennessee; and Johnstown, Colorado. The full list of all 20 planned openings has not been disclosed.
Some parts of the country remain underserved. Nevada, Oregon, and the Dakotas are cited as states with minimal Texas Roadhouse presence, suggesting room for future growth beyond this year's announced batch.
The expansion stands in sharp contrast to the decisions other major restaurant groups have made recently. Darden Restaurants, for instance, announced plans to close Bahama Breeze locations, trimming its portfolio even as its LongHorn Steakhouse brand competes directly with Texas Roadhouse for steak-hungry diners.
The chain's tech push started in earnest in 2022, when it introduced Roadhouse Pay, tablet kiosks placed at tables so customers can pay by card without waiting for a paper check. That system is now being extended to every one of the chain's hundreds of steakhouses.
The bigger operational shift is the digital kitchen initiative, first introduced in 2024. Instead of handwritten or printed paper tickets, kitchen staff see orders on screens. Servers use handheld tablets to punch in orders from the floor, which the company says helps the back of house prepare food more efficiently and keeps better track of what's coming in.
FSR Magazine reported that about 65% of Texas Roadhouse locations had already converted to the new kitchen model as of May 2025. The chain's goal is to finish the rollout across its entire store fleet by year's end.
That's a meaningful operational bet. For a chain that averages 5,000 guests per week per location and serves 300,000 meals a day across its system, even small gains in kitchen speed and order accuracy compound fast. Texas Roadhouse has also been navigating rising beef costs, hiking menu prices across all of its locations, which makes operational efficiency more than a convenience play.
Texas Roadhouse's own fact sheet fills in the picture. The average restaurant runs 6,700 to 7,500 square feet and seats 291 guests. Steaks account for 44% of the menu. The number-one seller is the 6-ounce USDA Choice Sirloin. Draft beer is served at 36 degrees Fahrenheit, and the chain offers 15 varieties of what it calls Legendary Margaritas.
Those are not the numbers of a brand in retreat. They describe a high-volume, meat-and-potatoes operation that has figured out how to fill seats in an era when many sit-down restaurants are struggling to do exactly that.
The steakhouse segment has been one of the brighter spots in casual dining. Texas Roadhouse and LongHorn Steakhouse have been competing aggressively on steak pricing, each trying to hold value-conscious diners who still want a sit-down meal without a fine-dining bill. That competition has kept prices relatively sharp even as input costs climb.
Opening 20 new locations in a single year is not a small commitment. Each restaurant requires real estate, construction, staffing, and supply-chain infrastructure. Texas Roadhouse is making that investment while simultaneously overhauling the technology backbone of every existing location, a two-front effort that demands confidence in consumer demand.
Part of the context is a broader restaurant labor market that has held up better than many expected. U.S. restaurant payrolls grew in 2025 despite a weak overall job market, suggesting the industry has been able to staff up even as other sectors cooled.
The technology side of the expansion also matters for the workforce. Handheld tablets and digital kitchen screens don't eliminate jobs, they change how front-of-house and back-of-house employees do them. Servers spend less time running paper checks. Kitchen staff get clearer, faster order flows. The pitch is speed and accuracy, not headcount reduction.
Whether the digital overhaul delivers on that promise at full scale remains an open question. Converting 65% of locations is one thing. Getting the last 35% done, often the older, more idiosyncratic stores, is typically harder. And rolling out Roadhouse Pay to every table in a system this large is a logistics challenge that will test the company's execution through the rest of the year.
There are also unanswered questions about the 2026 pipeline. Exact opening dates for the planned steakhouses have not been announced. The full list of locations beyond the five named cities is not public. And the relationship between the 20 Texas Roadhouse-branded openings and the broader 35-restaurant figure across all brands leaves some ambiguity about how the numbers break down.
The steakhouse business is not immune to the pressures squeezing casual dining, inflation, labor costs, shifting consumer habits. But Texas Roadhouse is not acting like a company bracing for a downturn. It is acting like one that sees open lanes on the highway and intends to take them. Even legacy brands like Delmonico's are now planning their first new locations in generations, a sign that the steakhouse category still draws investment when the fundamentals are right.
In an economy where consumers keep hearing they should tighten their belts, a chain that sells 6-ounce sirloins and ice-cold beer is betting Americans would rather pull up a chair. That's the kind of confidence the market rewards, or punishes, in a hurry.