Photo by Nathan Hunsinger
Audio By Carbonatix
This year, dining room sales at Renny’s, the north Dallas neighborhood hangout, are down double digits. Meanwhile, the restaurant’s catering and private-party sales are up in the double digits.
“The best way to describe business right now is that nothing makes any sense,” says Renny’s owner, Mark Maguire. “Other than the first months of COVID, this is the least predictable I’ve seen in my 19 years in Dallas, let alone my time in the restaurant business before that. You really don’t know what to expect.”
Given that, it’s probably not surprising that the latest Texas Restaurant Association member survey found that the state’s restaurateurs are more optimistic about the future than they were at the end of 2025. The restaurant group measures its members’ outlook on a scale of 1 to 100, and the score rose from 53 to 57 at the end of last year.
And they felt this way despite reporting obstacle after obstacle in their way – higher food and labor costs, plus increasing concern about skyrocketing gas prices, all of which led to declining profits compared to the same time last year.
Situation Normal?
Confused? Or is this just another example of “situation normal” in the restaurant business?
“I think, to put it into perspective, that last year was so tough, the new year brings new hope,” says TRA spokeswoman Kelsey Erickson Streufert. “There seems to be a sense that our members can weather the storm better. It shows their resilience and how much grit they’ve shown in the past six years since COVID.”
The numbers are bad, in part because the survey was conducted in the middle of April, which includes the gasoline spikes after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran in March: 95% of respondents said gas prices have led to supplier fuel surcharges, higher food costs, and, subsequently, menu price hikes.
In this, says Maguire, prices have even gone up for takeout supplies – plastic and styrofoam boxes, utensils, and the like – because they’re petroleum-based products. This is especially annoying, he says, because takeout and delivery, particularly with third-party companies like DoorDash and Grubhub, are break-even propositions used more for marketing than for profit, and where every penny counts. We covered this extensively recently.
$4 Gas and Eating Out Less
There is also the concern, says Streufert, that $4 gas – the average for the week of May 11 in Dallas was $4.05, according to AAA – means consumers will drive less, and that could translate into fewer people driving to eat out. In fact, about two in five restaurateurs in the survey said they had already started to happen in the first three months of this year.
Among the other survey results: almost 90% of restaurant operators have increased menu prices since this time last year, while more than half reported decreased profit margins. This came even though more than half said, despite lower traffic, higher costs and all the rest, that their revenue went up.
In other words, restaurant owners in the state were taking in more money but making less profit.
“I think, maybe, people need a reason to eat out,” says Magruie, whose Mother’s Day sales were up double digits this year despite everything. “If they have that, maybe they’ll keep coming.”
Talk about a conundrum.
