Chili’s is America’s unlikeliest restaurant comeback story

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New York CNN — Chili’s, the 49-year casual dining chain that American diners forgot and Wall Street turned its back on, has made a stunning comeback. It’s America’s hottest restaurant chain, a sentence that hasn’t been uttered since NSYNC sang its baby back ribs jingle in a 2002 commercial.

For years, Chili’s, a purveyor of greasy American staples, was losing out to flashier and more up-to-date restaurants like Olive Garden and Texas Roadhouse when customers wanted a casual and inexpensive dinner out with the family.

Chili’s was doing just about everything wrong. Its advertising was focused on discounts, biting into profits. That meant it couldn’t invest in modernizing its restaurants, upgrading its menu and keeping its staff happy, leading employees to head for the exits. The slow service and outdated atmosphere frustrated customers.

“We were very much on a strategy of just trying to be the lowest price out there,” Kevin Hochman, Chili’s president and CEO of its parent company Brinker International, said in an interview with CNN. “That made it very difficult for us to make the needed investments in labor and in the restaurants.”

But under Hochman, who took over in 2022, Chili’s upgraded its french fry and chicken tender recipes, offered fast food-like prices and caught fire on TikTok with customers posting videos pulling apart gooey mozzarella sticks.

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Hochman, a marketing veteran who turned around KFC and Old Spice, didn’t try to reinvent the wheel at Chili’s.

Instead, he focused on the basics—improving the food, streamlining operations and sprucing up restaurants. Parent company Brinker has poured more than $400 million to simplify Chili’s menu, add more servers and bussers and renovate restaurants.

There were too many options on Chili’s menu, bogging down cooks. “When you have certain amount of labor and you have a complex menu, it’s very hard to execute that consistently,” Hochman said.

Chili’s trimmed down the menu to four primary areas: burgers, chicken crispers, fajitas and margaritas. Chili’s removed more than 50 items, roughly 25% of the menu. It went menu item by item to try to make what was left “more craveable” and efficient for kitchen staff to prepare, he said.

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