Texas Roadhouse, the steakhouse restaurant company based in Louisville, Kentucky, is opening its new Benton location on July 17 and will begin hiring June 17. The 7,100 SF-store will be the company’s fourth restaurant in Arkansas, but it’s not necessarily done.
That’s according to Travis Doster, the senior director of PR for Texas Roadhouse and “a proud graduate of the University of Arkansas.”
Doster says the company is looking to open restaurants in at least three other cities in Arkansas. “Our restaurants in Arkansas have done really well,” he said. “Arkansas is a hidden gem.” The location in Little Rock, for example, had sales of more than $4 million in 2014, the last year for which figures are publicly available.
The Benton store will be at 20280 Interstate 30 North. Doster said the high-visibility location is intentional. “Texas Roadhouse doesn’t advertise nationally,” he said. “You’ll never see us on TV.” The buildings themselves, with their bright neon signs and flags, serve as advertisements.
“We like to call ourselves a collection of independent restaurants,” he added, because the managing partner of each location has ownership in that store. “They pay us $25,000 and in return they get 10 percent of the operating profits,” Doster said.
Texas Roadhouse, which is traded on the Nasdaq (TXRH), reported revenue of almost $2 billion in 2016, a 10 percent increase over 2015. Texas Roadhouse has 460 locations in 49 states and five locations in the Middle East, and 90 percent of them are company owned.
“Everything we do is made from scratch, which is very labor-intensive, so we’ll hire about 200 employees” for the Benton location, Doster said. “We have on-site meat-cutters, bakers. We bake our own bread. We cut our own meat in-house.”
Texas Roadhouse encourages its restaurants to become involved in their communities. “They support Little Leagues, Special Olympics, various nonprofit organizations,” Doster said. That activity in the community also helps advertise the restaurants.
Keith Smith is the managing partner of the Benton Texas Roadhouse.