Johnny Carino's Bets Its Future on a Bar-Forward Prototype. Here's the Strategy.

When Johnny Carino's opens its new Laredo, Texas location on March 25, 2026, it won't look much like the Italian casual dining chain operators and guests remember from the early 2000s. The new 6,000 square foot prototype features an expanded bar area with 20 draft beer taps, craft cocktails, a curated wine list, and an outdoor patio lined with fire pits. The kitchen is open. There's a private dining room. Multiple TVs anchor the bar.

This is not a cosmetic refresh. It's a strategic repositioning, and the timing isn't accidental.

The Structural Problem Casual Dining Is Trying to Solve

Casual dining has been shedding units for years. Net unit count for the segment declined approximately 3.3% between 2022 and 2025, a trend driven by a brutal combination of rising labor costs, food inflation, and a consumer base that increasingly sees full-service dining as a discretionary expense rather than a routine one.

For a brand like Johnny Carino's, which has been operating for nearly three decades, the challenge is acute. The original casual dining playbook, large dining rooms, broad menus, table service for every occasion, built for a traffic pattern that no longer exists the same way. Lunch is gone from many locations. Families who drove 20 minutes for a sit-down pasta dinner in 2005 now have dozens of fast-casual alternatives within five minutes.

The answer the industry has been converging on: make the bar worth the trip.

Why Beverage Margins Drive the Strategy

The economics behind bar-forward conversions are straightforward. Food in casual dining carries a gross margin of roughly 65-70%. Beverages, particularly craft cocktails, draft beer, and wine by the glass, typically run 75-80% gross margin. When a table orders two craft cocktails alongside their entrees, the profit profile of that check changes materially.

More importantly, the bar creates a reason to visit outside of a meal occasion. A group stopping in for happy hour, a couple lingering over wine, regulars watching a game with draft beers: these visits generate revenue in dayparts that traditional casual dining largely abandoned. Happy hour traffic in particular represents incremental revenue with a different cost structure than full dinner service.

Johnny Carino's has addressed this directly in the Laredo prototype with a reworked happy hour program alongside the expanded 20-tap beer selection. The outdoor patio with fire pits extends the usable footprint into evening hours and shoulders more weather-dependent occasions, particularly relevant in Texas markets.

A Format Built for How Casual Dining Actually Competes Now

The physical design of the Laredo unit signals a clear understanding of where casual dining wins and loses in 2026. The large bar area with multiple TVs competes directly with sports bars for that evening traffic. The open kitchen addresses the transparency trend that has reshaped consumer expectations since the farm-to-table wave of the 2010s. The private dining room captures group and event business, a category that remains relatively insulated from the traffic declines hitting weekday lunch and casual weeknight dining.

At 6,000 square feet, the footprint is smaller than the sprawling casual dining boxes of a decade ago, and that matters operationally. Smaller dining rooms mean lower utility costs, fewer servers needed to cover the floor, and a tighter table turn model that doesn't require volume levels the market no longer reliably delivers.

The core Italian menu stays intact: lasagna, handcrafted pizzas, and the signature dishes that built the brand's loyal customer base across its nearly 30-year history. That's a deliberate choice. The brand isn't abandoning its identity; it's building a new occasion layer on top of it.

Industry Precedent: Who's Already Running This Play

Johnny Carino's is not the first casual dining brand to pivot toward bar-forward as a survival strategy, and the early results from peers validate the direction.

Chili's provides the clearest proof of concept. The Brinker International brand leaned heavily into its beverage program, and the Presidente Margarita became a cultural touchstone that drove visits from guests who might not have come in for a burger. Brinker has consistently cited beverage attachment as a meaningful contributor to its average check performance and comp sales recovery.

Texas Roadhouse has invested continuously in bar buildout as part of new unit construction, recognizing that capturing the first-drink occasion translates into longer visits and higher checks. The chain's consistent traffic growth, even in an environment where most casual dining peers are posting declines, is partly attributable to an operation that functions as a destination for both dining and social occasions.

Applebee's explored the concept from a different angle with its Cosmic Wings virtual brand, an experiment that used the bar infrastructure as a revenue driver during non-peak hours. The execution had mixed results, but the underlying logic, using existing licensed bar infrastructure to generate incremental revenue streams, reflects the same institutional understanding that bar capacity is underutilized in most casual dining footprints.

The common thread across all of these moves is that the brands succeeding in casual dining are the ones engineering specific reasons to visit, not just waiting for the dinner occasion to drive traffic.

What Laredo Tells Us About the Rollout Logic

The choice of Laredo, Texas as the debut market for this prototype is worth examining. Laredo is a border market with distinct consumer demographics and competitive dynamics. It's also a market where Johnny Carino's has existing brand awareness and operational history in the region.

Prototype launches in secondary or tertiary markets are standard industry practice for a reason: they allow operators to test a format at scale, gather real operational data on throughput, staffing models, and check averages, without the visibility pressure of a major metro debut. If the Laredo unit demonstrates that the bar-forward format drives the expected beverage attachment rates and extends dwell time into additional dayparts, the model becomes exportable to the broader system.

The relevant questions operators watching this rollout will want answered: Does the 20-tap beer selection require specialized staff training that creates hiring friction? How does the outdoor patio perform across seasons? Does the private dining room justify its square footage allocation in terms of revenue per square foot compared to open dining room capacity? These are answerable questions from a single well-instrumented prototype, and the answers will determine how aggressively the chain expands the format.

The Larger Bet

Casual dining's structural decline isn't going to reverse because one brand opens a bar-forward prototype. The segment is working through a long-cycle contraction driven by demographic shifts, competition from fast casual, and the lasting effects of pandemic-era changes in dining habits. Net unit declines of the magnitude the segment has seen since 2022 don't stabilize quickly.

What bar-forward formats can do is protect the economics of individual locations. A unit that drives meaningful beverage revenue in the 4-to-7 p.m. daypart through a reworked happy hour, captures group occasions through a private dining room, and maintains a loyal food-first customer base through its core Italian menu is running a fundamentally different P&L than a traditional casual dining box that depends entirely on the dinner occasion.

For a nearly 30-year-old brand, that's not just a format change. It's a recalibration of what the business is actually selling: not just a plate of lasagna, but an occasion, an environment, and a reason to choose a full-service restaurant over the expanding universe of alternatives.

The Laredo prototype is one location. Whether it becomes a template for system-wide renovation depends on whether the numbers justify the investment. Operators in the casual dining space will be watching closely.