Texas Roadhouse tests delivery through DoorDash in select locations

Texas Roadhouse has started testing first-party delivery through DoorDash in a handful of locations, including urban, suburban and tourist markets, with orders placed on the chain’s website and fulfilled by DoorDash. The test uses menu prices plus a $5.50 delivery fee and tip, a small but telling shift for a chain that has long treated delivery as a threat to quality and the dine-in experience.

That resistance has been unusually durable. Texas Roadhouse remains one of the few large restaurant brands that does not broadly offer delivery, a stance shaped in part by late founder Kent Taylor, who mocked the idea and told rivals to serve lukewarm food. Even so, the company has been posting strong results without leaning on delivery. Fiscal 2025 same-store sales rose 4.9% and traffic grew 2.8%, consolidated average unit volume topped $8.4 million, and in the first quarter of 2026 average weekly sales reached $174,151, including $25,374 from to-go orders.

For Pizza Hut workers, the significance is not that Texas Roadhouse suddenly wants to become a pizza chain. It is that another major casual-dining operator is treating delivery as a controlled experiment rather than a last resort, and doing it from a position of strength. That matters because Pizza Hut already lives in the off-premise business. When the chain faced driver shortages in 2022, it turned harder toward third-party platforms such as DoorDash and Uber Eats. By late 2022, Yum said 90% of Pizza Hut’s U.S. system was working with at least one third-party delivery company.

That shift came after a rough stretch for Pizza Hut’s own delivery operation. U.S. same-store sales fell 6% in the first quarter of 2022 amid staffing and driver shortages, then improved to a 1% increase in the third quarter as third-party delivery helped fill the gap. For drivers, that history is a warning that hours can move fast when stores cannot staff enough in-house routes. For kitchen crews, more platform volume means tighter dispatch timing, more packaging, and more pressure to keep remake and late-order problems from spilling into the dining room and make-line flow.

The larger pattern now is that delivery is no longer a yes-or-no question. It is about who owns the order, who gets the fee, and how much work stays inside the store. DoorDash has been building tools beyond drop-off alone, including its $1.2 billion acquisition of SevenRooms, as restaurant companies look for ways to drive traffic and handle off-premise demand at the same time. Pizza Hut is already deep in that world, and Yum’s formal strategic review of the brand on November 4, 2025 only heightens the pressure to decide whether more order volume will come through company drivers, gig couriers, or some mix of both.