This Steakhouse Restaurant Chain Briefly Served Mexican Food In The '90s

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Mexican food — from its more traditional varieties to heavily American-inspired Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex — has a deep place in the USA's culinary heart. The stats point to it appealing to the country's palate too, ranking as one of Americans' favorite national cuisines (via YouGov). It comes as no surprise that restaurant chains might want to cash in on its popularity, but out of those to dabble in the salsa back in the '90s was no other than steakhouse giant Texas Roadhouse — although the experiment was decidedly short-lived.

Texas Roadhouse has now firmly established itself as one of the biggest steakhouse chains in the United States — part of a pillar of the American dining industry as the most popular casual restaurant, with a history punctuated by some turbulent hiccups — boasting locations in every state bar Hawaii. It's now better known for its convivial atmosphere and mammoth, relatively budget-friendly hand-cut steaks served alongside fresh bread rolls, but back when it first opened its doors in 1993 in Clarksville, Indiana, its menu also included some Mexican classics. We don't have much info at the moment on what the original menu looked like, but we do know that it wasn't much of a success: chain founder Kent Taylor mentioned it in his memoir "Made from Scratch," where he wrote about how it lasted the grand total of two weeks. "They tried Mexican food for a few weeks (didn't work)," the preface to the book reads.

Big chain restaurants experimenting with menus succeed and fail on a cyclical basis, with new items being introduced and then suddenly vanishing faster than Houdini. But even by the industry's notoriously fickle standards, a two-week run is definitely abrupt, especially for a business that had just opened its doors to the public. So what was it about Texas Roadhouse's Mexican-inspired offerings that failed to land?

According to Kent Taylor, it was ultimately a mixture of the restaurant's capabilities and overall theme. "Our kitchen wasn't set up to do Mexican food justice," he recounted in the book. "[I]t's an entirely different skillset," he added. Initially, he had been pushed by two early managers to include a Mexican section on the menu, especially since he had recruited people from the Tex-Mex chain that's making a 20-year comeback, Chi-Chi's, which eventually went bankrupt in 2004 and would only reopen in 2025. Taylor, however, had not been convinced from the start, which helps explain why it was dropped so quickly.

Moreover, he claimed that serving Mexican dishes "didn't really fit the theme of the place." While Texas, to which the chain pays homage, clearly has a major Mexican cultural influence — Tex-Mex cuisine, with its heavy use of seasoned ground beef and melted cheese in flour tortillas, developed within the Lone Star State's borders — the Roadhouse clearly has assumed a very different character from the sort of restaurant you'd expect to have a Mexican-inspired menu: steak and ribs remain the backbone of its culinary offerings.