Dave & Buster's posted a loss. Its Texas bars posted a tenth straight month of growth while the neighbors fell 16%.

Third in a series: April: the brand-level split, August: the bar isn't the problem.

What the quarter said

Revenue fell 2.4% to $544.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA dropped to $98.9 million from $129.8 million, and the adjusted loss of $0.27 a share landed against a Street that expected a profit. Entertainment, 61% of the business, fell 8.8%.

Food and beverage comps rose 7.6%, the fifth straight positive quarter. The 10-Q splits that line: food and non-alcoholic beverages rose 11.3% to $151.4 million, and alcohol rose 5.6% to $60.1 million. Special events grew for a seventh quarter, and the monthly comp improved from −5.0% in June to −1.6% in July.

CEO Darin Harper didn't dress it up on the call. "Clearly Q2 was not where we want it to be, but it clarified both the challenges and the opportunity," he said. His diagnosis was about the occasion: "When we're the obvious answer, we win decisively."

Ten months

The 13 Texas venues open at least 18 months have grown every month since October 2025: +7.2% in October, +6.7% in November and +5.4% in December, a thin +2.5%, +0.6% and +1.2% through the winter, then +6.9% in April, +14.0% in May, +11.0% in June and +3.8% in July.

Add any venue that filed in both years and a fourteenth store joins the group: Killeen, opened May 5, 2025. It pulls July to +1.7% and May through July to +4.2%. Both numbers are accurate, and both rest on a handful of stores, so they describe what happened rather than prove a trend.

Sixteen Texas stores filed in July, Sugar Land and McKinney among them, and together they took in $4.13 million from May through July, up about 9%. That covers 16 of the chain's 18 Texas stores; Austin South and Lubbock hadn't filed. Eleven of the 13 legacy bars grew over June and July combined, led by Euless (+19.8%), Balcones Heights (+19.3%), Frisco (+14.4%), McAllen (+13.7%) and Dallas (+13.0%). Austin slipped 0.8%, Shenandoah fell 4.5%, and Katy Freeway was flat at +0.5% on $411K.

The neighbors

Take D&B and Main Event out of the Texas eatertainment index and the other twelve brands fell 12.3% in May, 17.9% in June and 17.3% in July, on 79 to 81 venues. Pull Topgolf out as well and the remaining 68 venues were still down 13.4%. Topgolf itself fell 19.9%, 20.8% and 18.9% across the three months. Alamo Drafthouse's 13 Texas venues were down 21% in July, Chicken N Pickle's five were down 24%, Andretti's five were down 21%, and Bowlero/Lucky Strike's 16 were down 10.6%.

July isn't a partial month here. Venue counts have been flat since March, and the July-to-June ratio sits inside the range of the last four summers. The decline belongs to eatertainment bars specifically. D&B is taking share of a shrinking category, which is a narrower claim than "the turnaround is working." The fair benchmark for the category this summer is about −16%, not flat.

Not the stadium

The World Cup doesn't explain it. D&B's legacy bars in host metros grew 12.0% in June and 1.0% in July, 6.9% over the two months. Bars outside host metros grew 9.5% and 8.5%, or 9.0%. From January through May, before the tournament, the two groups ran within a third of a point of each other.

Killeen sits outside that comparison on purpose. Put it in the non-host group and non-host growth drops to +0.3%, which would make host metros look like winners, but Killeen's slide is a second-year story that has nothing to do with soccer.

Across the wider eatertainment index, host metros went from +1.6% before the tournament to −18.5% in June and July, while the rest of the state went from −2.9% to −16.4%. Set side by side, host metros lost about six points against the rest of Texas. That's a contrast, and it stops short of proving cause.

Main Event

Main Event's Texas bars rose 5.3% in April and 2.9% in May, dipped 0.4% in June and rose 2.1% in July. A majority of its 22 venues grew in each of those months (16, 12, 13 and 13), the longest run since early 2022. Its trailing twelve months are still down 3.3%. DFW and Houston venues improved about seven points against the rest of the state during the tournament, the one place a World Cup effect could be hiding.

Killeen and the honeymoon math

About 26 stores across the system are too new to be comparable and are working through year-two declines. Killeen shows what that looks like. Its bar took in $126K in its opening month, $128K in June and $74K in July, then $49K to $83K a month through the winter. This May it took in $44K, followed by $66K in June and $51K in July. Year two is running at roughly half of year one.

It's why this series leads with the 13-venue group. Admitting a store in the month it laps a soft-opening filing would print +317% one month and −65% the next.

The remodel we can't credit yet

Harper told analysts the remodels are still outperforming, though "that delta between the two has contracted some" as the rest of the system has improved. Balcones Heights in San Antonio is the one Texas remodel completed this fiscal year. Its bar rose 27% in April, 53% in May, 16% in June and 24% in July, against +5%, +10%, +10% and +2% for the other twelve legacy venues, and it beat that group by 22 points in July.

We can't hand that to the remodel yet. The outperformance started before the work finished, and the 2025 base was weak. Frisco, remodeling from August through November, is the cleaner test: its bar was up 14.4% over June and July before work began. Friendswood, which we flagged in April after its remodel faded to −5.5%, was back to +7.1% over June and July.

Price, cost and the bigger line

Alcohol is 11% of D&B's revenue. Texas D&B and Main Event stores produced $7.9 million of it from May through July, about 13% of the $60.1 million alcohol line from roughly 15% of the stores.

Some of the Texas growth is price. Food-away-from-home inflation ran 7.0% in Dallas in July and 6.1% in Houston in August, and national alcohol-away-from-home inflation was 3.0%. Texas menus list a domestic draft at $5, a frozen 'Rita at $9.99 and the Eat & Play Combo at $19.99 a person. A good share of the 4% to 9% growth is likely price, and volume can't be separated from it without a price series.

Inputs moved the other way. Whole wings were down 35% year over year, boneless breast 42% and cheese blocks 18%, so the cost ratio's move from 24.5% to 24.8% is a mix story. The consumer backdrop is softer: diesel was $5.97 the week of September 7, Houston gasoline went from $2.31 in January to $3.83 in May, unemployment rose two to five tenths of a point year over year in every Texas metro, and Dallas County bar employment was down 18% in the first quarter.

The 10-Q attributes the comp decline to "a reduction in walk-in business." Entertainment, 61% of revenue and down 8.8%, is the line the stock trades on, and nothing in the receipts fixes it. What the receipts do is retire two easy explanations: it wasn't the stadium, and it isn't a rising tide.

Scorecard

| What we said | What happened | | --- | --- | | Texas D&B alcohol growing, Main Event declining (April) | D&B +4.2% TTM; Main Event positive in three of the last four months | | Nine straight through June, +4.2% TTM (August) | Ten through July, +4.2% TTM on the same 13 venues | | May +13.9%, June +11.0% (August) | Held; July +3.8% | | June carries a World Cup asterisk (August) | Host-metro bars grew less than non-host; asterisk removed | | Main Event's new menu is an unproven flicker (August) | Majority of venues growing four months running | | Topgolf leads Texas eatertainment alcohol at +13.5% (April) | Topgolf Texas −20% May through July | | Friendswood remodel faded to −5.5% (April) | +7.1% June and July | | The bar doesn't fix the company (August) | Bar 11% of revenue, up 5.6%; entertainment down 8.8%; company lost $12.5M |

Next check

August receipts land in mid-October: whether the streak reached eleven, whether the index kept falling, and what Frisco's bar did in its first remodel month.

Sources: Pourcast Texas beverage tax receipts through July 2026, venue-month grain; D&B Q2 FY2026 earnings release and Form 10-Q for the quarter ended August 4, 2026; Q2 FY2026 earnings call, September 14, 2026; FRED, BLS, EIA and USDA series as labeled. Same-store means the venue filed in the month and in the same month a year earlier; the 13-venue group additionally excludes stores open fewer than 18 months.