Texas Roadhouse, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Today's conference is scheduled to begin momentarily. Until that time, your lights will remain on music hold. Thank you for your patience. Music Thank you. THE END Thank you. THE END Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by and welcome to the Texas Roadhouse Inc. first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any assistance, please press star zero for the operator. Thank you. It is now my pleasure to turn the call over to Ms. Tanya Robinson. Ms. Robinson, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Sylvia, and good evening, everyone. By now, you should have access to our earnings release for the first quarter ended March 30th, 2021. And it may also be found on our website at TexasRoadHouse.com in the Investors section. Before we begin our formal remarks, I need to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore undue reliance should not be placed upon them. We refer all of you to our earnings release and our recent filings with the SEC. These documents provide a more detailed discussion of the relevant factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements, including factors related to the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, we may refer to non-GAAP measures, If applicable, reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to the GAAP information can be found in our earnings release. On the call with me today is Jerry Morgan, Chief Executive Officer of Texas Shared House. Following our remarks, we will open the call for questions. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jerry.

Thanks, Tanya, and thank you to everyone for joining us. Emotionally, the last six weeks have been extremely difficult for us. While the business environment and our financial performance have continued to strengthen, we have been mourning the passing of Kent Taylor, our founder, CEO, and friend. It was a sudden and unexpected loss. But in typical Kent fashion, he left us with a company built for success and a clear path forward. Kent will be deeply missed, but his legacy and his vision will remain firmly ingrained in our culture and how we will run the business going forward. 2021 has started off well for us with significant sales acceleration and profitability improvement throughout the first quarter. driven by the easing of dining room capacity restrictions. Guests continue to return to our dining rooms, and at the same time, to-go sales volumes remain steady for the quarter. And our sales momentum has continued into the first four weeks of the second quarter. Challenges continue to exist in this environment, the biggest being staffing. As the economy reopens and expands, as always, we remain committed to providing high levels of service at all of our concepts. Our operators are working every day to recruit, hire, train additional staff for their restaurants. It's never been more difficult to attract and retain employees. As a result, we are also seeing wage increases in our to remain competitive. To help offset some of these pressures, we implemented a 1.75% menu price increase, which went into effect yesterday. Consistent with our normal practice, we had calls with operators to get insight into what they were experiencing and use that feedback to get to what we believe is the right amount of pricing for the business. On the development front, our 2021 plan is progressing as expected. We opened three restaurants in the first quarter and have opened an additional five restaurants so far in our second quarter. And we continue to expect to open five to 30 company restaurants this year, including as many as five Bubba's 33 restaurants and one Jagger's. We are very excited about the direction of both of our newest concepts. At Bubba's, many of our restaurants are generating sales and profitability above pre-COVID levels and appear poised for continued growth and improvement. Our newest Jagger's location continues to perform very well, and we'll be opening our fourth location in the back half of this year. We believe in the opportunity that Jagger's provides, and we continue to focus on how it will fit into our portfolio and what future growth would look like. We also continue to expand our retail business. Our margarita mixer became available in some locations in February, and our canned margarita seltzer just rolled out to a limited number of retail stores. These initiatives, along with our butcher shop business, provide a solid foundation for us to build upon. We will see how consumers respond to these offerings, but our current expectation is that it will take some time for these businesses to gain awareness and build momentum. I want to end my remarks with a message to the Texas Roadhouse family. to the over 600 managing partners who come to work every day ready to deliver on the promise of legendary food and legendary service, and to the tens of thousands of roadies in our kitchens, in our dining rooms, and in our support center who understand what it means to take care of each other and our guests. Thank you for everything that you are doing for Texas Roadhouse. My commitment to you is that we will remain Roadhouse strong for you, for our guests, and for Kent. Our restaurants will remain the friendliest place in town. We will continue to deliver service with heart. Our food will be recipe right, smoking hot, and picture perfect. That is what Kent expected, and that is what we will continue to deliver. Now, Tanya will provide a financial update.