Chuy’s: 29 Patios in Six States, and the Turn to Motorized

• Customer: Chuy’s, Austin, Texas, part of Darden Restaurants since 2024.
• 29 locations across Texas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and North Carolina.
• About 330 panels and more than 25,000 square feet: manual roll-up clear with gray, brown or red borders on most patios, mesh sun shades at Tomball, Midland, Harker Heights and Fayetteville, fixed clear panels on the breeze-block prototype at Oklahoma City, New Braunfels, Harker Heights, Terrell and Longview, and motorized curtains at Abilene and Manor.
• Doors: framed steel doors at most patios, added later at Cedar Park and College Station.
• Repeat patios: North Lamar in Austin done three times over a decade, Katy and Round Rock replaced, River Oaks partially replaced in 2024.

The thatch-roof patios at Tyler, Waco, Katy and College Station take manual roll-up clear panels with a solid border, because a palapa has posts every few feet and nothing to hide a hood in. The Houston-area sun walls at Tomball and Midland take mesh, because the problem there is heat, not cold. And the 2023 breeze-block prototype, with its wall of round openings, took fixed clear panels inside the block so the pattern still reads from the street.

Nine years, three systems, one customer. Few groups have let us try this many answers on this many buildings, and few patios are this hard to make look right, because a Chuy’s is supposed to look like a party. The yellow motorized curtain is the answer that finally matches the building, and it took eight years of manual panels and two of fixed ones to get there.