Chuy’s Tex-Mex

Chuy’s is a Tex-Mex restaurant at North Hills in Raleigh. The setting is colorful and eclectic, the kind of room where the decor gives you something to look at between courses, and the menu sticks to Tex-Mex favorites made from scratch in the kitchen.

The chain started in Austin, Texas in 1982 and stayed inside the state for most of its first thirty years. It still talks about the business as a set of relationships, with the people who work there, the people who eat there and the towns where it opens.

What to know

• The first restaurant opened on April 16, 1982, in an abandoned barbecue joint.
• That original building sat on Barton Springs Road in Austin.
• The chain had just fifteen restaurants, all in Texas, in the late 2000s.
• Franklin, Tennessee, near Nashville, got the first location outside Texas in November 2009.