Classic Banana’s Foster dessert at Brennan’s of Houston, a top donor restaurant for Houston Restaurant Weeks.
Brennan’s of Houston
Houston Restaurant Weeks will launch Aug. 1, setting off 38 days of deals at restaurants across the city.
The event is both the biggest annual fundraiser for the Houston Food Bank and a major booster for many local restaurants, for whom August is traditionally the slowest month of the year. Participating restaurants offer multi-course, set-menu meals, and donate a portion of the proceeds from each sale.
READ MORE: Houston Restaurant Weeks starts soon. Here’s where the Chronicle food team recommends eating.
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Recently, however, the restaurant industry has been hard-hit by a barrage of problems: People are eating out less. Some of them drink less. Food costs went up. Hiring became harder. And it’s often a struggle for restaurants to create a menu that brings in enough money for them to make a profit and make a donation, while still offering a bargain to diners.
So in an attempt to support them, HRW changed its donation structure last year. It will maintain the changes for 2026.
Here’s a look at what changed and how it’s impacted restaurants.
Why make the change?
During HRW, restaurants agree to offer set-price meals for $25, $39 or $55. Historically, for each meal sold, they would donate $3, $5 or $7 to the food bank, depending on the cost of the meal.
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Last year, though, the restaurant industry in Houston faced a crisis. Restaurants all over the city were closing down.
So HRW changed its expected donation. Instead of requesting $3, $5 or $7 per meal, it asked for $1, $3 or $5.
“That $3 and $5 and $7 donation structure just wasn’t fitting for the time that we’re in,” said Katie Stone, who leads HRW as president of the Cleverley Stone Foundation. “When we changed it last year, we kind of had the feeling that this is where we’re going to be for a few years.”
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She said HRW also removed the minimum requirement that restaurants sell at least 200 of each meal special they offered, or else donate an amount equivalent to what they would have raised if they sold 200. (For instance, under the previous system, a restaurant that offered a $55 dinner deal and a $25 lunch would have had to give at least $2,000. That’s the old $7 donation for dinner and $3 for lunch, times 200 meals each.)
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At the same time, Stone added an additional $1,000 for restaurants to donate as a guarantee up front, to mitigate the issue of chasing down restaurants for their donations after HRW. This does not count toward restaurants’ per-meal donation later, she said.
But Stone also said she manually adjusted the overall donation amounts for about 40 small restaurants to ensure that the new structure wouldn’t mean they had to donate more per customer.
“This is not a fee,” she said. “This is just us trying to hedge a little bit to not collect all the money at the end of the event.”
How did it affect donation amounts?
In 2024, HRW brought in about $2,010,000. Last year, it raised $1,650,000, an 18% decrease.
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Still, the fundraiser significantly outperformed Stone’s expectations, she said.
That’s because customers helped to make up for the lowered per-meal donation with a swelling in the number of orders. Approximately 26% more people ordered dinners through Houston Restaurant Weeks last year than in 2024, Stone said.
“It worked so well for us that we are definitely going to stick with it,” she said. “It was definitely the right decision for us to make.”
Julie Voss, chief development officer at the Houston Food Bank, said she’d initially been nervous about the change, especially after the food bank faced an $11 million cut in federal funding. In the end, though, the 2025 donation beat her expectations, and she said the difference fell within a margin she was happy with.
What do restaurants say?
Even for an institution like Brennan’s of Houston, proprietor Alex Brennan-Martin said the years since the COVID-19 pandemic have been rough. The challenges, he said, came to a head in 2025.
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So lowering the expected donation offered a measure of relief.
“I know that was a huge help to restaurants. It certainly helped us,” he said. “To get an extra couple dollars, an extra dollar here, an extra dollar there — that reduced the donation, to be sure, to the food bank, but it’s helped keep the golden goose alive.”
The majority of Brennan’s customers in August, he said, order the HRW menu. That makes the Southern restaurant into a powerhouse donor, HRW’s second-biggest in recent years. In 2024, it donated $48,000, and in 2025, $26,000, according to numbers that HRW released about its top donations.
B&B Butchers, HRW’s biggest recent donor, likewise dropped its donation to about $44,000 last year, from about $64,000 the year before. The change particularly helped as beef prices soared, said Berg Hospitality Group founder and CEO Ben Berg.
“Last August, meat prices were at an all-time high,” Berg said. “That was one of the reasons I think restaurants, too, pushed for (the donation) lowered.”
But some smaller restaurants noticed different changes. At Craft Pita, owner Rafael Nasr said he donated about $1,000 more in 2025 than 2024 between his two locations, which he attributed to an increase in the number of customers. As the food bank saw grants cut, Nasr said, he found it more important than ever to donate.
At Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen, meanwhile, Sylvia Casares said she gave $1,000 up front for each of her two restaurants last year and then sold about 500 HRW meals in total. Participating every year, she said, is worth it — both to support the food bank and to draw new customers to her grilled meats and enchiladas.
“Of course, I would love it to be less of a spend,” Casares said in a text, “but it is for a great cause!”