The Menu Move

BJ's Restaurant & Brewhouse (NASDAQ: BJRI) activated its 2026 holiday menu on November 5, anchoring the seasonal push around a 16-ounce Hawaiian Rib Eye and two new shareable sides — Truffle Mac & Cheese and Loaded Mashed Potatoes — alongside Truffle Fries. The steakhouse-premium framing is deliberate: casual dining operators have been migrating toward higher check averages and trade-up proteins as a hedge against traffic softness, and BJ's is leaning into that positioning rather than competing on value alone.

The Truffle Mac & Cheese is worth noting for operators watching test-to-launch pipelines. The item — cavatappi pasta in white truffle oil and white cheddar sauce, finished with Gruyère, Jack, and a Parmesan panko crust — sold out during testing before making the national menu. That kind of pre-launch scarcity signal is increasingly used by chain operators to de-risk LTO additions and generate earned media ahead of a full rollout.

Pizookie Data Point

The dessert headline is the return of the Biscoff® Pizookie®, reformulated with a brown butter cookie base. BJ's cited 65% consumer interest in brown butter desserts in 2026 as the trigger — a relatively rare instance of a casual dining chain surfacing explicit category trend data to justify a reformulation decision. For operators and menu developers, this is a useful benchmark: brown butter has migrated from fine dining into fast casual and is now showing up in LTO strategy at the 200-plus-unit scale.

The updated Biscoff® Brown Butter Pizookie® ships warm with vanilla bean ice cream, cookie butter drizzle, Biscoff® crumbles, and a whole Biscoff® cookie. It joins the recently launched Nutella® Gone Bananas Pizookie® on the holiday dessert card, giving BJ's two shareable dessert SKUs to drive table attachment through December.

Gift Card Architecture

The holiday activation extends beyond food and beverage into a structured gift card program running November 5 through December 31. The tiered mechanic — $10 bonus on a $50 purchase, $20 bonus plus a 20% VIP card on $100, and a Cyber Weekend escalation to $25 bonus on $100 — is a standard frequency-loop play designed to pull January traffic from December spend. Bonus cards and VIP discounts are redeemable January 4–31, 2027, creating a built-in Q1 traffic floor. In-restaurant buyers at the $100 tier also receive two collectible holiday pint glasses, adding a physical brand touchpoint that reinforces BJ's craft brewing identity.

Festive cocktails — the Glittery Goose Sangria and Caramel Macchiato Martini — round out the beverage side, alongside the return of the 27th Annual Grand Cru, a limited-time Belgian-style holiday ale that now carries more than 270 craft brewing awards. For operators benchmarking seasonal beverage programs, BJ's pairing of a heritage craft ale with two trend-forward cocktails represents a layered approach to capturing different daypart and occasion occasions without fragmenting the brand identity.

The full holiday menu is available nationally for a limited time across BJ's 200-plus restaurants in 31 states. Operators in the casual dining segment watching premium LTO cadence, shareable side strategy, or gift card program architecture will find BJ's 2026 holiday build a useful reference point for how a mid-scale brewhouse chain is managing check growth and return-visit mechanics simultaneously.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.