Zacks Industry Outlook Highlights: Darden Restaurants, Brinker International, Ruby Tuesday and California Pizza Kitchen

Chicago, IL – August 3, 2009 – Zacks.com announces the latest Industry Outlook. Today’s outlook from Zacks Equity Research analyst Ann Northrop discusses the Restaurants sector. Highlighted stocks include: Darden Restaurants (DRI), Brinker International (EAT), Ruby Tuesday (RT) and California Pizza Kitchen (CPKI).

Driving the restaurant stock rally, was a slew of better-than-expected earnings reports – and upward earnings estimate revisions -- including those by Darden Restaurants (DRI), Brinker International (EAT), Ruby Tuesday (RT) and California Pizza Kitchen (CPKI). With the exception of Darden, however, the out-performance was driven by strong cost controls, decelerating commodity prices and conservative assumptions.

Darden was the only operator that saw customer traffic improve and had limited same-store sales declines to the low single-digits (down 3.2% in its latest quarter). The remaining three earnings out-performers saw same-store sales fall at a mid-to-high single digit rate in 1Q09, and those results were bolstered by menu price increases, masking steeper drops in customer traffic.

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Read the full analyst report on DRI

Read the full analyst report on EAT

Read the full analyst report on RT

Read the full analyst report on CPKI