The GCBI Dining Industry Report covers five full-service restaurant brands operating across Canada: The Keg, Swiss Chalet, Montana's, JOEY Restaurants, and Jack Astor's. This report covers the casual-to-premium full-service dining segment—brands where the service experience is as central to perception as the food. Data reflects national consumer perception surveys conducted in both 2025 and 2026.

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This report is based on proprietary data from the Great Canadian Brand Index (GCBI).

The 2026 GCBI is based on a national survey of 3,441 Canadian adults (18+) across Canada's ten provinces (territories excluded). The sample was designed to be nationally representative of the adult population, using 2021 Census benchmarks with quotas and weighting applied across age, gender, race, and political affiliation. Respondents rated Canadian brands they were familiar with across seven core value dimensions—Friendliness, Niceness, Respectfulness, Honesty, Tolerance, Adventurousness, and Sustainability—using standardized measures transformed to a common 0–100 scale.

Brand-level estimates were generated using Bayesian shrinkage estimation to improve stability, particularly for brands with smaller respondent samples, and each brand's overall GCBI score is a composite index averaging performance across the seven dimensions. The result is an independent, nationally benchmarked measure of how Canadians perceive leading Canadian brands on the values that shape trust, reputation, and institutional standing.

Data access is available on a subscription basis. If you are interested in custom brand-level reports, please contact us for all enterprise queries.

• The Keg claimed the #1 position in the category for the first time in the GCBI's history, displacing Montana's.

• Swiss Chalet rose 23 national positions on a score improvement of just 0.19 points—a reflection of how much other brands declined around it.

• The dining category ranked 3rd among all 12 GCBI industries—one of the most resilient categories in a difficult year for Canadian brand perception.

• Swiss Chalet is the only full-service dining brand in Canada with a near-zero gender gap—men and women rate it almost identically.

• Boomers declined sharply (−1.56 points) while Gen X improved (+0.60 points)—the category's audience is shifting toward its middle-aged core.

The Canadian full-service dining category outperformed expectations in 2026. While 93 of 130 GCBI brands declined nationally, the dining category fell by just 0.13 points—among the smallest year-over-year declines of any industry.

The category story is one of modest but meaningful reshuffling. The Keg improved while Montana's—the 2025 leader—declined, producing a change at the top that reflects the narrowness of the competitive gaps rather than any dramatic brand-level shift. Jack Astor's held last place for the second consecutive year, with the largest gender gap in the category (2.13 points) and the only brand where men rate it substantially higher than women.

The most counterintuitive finding in the dining data: low-income Canadians rate full-service dining brands more favourably than high-income Canadians—by a meaningful margin. For a category often perceived as a treat or occasion rather than a routine, this income inversion suggests that the emotional value of a full-service restaurant visit may be highest among those who visit least frequently.

• Complete brand rankings table—2025 vs. 2026, category and national positions.

• Dimension-by-dimension profiles: which brands lead on Friendliness, Honesty, Sustainability, and more.

• Regional breakdown: how every dining brand scores across six Canadian regions, with special attention to the Québec gap.

• Demographic breakdown: gender gaps by brand, generational shifts, income inversion analysis, and political profiles.

• Competitive landscape: who owns which segments and which brands are most at risk.

• Five strategic implications including the Québec structural challenge and the Boomer decline.