Christopher O’Cull: Question relates to margin. And Raj, EBITDA margin has been up about 110 basis points, I think, relative to 2019 in the first half of the year, and I think your guidance kind of implies that the margin could be up 120 basis points or more in the second half of the year. I’m just wondering if you’re expecting G&A to continue driving that improvement? Or are you looking for the restaurant margin to become a bigger contributor to the back half improvement?
Rajesh Vennam: Yes. I would say that G&A actually the way — because of the way we do incentive accruals, G&A is going to be probably higher in the back half than the first half. The restaurant-level margin should improve relative to pre-COVID in the back half versus where it was in the front half. But overall, if you step back, look at overall, your point is right. We do expect growth in the back half now. I’ll point out that the starting point is way higher for the back half because our margins were very high in the back half to begin before cold. So we had more room to grow in the first half, and you saw that. But G&A, definitely, we expect G&A in the back half to be higher as a percent of sales than it was in the front half.
Christopher O’Cull: And just secondly, the segment margin at Olive Garden, I think, compressed about 320 basis points year-over-year this quarter. Can you help parse out what drove that? And how much of it was intentional in terms of menu or labor investments? And how much of it was just due to inflationary pressure?
Rajesh Vennam: It’s really inflation. If you think about the 3 items I mentioned that have the highest inflation — had highest inflation in the quarter, chicken, dairy, and we — well, that’s all has gotten for you. We got 20-plus percent. They have a little over 20% inflation on the commodities this quarter. So that — when you take that into consideration and look at the fact that we only had 6.5% pricing at Darden level and Olive Garden, obviously, would be pretty close to Darden price in our price level. That’s the biggest piece. And then one other piece I mentioned on the call was lettuce while we did not experience the same level of inflation as the general market, it was a big surprise. It was, call it, $4 million to $5 million impact in the quarter, that’s meaningful.
Operator: Our next question comes from Danilo Gargiulo with Bernstein.
Danilo Gargiulo: I was wondering, in the context of potentially slower market environment, what gives you the confidence to raise the outlook for same-store sales? And in particular, on which brands you are elevating your expectations.
Rajesh Vennam: Well, so actually, let me kind of explain how we got there. If you think about our pricing we had in the earlier guidance was 5%, now we’re at 6%. We raised the coupon of our sales by 0.5 point. So essentially, we’re saying on the top end, we’re actually brought down traffic by about 0.5 point. And then on the bottom end, we basically raised it by the full point, which kind of gets to that pricing. So that’s really the driver of our change in guidance. then the costs out of the cost — we have some visibility into costs and we have some ranges around the ones where we have some risk, and that’s how we came up with this guidance.
Danilo Gargiulo: And can you also provide some context on perhaps the frequency of visits of your consumers by brand and whether you’re seeing the frequency differently today versus historical averages, maybe by by some type of consumer cohorts or brands?
Rajesh Vennam: No. I think look, our casual dining average frequencies and we call it in that 3 to 4x. And what we see with the core — all of our brands are seeing over time, the investments we’ve made pay off and transmitting into a slight tick up in frequency. But again, this is a slow build. We always believe that we — that’s our bet is that this takes time. But we are seeing — it is — we’re seeing signs of positive momentum. And I think is the fact that we outpaced the industry by over 500 basis points on traffic, tells you that things we’ve done over time are translating into some increased frequency.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brian Vaccaro of Raymond James.
