Starbucks and More Popular Restaurant Stocks Among Hedge Funds

DineEquity Inc (NYSE:DIN), the owner of Applebee’s and IHOP, had 19 hedge funds and other notable investors report owning shares in this round of 13Fs. Among them was Richard McGuire’s Marcato Capital Management, which increased its holdings of DineEquity by 32% to over 1 million shares.

Hedge funds were cool on the formerly high-flying Chipotle Mexican Grill, Inc. (NYSE:CMG) as their ownership declined from 24 filers to 18 and pulled the Mexican restaurant out of the top five. Billionaire David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital named Chipotle as one of his favorite shorts last October (see Einhorn’s stock picks).

One table-service restaurant that got increased attention from hedge funds was Darden Restaurants, Inc. (NYSE:DRI). We counted 18 owners of Darden in our database, up from 10 at the end of the third quarter. Citadel Investment Group, managed by billionaire Ken Griffin, was buying shares (find more stocks Griffin bought).

Brinker International, Inc. (NYSE:EAT) was another restaurant stock which made our list despite not being a quick service restaurant. AQR Capital Management, which is managed by Cliff Asness, owned almost 630,000 shares of the restaurant which is best known as the owner of Chili’s (check out more stocks AQR owned).

Ownership of Buffalo Wild Wings (NASDAQ:BWLD) ticked up a bit to 17 hedge funds and other notable investors in our database. Tiger Consumer Management increased its holdings of Buffalo Wild Wings by 6% to a total of almost 900,000 shares.

Disclosure: I own no shares of any stocks mentioned in this article.