DAVE'S HOT CHICKEN OPENS ITS 500TH RESTAURANT, IN PHOENIX

Dave's Hot Chicken opened its 500th restaurant on Oct. 8, in Phoenix. The company announced the milestone the same day, capping a stretch that's added roughly 100 new restaurants since the chain crossed 400 locations earlier this year. The Nashville-style chicken chain now operates across dozens of U.S. states, plus Canada, the Middle East and a flagship restaurant in London on Shaftesbury Avenue. Less than a decade ago, it was three friends with $900, a couple of portable fryers and folding tables set up in an East Hollywood parking lot.

Dave Kopushyan, Arman Oganesyan and Tommy Rubenyan started the brand in 2017. Growth came fast from the beginning. The chain hit its 200th restaurant in March 2024, in Texas, and hasn't slowed down since. A roster of celebrity investors, Drake, Maria Shriver, Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Strahan among them, helped build early buzz that turned into franchise demand. Then in June 2025, private equity firm Roark Capital bought a majority stake. CEO Jim Bitticks told FastCasual the deal valued the company at around $1 billion. The money is meant to fund growth at home and abroad, and the company has said it wants to go public within three years.

Dave's 500 restaurants now stretch from Phoenix to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, with units scattered across states from Connecticut to Utah. The chain has also started opening in airports. Overseas, it's signed a 60-restaurant development deal for the U.K. and Ireland, plus a separate 180-restaurant agreement with Azzurri Group covering 10 European countries, including France, Spain, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands. All told, the company says it has sold development rights to more than 1,592 locations worldwide. It's still recruiting franchise operators in Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

Getting from 400 to 500 restaurants took about a year. That's roughly two openings a week, system-wide, for twelve straight months. And the 1,592-plus development rights already sold mean the pipeline behind today's count runs more than three times deeper than what's currently open. Roark's roughly $1 billion valuation of the company gives it the balance sheet to keep signing multi-unit deals at that pace. The three-year IPO target adds a deadline to all of it.

"Reaching 500 restaurants is an incredible milestone," Bitticks said in a statement. "We're proud of the pace, but what matters most is continuing to grow the right way."

Co-founder Arman Oganesyan struck a similar note. "When Dave, Tommy and I started this, we weren't thinking about hundreds of restaurants," he said. "The scale has changed, but the energy and obsession with the food that got us started are still at the heart of who we are."

The gap between development rights sold and restaurants actually open, more than 1,000 units, is the number worth tracking here. Dave's will likely be signing leases at this pace for years, not just through this one good run. Roark has backed plenty of restaurant chains through a heavy build-out phase ahead of a sale or IPO. That track record points to a well-funded, fast-moving real estate team. The brand's footprint so far leans toward small-box, endcap-friendly space, and the new push into airports and other non-traditional venues shows it's willing to take formats most chicken concepts wouldn't touch. One open question is whether the European buildout, especially that 180-unit Azzurri Group deal, pulls focus and capital away from new U.S. markets over the next few years. Given the pace so far, that seems like the less likely outcome.