Raising Cane's Plans Six September Openings, Including Its San Francisco Debut

Raising Cane's will open six new restaurants across five states in September, headlined by the chicken-finger chain's first San Francisco location at 211 Jefferson St. in Fisherman's Wharf, QSR Magazine reported this week. The month kicks off Sept. 8 with a first-in-market restaurant in Saginaw, Michigan, at 5015 Bay Road and a Cleveland, Tennessee, location at 148 Sgt. Paul Huff Parkway NW. Those are followed by Westminster, Colorado (7375 W. 88th Ave.) on Sept. 14, a Nashville restaurant at 1819 Broadway on Sept. 21 and the brand's Oregon-market entry in Gresham (20 NW Burnside Road) on Sept. 22. An opening date for the San Francisco restaurant has not yet been announced.

The September slate extends a relentless opening cadence for the Baton Rouge-born brand, founded by Todd Graves in 1996 and celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. In August alone, Raising Cane's opened seven restaurants and reopened four remodeled ones, entering Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Statesboro, Georgia, along the way, according to QSR Magazine's earlier coverage. The chain crossed 950 locations late last year after opening nearly 100 restaurants in 2025, per CRE Daily, and has publicly targeted more than 1,600 U.S. restaurants over the long term.

The Fisherman's Wharf deal is the most interesting piece of real estate in the batch. The restaurant will sit at Jefferson and Taylor streets in the heart of the city's most-visited tourist corridor, a district in the middle of a concerted post-pandemic revitalization push that has recently added a Taco Bell Cantina and a conveyor-belt sushi concept, according to SFGate's reporting (via AOL). "The arrival of Raising Cane's is another exciting sign of the momentum we're seeing in the Wharf," said Cecile Gregoire, director of communications for the Fisherman's Wharf Community Benefit District. For a chain built largely on suburban drive-thru pads, an in-line site in a pedestrian tourist district is a meaningful format stretch — and a bet that Wharf foot traffic keeps recovering.

Raising Cane's has signaled roughly 100 U.S. openings for 2026, a pace that would carry the system past 1,000 restaurants by year-end, with a development pipeline reported at around 300 units, according to QSR Pro. The brand is simultaneously going international, with a London flagship at Piccadilly Circus and a Mexico entry through a development partnership with Alsea slated for the back half of the year. "September is an exciting month for Raising Cane's as we bring our ONE LOVE — Craveable Chicken Finger Meals — to new communities," a company representative said in the announcement reported by QSR Magazine.

Three of the six September openings are first-in-market deals — Saginaw, Gresham and San Francisco — evidence that even at 1,000-plus units the chain still has whitespace to fill in secondary markets and dense urban cores alike. The site mix is just as telling: alongside classic suburban arterials like Bay Road and West 88th Avenue, Cane's is underwriting an urban Nashville address on Broadway and a tourist-corridor storefront at the Wharf, suggesting landlords with non-traditional formats now have a realistic shot at the tenant. The Fisherman's Wharf commitment is also a data point for San Francisco retail generally — a high-volume, credit-quality QSR taking space there gives other national tenants cover to follow. Finally, the four remodel reopenings in August are a reminder that the brand is reinvesting in its existing fleet even while sprinting on new units — good news for owners of older Cane's pads, and a sign the chicken-segment land grab, with Chick-fil-A, Popeyes and upstarts like Layne's chasing many of the same outparcels, isn't cooling off.