28% of Mapped NYC Eateries Have Private Equity Money Behind Them

A new website says 28% of the New York City restaurants, bars and cafes it tracks are owned or backed by private equity. The number comes from isitownedbyprivateequity.com, an interactive map built in a single day that now covers just over 5,000 NYC eateries.

The single largest player is Roark Capital, which accounts for 842 of the tracked locations. Nearly all of those are Dunkin' Donuts and Subway shops — Roark acquired Dunkin' in 2020 and Subway in 2024. One firm, through two franchised chains, touches roughly one in six food spots on the map.

How the site works

Davie Liebowitz, known on social media as DeFi Dave, built the tool with Grok Bot and Cursor in one day, an experience he described as "psychedelic" in a follow-up post. He then shared it on X, where the launch post has drawn more than 178,000 views.

The idea came from a complaint he kept seeing online. "What initially inspired me to create it was walking around Manhattan on the weekends and seeing all the lines for different restaurants," Liebowitz told Fast Company via social media. "Then I would go online and see the discourse around private equity blaming them for the lines and decrease in quality."

The site is growing fast. It added 1,320 of its listings in the single day after launch. Users can zoom in on any bar, restaurant or cafe and see one of three statuses: private equity or venture capital ownership, public ownership, or private ownership.

Clicking a business opens a window with its ownership status, nearby privately owned alternatives, and a neighborhood scorecard showing the local share of private equity-backed food spots. The data, according to the site, comes from investor and parent-company portfolio pages plus Wikipedia articles that cite primary sources.

What does the ownership data show about quality?

Liebowitz is careful not to turn the map into a verdict. Being family-owned, he argues, does not guarantee quality. In one post on X, he singled out Black Seed Bagels — a chain with sleek, clean branding that fits the private equity stereotype but is in fact privately owned. That, he wrote, did not stop the shop from "skimping so bad that the pickled tomato is thicker than the lox" on his pastrami lox sandwich.

The map handles such nuance with a "before vs. after the deal" window. For private equity-owned or backed businesses with enough data, the site tracks how customer satisfaction shifted over time using American Customer Satisfaction Index scores. The results cut both ways: Panera Bread has dropped four ACSI points since JAB Holding Company acquired it in 2017, while Subway has gained five points since Roark bought it.

That split matters for the broader debate. Private equity firms have drawn criticism for buying food establishments that then decline in quality as new owners cut costs, and for displacing mom-and-pop shops. But the ACSI data on the map suggests the post-deal trajectory is not uniform.

What comes next?

Liebowitz says the goal is consumer information, not judgment. "I believe more transparency is always good, especially when it comes to where people decide to spend their money and what businesses to support," he said. "In addition, I hope people use the site to be more objective about restaurants they patronize."

The expansion plan is concrete. Liebowitz intends to add San Francisco and Los Angeles, and to let users submit their own information about businesses to supplement the existing dataset. He also wants to map industries beyond food service that private equity firms often target — nursing homes, real estate, healthcare and dentistry.

The scale of the problem the site addresses is large: New York City alone counts roughly 31,000 food establishments, and the map covers about one-sixth of them so far. If Liebowitz's dataset keeps growing at its launch pace, ownership transparency may become a routine check for diners — and a reputational variable for the firms on the other side of the ledger.