Dave's Hot Chicken Hits 500 Restaurants, Eight Years After a $900 Start

Dave's Hot Chicken opened its 500th restaurant in Phoenix on October 8, Food & Beverage Magazine reports — a count that took the chain just eight years to build from a $900 parking-lot stand.

Three childhood friends launched the business in 2017 with $900, portable fryers and folding tables in an East Hollywood parking lot. Bill Phelps, co-founder of Wetzel's Pretzels, signed on to franchise the concept in 2019. In 2025, Roark Capital — the private equity firm that also owns Subway — bought a majority stake at a valuation of roughly $1 billion.

That is a valuation of about $2 million per restaurant on today's unit count, a frame investors will apply the moment growth slows. The source discloses no revenue, no unit-level economics and no debt structure in the Roark deal.

How fast is the chain actually growing?

In April, Dave's opened a record eight restaurants in a single day — one new location every three hours. The brand now operates in Canada, the Middle East and London. It has signed a 180-restaurant deal spanning ten European countries, and it has sold development rights for more than 1,592 locations worldwide.

That pipeline is more than three times the current store base. Sold development rights, however, are commitments, not built restaurants; franchise agreements routinely expire or shrink before every unit opens.

"We weren't thinking about hundreds of restaurants," co-founder Arman Oganesyan said. "We were focused on making the best hot chicken we could and getting people to try it."

The quote is a reminder that the founders scaled on product demand, not a unit-growth model — but Roark Capital did not write a roughly $1 billion check for modesty. It bought the pipeline.

What does the Roark deal signal?

Roark's portfolio already includes Subway, and adding Dave's gives the firm another protein-heavy, franchise-driven chain with a proven expansion engine. Majority ownership at a roughly $1 billion valuation implies the buyer expects the committed 1,592-plus development rights to convert into operating stores.

The conversion rate on those rights is the number to watch. Eight openings in one day shows the machine can build; it says nothing about whether each new market — ten European countries among them — will absorb Nashville-hot chicken at U.S. volumes.

What is not said matters as much here: no same-store sales figures, no average unit volumes and no international performance data appear in the announcement. In plain terms, the growth story is real, but its profitability remains undisclosed.