Exclusive – Azzurri Group to bring US brand Dave’s Hot Chicken to the UK: Azzurri Group, the hospitality investment platform which operates ASK Italian, Zizzi, Coco di Mama and Boojum, has signed a deal to launch Dave’s Hot Chicken, the fast-growing US quick service restaurant brand, into the UK, Propel has learned. The US brand, which was founded in 2017 and has more than 200 sites, has signed a franchise agreement with Azzurri Group to open 60 locations across the UK and Ireland, with the first location planned to open in London by the first quarter of 2025. Dave’s Hot Chicken is one of the fastest growing restaurant brands in US history and is a social media sensation, with 2.4 million TikTok followers and 1.2 million followers on Instagram. Three childhood friends – chef Dave Kopushyan, Arman Oganesyan and Tommy Rubenyan – scraped together $900 to launch Dave’s Hot Chicken in a parking lot in Los Angeles, with portable fryers and folding tables in tow, in 2017. They opened an East Hollywood brick-and-mortar restaurant shortly after. In 2019, the team struck a deal with Wetzel’s Pretzels co-founder and former chief executive, Bill Phelps, to begin franchising the Dave’s Hot Chicken brand, with Billboard’s artist of the decade, Drake, investing in the brand as well, alongside other celebrities including Samuel L Jackson and Usher. The company has sold the rights to more than 700 franchise locations in the US, Middle East and Canada and will open 90-plus locations this year. Steve Holmes, chief executive of Azzurri Group, said: “When we first tried Dave’s Hot Chicken we were blown away as it makes some of the most craveable and delicious food we’ve ever had. We’re excited to bring this incredible brand to the UK and to be their partner in this ambitious roll-out.” The business said that each Dave’s Hot Chicken store is “popping with eye-catching colour and energy, with exclusively designed LA-based street art, reflecting the connection with the parking lot where the brand began”. It specialises in jumbo hot chicken sliders, tenders and bites, along with sides of house-made “kale slaw, creamy mac and cheese and crispy, seasoned French fries”. Offered at seven spice levels ranging from no spice to “reaper” (which requires a signed waiver for those who dare), each piece of hand-breaded chicken is spiced to order. Phelps, chief executive of Dave’s Hot Chicken, said: “We know there is an opportunity to make Dave’s Hot Chicken one of the iconic restaurant brands, and we do that by partnering with incredible operators, like Azzurri Group. The flavour of Dave’s Hot Chicken resonates across borders, and we’re looking forward to the first UK store getting open soon.” Azzurri Group chief executive Steve Holmes will be among the speakers at the Propel Multi-Club Conference and summer party on Thursday, 5 September, at the DoubleTree by Hilton Oxford Belfry. There are up to three free places per company for operators but Premium subscribers can have up to four places. To book, email jo.charity@propelinfo.com. A room can also be booked for the evening. For more details, email jo.charity@propelinfo.com.

 

“Just don’t embarrass me dad!” It is a request/order/plea I am still getting used to from my just turned 12-year-old son, and one echoed on occasion by his two younger siblings. Can you ever be cool to your kids? Well, it seems that Steve Holmes, chief executive of Azzurri Group, may have achieved that and more with his company’s link-up with US brand Dave’s Hot Chicken. Researching the business one weekend, the brand was given a ringing endorsement by Holmes’ 17-year-old son. Holmes says: “The Dave’s Hot Chicken opportunity came about because I had heard about it and I was just having a look at its website. It was on a weekend, and I was chatting to my son and said I had heard about this brand. And he was like ‘Dave’s Hot Chicken! I love Dave’s Hot Chicken. All my friends follow it on social media’. I thought this is random, you all follow a brand I had never heard of until then, and one that has no presence in the UK. So, this piqued my interest even more.”

Holmes reached out to the brand’s founders, told them about the Azzurri business – more than 230 restaurants across the UK and Ireland – and got invited to meet them out in California. From there, he met the team behind the brand, ate the product – “really good” – and found an amazing business that had “phenomenally busy” sites with “real personality”, with a differentiated and unique fried-chicken product. The founders remain involved, including the Dave in the name – Dave Kopushyan, who worked in Michelin-starred kitchens and wanted to apply the culinary craftsmanship he learned as a chef to his passion for Nashville hot chicken. However, for the sake of accessibility and their love of In-N-Out Burger, Kopushyan and his co-founders aimed for a fast-casual dining experience. When Kopushyan had developed his proprietary Nashville hot chicken recipe, the friends collectively invested all of their money to buy the equipment for a fried chicken food cart in a parking lot in East Hollywood in 2017.

Holmes, who has visited that initial parking lot, describes the location as “properly dodgy”. The business did $60 on its first day, $90 on the second day and the momentum kept building. A positive blog/review by a well-known reporter for Eater LA – “this chicken is going to blow your minds”  – meant the following day, they had a queue down the street. Within six months, a first bricks-and-mortar site had opened and was doing $10,000-$12,000 a day in revenue. Investment and endorsements from the likes of Drake, Samuel L Jackson and Usher followed, and according to Holmes, the brand was the fastest growing restaurant business in the US last year. He says: “It has more Instagram followers and Tiktok followers than KFC and Costa Coffee combined globally, from just 200 sites currently.”

 

Its point of difference in terms of cuisine is the hot in the brand’s title. Holmes says: “Dave’s is spicy, it does the Nando’s thing but for fried chicken. It is super popular with young people, generates tremendous revenue, has a massive social media following, big celebrity investment, real personality and design. There’s nothing quite like Dave’s in terms of look and feel. I went out for dinner with the founders and got to know them, and these are great guys. They are really down to earth, passionate, proud people with a fantastic product and a great team. So, we just sort of hit it off, and then we started chatting about it. It’s a bit unusual for us because Azzurri is a brand owner, we don’t do franchising. We obviously franchise Coco a little bit in transport hubs/service stations, but only to a small extent, we are not a franchisee.

“The reality is we liked the business – it is a premium quick service restaurant (QSR) brand, it is a labour-lite model like Boojum, it is a different cuisine, it is a high-quality, affordable product, so it ticks a lot of boxes and we thought it would fit nicely in the Azzurri platform, complementing the other brands. It also gives us something to grow rapidly.” Holmes says the plan is to secure completely new sites for Dave’s, with conversions not on the cards – “all the ASKs, Zizzis and Cocos are profitable, so there is no reason to convert them”. Holmes says: “The mindset is to open new ones, starting with a site in central London in the next six months. If we can do a few in the next calendar year (2025), then that would be brilliant.” The brand’s launch and expansion in the UK will be overseen by Jim Attwood, managing director of Coco Di Mama, who will lead both businesses.

 

Azzurri has also been buoyed by the initial success of Boojum, which it acquired last year. Holmes says: “We set up Azzurri as an investment platform and we run all of our businesses independently. Even though we were known for ASK and Zizzi, that has never been the original plan. We wanted to acquire and grow amazing restaurant businesses with fantastic products and amazing service, and potentially diversify the platform into different cuisines and service models. Coco Di Mama was the first foray, but that was a long time ago (July 2015). Obviously, covid put everything on the back burner a bit, but then we really started to kick on properly with the vision, once people sort of recovered from covid last year, with the acquisition of Boojum. We liked it because it is labour-lite, fast-casual, very high quality, good value for money, good price point product in an area that we think is hugely underserved in Mexican cuisine, relative to say, the US, for example. We think that there’s a huge opportunity for Boojum.”

Mexican fast-casual brand Boojum recently secured its second UK mainland restaurant, in Nottingham. Following its launch on the mainland in Leeds in April, Boojum is opening a 2,377 square-foot restaurant in Nottingham’s Lower Parliament Street, opposite the Victoria Centre. Established in 2007 in Belfast, Boojum has 17 outlets across Ireland, Northern Ireland and the UK mainland, and plans to open 25 sites over the next five years in major UK student cities. A site in Birmingham’s New Street is also set to open later this year. 

 

Anyone who has followed the growth of the UK’s fried chicken scene over the last few years will know that Azzurri is introducing Dave’s Hot Chicken into a highly competitive, fast-paced category. A brilliant piece from Harry Wallop in the Sunday Times yesterday – How fried chicken took over the British high street – highlighted the growth of the market and its popularity with the UK consumer. As Wallop wrote: “In the 12 months to May, Brits spent £4.58bn on chicken in fast-food outlets according to Kantar, a research firm that tracks the spending of 30,000 families in the country. This is the equivalent of £70 for every person in Britain, hugely exceeding the £1.98bn we spent on beef from a fast-food place. In some postcodes in the UK there is one chicken shop for every 500 people – way exceeding the density of pubs.” Popeyes UK has 37 restaurants, plus a large business on Deliveroo, and is on track to post an annual turnover of £150m, despite being here for only two and a half years. Tom Crowley, its chief executive, said: “The reason we came [to the UK] was there was this big explosion of chicken growth here. We definitely saw white space in chicken. Wherever we’ve opened — from Glasgow to Plymouth and Cardiff to Cambridge — we’ve done well. That gives us confidence.”

 

White space remains a key factor. Both Popeyes and Wingstop have indicated they could eventually have 350 sites each in the UK. The market leader, KFC, currently has 1,035 sites across the UK and Ireland. Since 2018, KFC has opened 200 new restaurants across the UK and Ireland, and the brand’s ambition is to open a further 500 restaurants across the region by 2030. That’s before mentioning the roll out plans from the likes of Slim Chickens, Morley’s, Chicken Cottage, Chicken Shop, Butchies, Thunderbird and the soon to return to these shores Chick-Fil-A. Dave’s Hot Chicken will find in the UK that it is not the only fried chicken brand built – in part – on celebrity endorsements and social media presence.

It is also a bold move by Azzurri, another major step away from its mid-market Italian roots, but one Holmes is excited about. He says: “It is really interesting for us. It is one that has sort of developed. It’s not like we went out and said Wingstop is doing brilliantly and we’ve got to go out and find a fast casual QSR business. We are talking to people all the time about all sorts of businesses, and my son was so obsessed with it that I thought there must be something in it. So, it was something that just sort of happened. I’m excited about what we can do with the brand here.”