From LA food stand to billion-dollar brand, how Dave’s Hot Chicken got us hooked

Throughout ancient mythology, birds have often prefigured good fortune for characters keen enough to spot them.

So it goes then that during the early days, when the three 20-somethings behind Dave’s Hot Chicken laid eyes on a single, limp rubber chicken for sale — just as they meandered around a local swap meet in the search of cheap kitchen equipment — it stopped them dead.

“We're like, what are the chances there's one rubber chicken inside a kitchen store, when we're trying to open up a chicken restaurant,” said Arman Oganesyan, one of the three cofounders along with Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan.

L-R: Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan.

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Courtesy Dave's Hot Chicken

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The trio announced earlier this week that they signed what’s purported to be a billion-dollar deal with Roark Capital, a private equity firm that owns brands like Dunkin' and Baskin-Robbins.

Quite a coup, considering they famously got their start with some foldout tables and fryers in a Hollywood parking lot back in 2017 with a pooled $900 worth of savings.

Their rubber chicken logo that put them in the public's consciousness

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Courtesy Dave's Hot Chicken

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Needless to say, they brought the rubber chicken home, and decided to use the goofy oddity as their logo.

“And every time people see a rubber chicken, they'll think of the brand and every time they see a brand, they'll think of the rubber chicken, and it'll be this really crazy snowball effect,” said Oganesyan, who’s known as the marketing genius behind the brand, or in his words the “talker.”

That strategy behind the crude but indelible logo that draws eyes all throughout the city “worked kind of perfectly over time,” he added.

It's just one of a number of serendipitous moments that happened just perfectly, allowing these local boys to catch lightning in a bottle — proving that friends can actually be successful business partners under the right circumstances.

Childhood friends

The three friends grew up in the heart of Hollywood “with nothing,” Oganesyan said. He's known Rubenyan since kindergarten, and met Dave Kopushyan — the one with the cooking skills — in middle school on what was actually Kopushyan’s birthday.

His brain started clicking some years later in 2017, when Oganesyan said he saw Nashville-style chicken start to trend hard.

“I'm like, damn. Dave's this culinary guy. We're good friends. We have great chemistry. If we could maybe work on a recipe and kind of jump in on this, like strike while the iron's hot?” he said.

Except Kopushyan — who had previously cooked at the French Laundry, as well as several Los Angeles restaurants — was actually a vegetarian at the time. He was also working as a chef at Echo Park’s Elf Café, then a vegetarian restaurant. (Elf just closed its doors on June 1.)

It took some prodding, as “he wasn’t about it at first,” said Oganesyan, who was already a fried chicken fiend. But he finally got Kopushyan to give the Nashville-style chicken a look, as he couldn’t deny it was getting seriously popular.

Quickly, “he was kind of hooked,” Oganesyan said. They started developing the patented Dave’s Hot Chicken coating — which relied on “baseline ingredients” accessible anywhere, which would help with scaling the business later — at Dave’s home over a period of months.

Tommy Rubenyan entered the picture as their main and “only believer,” Oganesyan said. None of their other friends were interested in going in with them on a food truck at the time. But Tommy was just like, “Yeah, I'm down. I'm like down to whatever.”

After deciding on the recipe, Rubenyan found the Thai Town parking lot where they’d set up shop just a few blocks from his place on Alexandria street. He was the one to make the call — “Well, we should start tomorrow” — even though they didn’t have any permits.

The appealing yet simple menu

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Courtesy Dave's Hot Chicken

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“He was like, ‘No one’s going to give three kids permits,’” Oganesyan recalled.

They could worry about paperwork later. Eventually, Rubenyan's brother Gary came on board and helped them open their first brick and mortar.

Perfecting the batter

Oganesyan, Kopushyan and Rubenyan are Armenian. Oganesyan moved to L.A. from Armenia when he was 2. Kopushyan and Rubenyan were born here shortly after their families arrived. Hot chicken isn’t really a thing in Armenian cooking, Oganesyan said, though the culture is very spice-heavy and they brought a hint of those flavors into their batter.

But Kopushyan had a Korean roommate and another from South Carolina who were into chicken. “So everybody kind of gave their input and we had all of these different pals who would come in and like help guide us.” In the end, what they got was an amalgam of “different cultures and palettes,” he said.

Another moment of luck occurred when Farley Elliot, then-senior editor at Eater LA, visited their chicken stand just a few days after they opened and gave them a writeup, telling readers the chicken would "blow their mind." He’d been made privy by the owner of nearby bar Tabula Rasa that these guys were cooking up some good chicken.

The day after Elliot’s article hit, they had a line of 60 to 70 waiting customers, Oganesyan said. From there, he continued to push the brand through an intense and focused “craving”-fueled social media strategy. But none of that would matter, he added, if the foundation wasn’t the strength of their food, as they had no marketing budget back then.

Could this stroke of good fortune have happened anywhere but L.A. at this particular moment in time?

“I always say that there's very few places where you could have done it like this,” Oganesyan said. “But I think L.A. played a very, very big role in how popular it got and how fast it got that popular. Because anything that trends in L.A., it creates this wave feeling where people catch that wave.”

“Like even hot chicken in general, before it came to L.A., obviously the only place they had hot chicken was in Nashville," Oganesyan added. "It was there for like 30 years and it comes to L.A. for a year and it becomes the most popular thing you could eat.”