COVER STORY
From a three-day notice to 45 restaurants and a $100M restaurant empire. David Mkhitaryan built Angry Chickz into one of the most compelling restaurant brands in America on nothing but instinct, obsession, and heat
The real curriculum started in the kitchen. David Mkhitaryan grew up in Los Angeles, the son of a restaurateur. He moved to Fresno at 18, and by the time most kids his age were navigating high school, he was already navigating the line. The pace of service. The math of prep. The almost physical sensation of a kitchen finding its rhythm on a Saturday night. He dropped out of high school and stayed in the restaurant. Not because he had no other options, but because he had already found the only one that interested him.
On weekends, he and his friends drove all over, chasing the most interesting food they could find. They saved their money and spent it wherever something new was happening, not to be seen, but to taste. To study. David wanted to know what made a dish stay with you after you left, what created food that people craved. He was asking that question years before the industry had a word for the kind of person asking it.
The Risk That Changes Everything
At 28, after multiple failed attempts at entrepreneurship in Fresno, he moved back to Los Angeles with his wife and their one-year-old child. He invested his life savings into a small restaurant in east Hollywood. No investors. No safety net. Barely enough to move into a one-bedroom apartment to pursue his dream.
He started simple, borrowing menu items from his father's kitchen, built around flavors that felt personal. Coupled with authenticity and discipline, it still struggled and eventually closed. David found himself at a crossroads familiar to many operators, until a buyer came forward to buy the restaurant. Would he take the exit and move on or was he going to give it one more try?
He declined. What came next would not look like anything he had done before.
The Dish He Could Not Forget
David had always had an appetite for heat, the kind of spice that announces itself and lingers. So, when he first encountered Nashville hot chicken, the effect was less discovery than recognition. This was the dish. Not to replicate, but to inhabit, to pull apart and rebuild according to his own instincts and the palate he had spent two decades sharpening.
He tested obsessively. He adjusted. He threw out what was not working and went back to the beginning until what remained was exactly what he intended. The resulting menu was seven items built around chicken tenders, with a heat scale running from Country, which carries no spice at all, to Angry, a level so committed to its name that ordering it requires a signed liability waiver. The simplicity was not a limitation. It was the argument. Do a few things with total conviction and let the food make the case.
Three People, a Baby, and a Line Around the Block
In those early weeks, the storefront was quiet. David worked the line. His wife ran the register. His best friend stepped in to help. Led by passion and grit, they worked 14-hour days, seven days a week to pursue David’s dream. Their one-year-old occupied a playpen in the back office. They kept their heads down and cooked the same food the same way every day.
Then the Instagram posts started to move. Not algorithmically, not through paid promotion, but the way food travels when it is genuinely worth eating. People tagged friends. Friends showed up. One morning David arrived and there was a line out the door. The three of them handled it. There was no other option, and no one present was looking for one.
Running Out of People to Call
As locations multiplied across Los Angeles, David did what founders with deep roots in family tend to do. He staffed with people he trusted, family, close friends, people whose character he already knew. It was a practical solution and a natural one for a brand built on personal loyalty rather than corporate systems.
The Strategy Nobody Else Was Running
When Angry Chickz began expanding beyond Southern California, David made a deliberate choice to go where other brands were not. He opened in Fresno. He targeted markets that the major chains had either overlooked or written off, communities with real appetite and no adequate answer to it yet.
What he understood, and what those openings confirmed, is that an underserved market does not just welcome something new. It becomes evangelical about it. There is a loyalty available in communities that have been consistently passed over that saturated urban markets, with their endless rotation of options and their short attention spans, simply cannot offer. By the time a national competitor arrives in one of these cities, Angry Chickz has already been there, already built the relationship, and has already become the answer to a question that the community has been asking for years.
“I'm very intentional in our growth,” David has said. "I want to build something sustainable instead of trying to be the fastest-growing brand.” From Los Angeles, the brand extended into other cities—Fresno, Bakersfield, Sacramento, Visalia, San Jose—before expanding into Nevada, Arizona, and Texas.
Saratoga Investment Corp. subsequently invested to fuel national expansion, helping position the brand to reach 60 restaurants across seven states, approximately $135 million in sales and over 1,300 employees in the year ahead.
With 350 employees across 18 restaurants, David knew he needed to find help outside of his family and friends. In late 2022, he brought in Peter Tremblay as COO. Tremblay arrived with the kind of operational experience that transforms a collection of successful restaurants into a scalable company. The next chapter required a different kind of team, and David was clear-eyed enough to build one.
The Founder Who Did Not Disappear
There is a version of this story where David Mkhitaryan, having built something real, hands it to a management team and recedes into ownership. That is not the story he is writing. Despite the brand's growth, David remains the sole owner of Angry Chickz, retaining 100 percent ownership while continuing to lead the company as CEO.
That presence is not incidental to what Angry Chickz is. It is the reason the brand feels like something a person built rather than something a committee approved. A high school dropout who spent his teenage years studying restaurants the way other kids studied for exams, who does not walk away even when it means moving in with relatives in Los Angeles to keep the dream alive and give it one more try. He stays in it. He keeps cooking.
Long before Angry Chickz became a brand, it was a bet David Mkhitaryan kept making on himself.
