The Dish: Here’s why you’re seeing so many dang chicken restaurants

How many times a week could you eat a hamburger? And how many times a week could you eat chicken? If you're like many Americans, the answer to the first question will be "once a week, if that," while the answer to the second is "multiple times." Or maybe "the limit does not exist."

That's one reason why we're seeing so many dang chicken places in Baltimore and beyond, said Scott Bocek, owner of multiple branches of Dave's Hot Chicken, including one that just opened in Columbia.

While many diners watch how much beef they eat and see chicken as a healthier alternative, they don't hesitate to eat it three, four or even five times a week. (I happen to know some children who subsist mainly on a diet of chicken nuggets.)

In the food world these days, it seems like it's chicken, chicken and more chicken.

The week after Dave's opened, Towson welcomed a brand new Chick-fil-A. This year, Mad Chicken launched a branch in downtown Baltimore and has one on the way in Towson. CHX opened in McHenry Row this summer. Zaxby's announced plans to come to the region. Last year, we saw crazy lines at Raising Cane's. Bocek, who already owns Dave's stores in Owings Mills and another in Glen Burnie, plans to bring the restaurants to Bel Air, White Marsh, Towson, Annapolis and Frederick. And that's on top of dozens of other new chicken-centric concepts in the area, including Rooted Rotisserie, which opened last year in Hollins Market.

"We did a lot of research before we settled on a concept" of roast chicken, said Amanda Burton, who runs Rooted Rotisserie with her husband, Joe. "It's something that you're always going to want." At the eatery, familiar chicken serves as an entry point to other, more adventurous dishes — including tinned fish and duck confit gumbo, the latter of which won a rave review from TikTok food critic Keith Lee.

But one of Baltimore's favorite chicken spots didn't set out to be a chicken spot. "When we started the business, I didn't think chicken would sell this well," said Steve Chu, whose local chain of Ekiben restaurants has become synonymous with their most popular sandwich, the Neighborhood Bird. "I didn't think our business would be pretty much bankrolled by chicken."

While Chu called the recent proliferation of chicken-focused restaurants "an interesting phenomenon," he noted that Americans — and Marylanders in particular — have long had a love affair with the bird. (Fun fact: Chicken a la Maryland was on the menu on the Titanic.) Chu remembered reviewing sales about a decade ago at his father's Chinese restaurant, Jumbo Seafood, and finding that despite the eatery offering a full menu of Chinese classics from mapo tofu to moo shu pork, "most of his sales were General Tso's chicken."

But it's not limited to the region. The whole world is obsessed with chicken, Chu said. "We were just in China and there were fried chicken places everywhere."

Chicken is also everywhere in Egypt, said Mad Chicken co-founder Mohamed Elkady. In the country often called the "Mother of the World" in Arabic, people almost never eat pork, and beef is saved for special occasions. So, chicken. With high-quality ingredients and the right processes in place, the dish is "hard to mess up," Elkady said, and lends itself to a fast-food environment. At Mad Chicken downtown, find it on fries or in bowls, in wing form or in tenders. And people love it: Some customers come to his restaurants every single day.

Our voracious appetite for poultry — and willingness to eat it on a near-daily basis — is just one reason that we've been seeing a boom in chicken joints in the past few years, Bocek said. With labor costs and minimum wage both rising, restaurateurs are looking for ways to execute a menu with fewer workers. Limited menus are one solution, able to be made consistently with a smaller staff. "It's such an easier product to replicate," he said. And training is simpler, too. "Here I can train people up in hours versus days," said Bocek, who also owns 17 branches of Qdoba Mexican Eats, where the menu is significantly more involved.

I interviewed Bocek last week just outside the Dave's in Columbia, where an enthusiastic crowd was lining up to order. "I've never seen anything like it," he said of the opening. The eatery, which counts Drake as an investor, allows customers to select from a range of heat levels, from mild all the way up to "reaper," for which a release form must be signed. Before launching Dave's franchises, Bocek worked with Starbucks and then Chipotle at the height of those companies' popularity. "They have a stronger base than both Starbucks and Chipotle," he said of Dave's. And like those chains, Bocek said, Dave's is poised to be the next big thing in quick-service dining.