DEAL ROOM: The M&A Window Is Wide Open — Here’s How We Play the Back Half of 2026
This week’s Deal Room goes to Houston TX Hot Chicken (“HHC”), the Las Vegas-born, Savory Fund-backed concept that didn’t exist five years ago and our friends at PizzaExpress.
HHC made its first move outside the U.S., and its partner isn’t a first-time franchisee. It’s PizzaExpress, one of the most established casual-dining names in the U.K. and Ireland with nearly 500 restaurants, 100-plus international sites, and a lineage back to 1965.
The structure is a master franchise agreement, three HHC units in 2026, scaling to 50 over three years. PizzaExpress carries the real estate, the labor pipeline, the operational muscle. HHC brings the brand, the flavor system, and the cultural energy of a concept with ~400,000 followers and a waiver-required, 2-million-Scoville “Houston, We Have a Problem!” sandwich.
All of the above is nice, but that’s not the story here.
For thirty years, “American brand goes international” meant a U.S. chain planting its own flag overseas and learning the market the hard way. This partnership flips it.
A British legacy operator went shopping in America, found a four-year-old brand, and pulled it into its own house of brands. Ben Lawrence, PizzaExpress’s international director, wasn’t browsing in the US, he was hunting. He’s said the team wanted a concept to complement its core brand and had spotted “a gap in the market for a high-energy chicken brand” in a country where hot chicken still isn’t mainstream. The tell: a mature operator treating an American upstart as the missing piece in its portfolio (not just a tenant to rent space to).
Friends, operators, here’s the message I want you to take away from this, flavor is now a category export, not just a brand export.
What crossed the Atlantic isn’t a logo, it’s an idea. When a 500-unit operator decides it needs Nashville-hot energy in its lineup, the category itself is worth licensing. Turn a regional food idea into a repeatable system and you’ve built an asset the world wants to rent.
The U.K. is open like it hasn’t been in a decade.
Casual dining crashed in 2018 and never fully recovered with roughly a 20% drop in units over sixteen years. Prime real estate is freeing up, inflation-squeezed diners are trading down into fast-casual and QSR, and chicken is cheap, craveable, and on a flywheel.
HHC is joining a stampede: Dave’s Hot Chicken (via Azzurri), Raising Cane’s (first London flag), Chick-fil-A (Leeds, a $100mm commitment), and our own partners at Big Chicken (which debuted at the Co-op Live Arena in Manchester). The reverse British invasion is real (and it’s heavily feathered).
Private equity now has a de-risked international on-ramp, and this is the part the capital side should sit with.
Our friends at Savory didn’t fund HHC to open its own units in Manchester. It proved the concept at home (nearly 30 units, 100-plus franchises sold, No. 217 on the Inc. 5000) and then handed foreign-market execution to a partner who already owns the ground game. Master-franchise into a local giant and you turn international expansion from a capital gamble into a royalty stream. That’s how you go global without betting the fund.
The asset that traveled wasn’t the restaurant. It was the brand system and the operating foundation under it. HHC didn’t stumble into this; it spent 2025 rebuilding to scale, restarting franchise sales, reworking recipes, pulling sauce in-house BEFORE signing 206 U.S. agreements and a 120-unit pipeline.
Brian Simowitz, HHC’s president and a former Applebee’s international hand, says the brand wasn’t even courting international, PizzaExpress came to them, and what sealed it was a partner who knows how to build and protect an iconic brand, not just fill sites.
Fifty units in three years is ambition, not a guarantee. Yes, I’m told often that the chicken lane is crowding fast (question: are the pizza, burger, taco lanes not crowded and fiercely competitive?!?).
The lesson holds for every operator and every fund holding one: build something with real cultural energy and a real foundation underneath it, and the opportunity comes looking for you. You don’t have to chase it across an ocean.
The Branded team respects that HHC knows fried chicken, but know firsthand few players know the U.K. better than PizzaExpress. The best international expansion is the one where your partner takes the risk and you keep the brand.
Fly HHC and PizzaExpress, Fly!
