Follow the money.

This site answers one question about restaurants, cafes and bars in New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles: who ultimately owns each establishment? So we decided to dig into the data and make what we found available to the public.

What the labels mean

PE-owned: the brand’s ultimate parent is a private equity firm (a buyout) or an investment holding company such as JAB (holding company).
PE-backed (outlined red, +): a private equity or growth equity firm holds a confirmed stake but isn’t confirmed as the controlling owner.
VC-backed (black outline, V): venture capital investors hold stakes; no controlling owner confirmed. We classify firms by how they describe themselves. If a brand has both kinds of investor, it gets the status of its lead or most recent major investor, and the detail view lists all of them.
A minority stake label means a confirmed non-controlling investment (including venture capital), with the investor named; PE-backed (stake undisclosed) means a PE or investment firm is a confirmed major backer but the size of its stake isn’t public. The type is shown on every brand.
Privately-Owned (Operator) (slate, R): owned by a company whose business is running restaurants, not investing (e.g. Craveworthy Brands, Convive Brands).
Privately-Owned (Family) (green, F): owned by a family or its founders, only where a source says so.
Other known ownership (gray, •): we found the owner and it fits none of the above (e.g. La Colombe, owned by the food company Chobani).
Ownership unclear: we couldn’t confirm the current owner. Yellow means unresolved, not “probably PE.”
Public company (purple, P): the brand is owned by a publicly traded company, shown with its parent and ticker where one of our sources gives it. Shown by default; you can turn them off in the Ownership filter.

Public companies

Chains owned by publicly traded companies (like McDonald’s, Starbucks or Burger King’s parent, Restaurant Brands International) are owned by their shareholders, and their ownership is already public record. They’re on the map as their own category, Public company, and they’re shown by default. If you’d rather keep the map focused on private ownership, turn them off in the Ownership filter. They’re included in the total behind the PE percentages you see on the site (for example, the share of mapped places that are PE-owned or PE-backed), but they’re never counted as PE-owned themselves.

What’s not here (yet)

The map covers chains we’ve researched, not every restaurant in each city. A place that doesn’t show up isn’t necessarily independent.

Before vs. after the deal

For brands that took a private equity, venture or other outside investment, the detail view shows a before vs. after score. Here’s how it works:

The score is the brand’s published American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) score, 0–100. ACSI surveys a national sample of each chain’s customers every year. Each year’s score covers surveys from April of the prior year through March.
Before is the latest score whose survey window ended before the deal. After is the most recent score whose survey window started after the deal. If a survey year straddles the deal, we skip it.
We store only published aggregate numbers, each with its source and date. We never copy or store individual reviews. Google and Yelp terms don’t allow scraping or storing their ratings, so we don’t use them.
No data, no score. Most chains here aren’t big enough for ACSI to measure, or weren’t measured before their deal. Those show “Not enough data.” We never estimate.
It’s national, not your block. The score reflects the whole chain, not one location. Lots of things move a satisfaction score, including prices, inflation, menus and the pandemic, so a change after a deal doesn’t prove the deal caused it.

Neighborhood scorecards & nearby alternatives

A neighborhood’s scorecard shows what share of the chain locations we’ve mapped there are PE-owned or PE-backed. It doesn’t count every restaurant, so treat it as a rough signal. The “privately owned nearby” list shows the closest mapped places owned by a family or a restaurant operator, according to our sources.

Brand vs. location

Most chains here are franchised. A PE firm owning the brand doesn’t mean it owns the store on your corner, which may belong to an independent franchisee. We label those locations “brand owned by X; this location may be independently franchised.” We don’t yet track franchisees.

Sources and method

Ownership comes from first-party sources (investor and parent-company portfolio pages) and Wikipedia articles that cite primary reporting. Each relationship records its sources, the date it began when a source states it, and whether it’s verified.
If a source doesn’t give a date, we say “date not sourced” instead of guessing.
In NYC, locations come from OpenStreetMap, matched by each brand’s Wikidata ID. In the Bay Area and Los Angeles we also use Overture Maps Places (the October 21, 2026 release), merged with OpenStreetMap when name, address, coordinates, phone or website agree; Overture’s own brand label is only a hint, never proof of ownership. For a few local chains that OSM doesn’t tag with a brand ID, we match by name within food places only and flag those locations. Neighborhoods come from NYC’s 2020 Neighborhood Tabulation Areas, DataSF’s Analysis Neighborhoods (San Francisco), U.S. Census TIGER/Line city and county boundaries (rest of the Bay Area) and the Los Angeles Times’ Mapping L.A. boundaries (CC BY-SA). The Bay Area means all nine counties: San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara (Silicon Valley, including San Jose), Alameda (including Oakland and Berkeley), Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Sonoma and Solano. Los Angeles means the City of Los Angeles plus 14 neighboring cities (Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Culver City, Inglewood, Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, South Pasadena, El Segundo, Hawthorne, Alhambra, San Fernando and Vernon); the boundaries are simplified, so places near an edge can be misassigned. OSM is volunteer-mapped, so some locations may be missing, closed or misplaced.
For Bay Area and Los Angeles places we label operating status as active (confirmed), likely active, closed (confirmed) or unresolved, with the date of the latest record. “Confirmed” means a name-matched food-facility inspection or permit record within the 24 months before that dataset’s newest record: Santa Clara, San Francisco, Alameda, Marin and Sonoma counties and LA County Environmental Health (Pasadena, Vernon and Long Beach run their own health departments and aren’t in that dataset). San Mateo’s public file is out of date, and Contra Costa, Napa and Solano don’t publish bulk data we can download, so those places can only be “likely active” (Overture says open, or an active California ABC license at a matching business name) or unresolved. We drop places the records show as closed, and flag the rest. Business names on ABC licenses, LA County permits and San Francisco’s business registry appear on a place as “legal entity on public records.” They identify who holds a license, not who owns the brand, and never by themselves support a private-equity label.
Each ownership claim carries a confidence level (confirmed, probable or unresolved) and the date of its newest source. When sources disagree we show both claims instead of picking silently.

What this isn’t

It’s not complete, and it’s not a verdict. It doesn’t cover independent restaurants, whose ownership rarely appears in public records. If a place isn’t here, that doesn’t mean it’s independent. We aim to be neutral: we report ownership, not whether it’s good or bad.

Corrections

Spot something wrong or out of date? Message @defidave on Twitter with a source and we’ll review it.