Hady Kfoury opened his first restaurant in Manhattan in 2008 already out of money. He had raised cash from friends and family to bring Lebanese food to New York, but construction ran over budget, he still owed his general contractor, and he bought equipment on eBay just to open the doors of the 54-seat space.
No bailout, no subsidy — just family capital and a debt to pay off.
That restaurant has since grown into 48 locations under the NAYA name, employing more than 1,000 people. Average annual sales run around $3 million per restaurant, with same-store sales growth above 10% a year and the footprint expanding more than 40% annually over the past four years. Kfoury's next target is 200 restaurants by 2030.
Kfoury was born in Lebanon in 1981, during the country's civil war, and recalls sheltering from bombs on some school days. After studying hospitality in Switzerland and working in New York under chef Daniel Boulud, he returned to Lebanon — only to live through another war in 2006. He decided to move to the U.S. permanently and start a restaurant built on the flavors he grew up with: chicken kebabs, falafel, rice with vermicelli, baba ghanoush and hummus, recipes his mother and aunt helped him write down for the first time.
Back in New York in 2007, landlords wouldn't lease to a first-time restaurant owner. Kfoury eventually took a space that wasn't suited for the high-volume fast-casual concept he wanted, so he opened NAYA as fine dining instead. He didn't convert to the fast-casual model until 2010, then spent roughly a decade refining it. By 2019, NAYA had just seven restaurants.
The category has since caught up to him. Fast-casual Mediterranean chains generated just under $2.5 billion in sales last year, according to Technomic data cited by Fortune, with category sales jumping 16% in 2025 — nearly triple the 6% growth of the broader fast-casual segment. Technomic tracks about 30 leading Mediterranean chains with a combined footprint of roughly 1,500 restaurants.
The category leader shows the ceiling. Publicly traded Cava ended its latest quarter with 476 restaurants, nearly ten times NAYA's count, yet the two chains post similar per-unit economics: Cava's average unit volume was $3.1 million versus roughly $3 million at NAYA. Cava's same-store sales rose 9% in the quarter, driven partly by a 5.3% increase in traffic.
Kfoury also points to a shift in consumer familiarity. A decade ago, he said, maybe three in 10 customers knew what shawarma was; today it's eight or nine in 10.
There is no government program in this story, no stimulus check, no tariff protection — only a product refined over nearly two decades until the market caught up to it. Kfoury bet his own capital, absorbed years of losses while 'people didn't get it,' and let unit economics, not subsidy, decide whether the concept scaled.
That is the case for free enterprise in miniature: an immigrant with no track record, shut out by landlords, builds a $3-million-a-unit chain on family recipes and borrowed money. The market did the rest.
