Chef Dave Kopushyan isn’t afraid of the Reaper heat level he created for Dave’s Hot Chicken but says he usually orders one hot and one mild tender to provide balance.
Dave Kopushyan likens ordering the Reaper chicken tender to buying a round of shots: Everyone has to take one.
“It’s fun to do it in a crowd where it’s like, hey, you take the first bite, and I’ll take the next bite,” says Kopushyan, the architect of a spice blend at Dave’s Hot Chicken that features the Carolina Reaper pepper and its 2.2 million Scoville units. “When a new franchisee would come into our store, it’s like a tradition for us to have a Reaper together.”
Kopushyan is the 33-year-old chef and co-founder of Dave’s Hot Chicken. He’s also a self-described spice nerd. While attending culinary school at the Art Institute of California’s former Los Angeles campus, he gravitated toward the cumin, saffron and of course, cayenne.
“I would open every spice and I would smell it and you know, I was just intrigued on how spices can change the flavor of the food,” he says. In coming up with a simple concept focused on the star menu item of fried chicken, the intricacy of the spices is where Kopushyan’s French-style culinary training truly shines.
“I knew it should be very complex, and a flavor profile that no one can really understand how to replicate,” he says, to prevent copycats. A traditional Nashville hot chicken spice blend includes paprika, cayenne pepper, onion or garlic powder, black pepper and brown sugar, he continues, “but we also have so many different spices and no, I won’t say which ones.”
Before achieving fried chicken fame, Kopushyan landed a job as a prep cook at renowned chef Thomas Keller’s Bouchon restaurant in L.A. It was just after culinary school, and from the celebrated owner Kopushyan says he learned to appreciate the seriousness of the kitchen and to strive for perfection. He later moved around to different restaurants, including Michelin-star French chef Ludo Lefebvre’s Trois Mec and Trois Familia, before coming up with the Dave’s Hot Chicken concept with friends Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Gary Rubenyan.
With a menu tightly focused on its namesake hot chicken, Dave’s Hot Chicken is careful when considering new additions to the lineup.
From its 2017 origins in a parking lot on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, Dave’s Hot Chicken is closing in on 250 locations, including a handful of restaurants in Canada, Dubai, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Its next international market is the United Kingdom after signing a 60-unit deal with London-based restaurant operator Azzurri Group.
At the brand’s headquarters in Pasadena, California, the walls are bedecked in street art murals by the artist, fellow Armenian and childhood friend of the founders who goes by Dehmq. The same team outfits every Dave’s restaurant with brightly colored artwork, Kopushyan says, which helps extend the chill vibe as the brand spreads across the country.
Kopushyan is likewise chill in sneakers, black jeans and a black Dave’s T-shirt featuring the company logo, itself a nod to the vivid yellow rubber chicken the founders discovered at an area flea market. The concept started with only two heat levels, mild or hot, he recalls, but as customer feedback began playing a role, Kopushyan developed another five heat options to ensure there was an approachable entry point for a range of palates.
“Some people would complain that the mild is like too hot for them. In Nashville, the mild is already hot, so we wanted to keep it true to the roots and we made our mild pretty spicy,” he says. “But we also realized a lot of the customers weren’t able to come back because it was spicy … we thought we were losing out on a lot of customers.”
Product innovation since has been deliberate, with an awareness of the pitfalls of menu creep. Restaurants can easily go down a path of adding new items based on prevailing trends, rather than what fits their brand, notes Kopushyan, and he returns often to his “emulator brand,” In-N-Out Burger, to avoid that approach.
“Even though chicken sandwiches might have had like, the craziest lines when Popeyes did a chicken sandwich, In-N-Out was like, hey, we don’t want to introduce anything new, this is what we do,” he says of the fellow California concept that only serves burgers, fries and shakes.
Dave’s in January introduced its first new core menu item since the original parking lot pop-up. Dubbed Dave’s Not Chicken, the cauliflower sandwich starts with a whole head of cauliflower that is hand-sliced, seasoned and fried to order, using the same spices as the hot chicken. Looking for a meat substitute, Kopushyan says he evaluated numerous plant-based products but decided he didn’t want something manufactured in a laboratory. Each cauliflower head yields just three filets, he notes, “but we didn’t want to cheap out and just mush it together and form a patty.”
Snackable chicken bites, which Kopushyan initially was “very much against,” debuted a few months ago and are performing well as a menu extension, as are the Top-Loaded Shakes, an iteration of the original milkshakes featuring crumbled Oreos, M&Ms or Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal. Testing for a line of slushies is underway, along with loaded fries.
The founders are also franchisees, operating 13 restaurants, something Kopushyan says ensures they remain close to the brand while a full C-suite put together in recent years runs the company. Simplicity reigns when it comes to considering changes, menu or otherwise, because while he’s no longer running a late-night hot chicken stand set up with a few hundred bucks and a fryer, Kopushyan still wants his spice blend to shine.
Culinary Q&A with Dave Kopushyan
What’s your guilty pleasure food?
I eat a lot of late-night tacos. Like 1 a.m. tacos. I will say Mexican food, for sure … the place I go to doesn’t even really have a name. It’s just a taco stand in Van Nuys, just in the middle of nowhere. But they make a great taco.
What’s the last thing you cooked at home?
I made a Hawaiian roll egg sandwich that was really good. I made a really good sauce with it, like a whipped cream scallion sauce. I had some chives on the eggs. It was like a cute Hawaiian roll sandwich, four of them, in a square.
If you could have any restaurant-related superpower, what would it be?
I guess whenever it’s slow that I could just bring people in. Is that a superpower? Yeah, it’s a pretty greedy thing to say, hahaha, I don’t want to sound money-hungry or anything.
Who’s one chef you’d like to cook with?
Probably Thomas Keller because I never really cooked by his side as much as I really wanted to. Him and probably Emeril Lagasse, because I grew up watching him my entire life. He’s actually my biggest inspiration, Emeril Lagasse. Just watching him cook from home was getting me excited to go to culinary school.
What’s the weirdest thing in your refrigerator?
Um, cat food? No, I do have something weird. There’s really no name for it, but it’s like cured meat and you cure it with butter. So it’s like a filet of meat covered in cold butter. I love to eat that as an appetizer. It’s like a traditional Armenian dish.
