Lazy Dog does not advertise like a chain. The name sounds like a bar somebody named after their dog (which is roughly what happened), the dining rooms are done up in timber and stone, and the menu runs to pot roast, chicken pot pie and a rotating list of house beers. Plenty of first-time visitors leave thinking they have found a neighborhood place. They have found one of 51.
Is Lazy Dog a chain? Yes, and a steadily growing one
Lazy Dog is a chain. Lazy Dog Restaurant & Bar opened its first restaurant in Orange County, California, in 2003 and had grown to 51 restaurants across eight states by May 2026. All of them are owned and operated by the company.
That growth was funded the way most restaurant growth is funded. A private equity firm bought a majority stake and wrote checks for new units. Since 2013 that firm has been Brentwood Associates, and the chain has gone from 12 restaurants at the time of the deal to more than four times that today.
| Question | Lazy Dog |
|---|---|
| Is it a chain? | Yes |
| Who owns it? | Brentwood Associates (private equity, majority since 2013); founder Chris Simms and management hold a minority stake |
| Publicly traded? | No, privately held |
| Franchised? | No, every location is company-owned |
| US locations | 51 in eight states (May 2026) |
| Founded | 2003, Orange County, California, by Chris Simms |
| Locally owned? | No |
Who owns Lazy Dog?
Brentwood Associates, a Los Angeles private equity firm, has been the majority owner of Lazy Dog since July 2013. The price was never disclosed. At the time Lazy Dog had 12 restaurants, all in California, and Brentwood's stated purpose was to pay for new ones. That is what happened.
Founder Chris Simms is still the chief executive, and he and his management team kept what the company called a substantial equity stake. Simms put it plainly to Forbes in 2019: Brentwood is the majority owner, it adds value, and it lets him run the company his way. His father, Tom Simms, joined the board after the deal and knows the playbook well. He founded Mimi's Cafe, another Southern California concept that grew into a national chain.
So the money trail is short. Your check goes to a company controlled by a private equity fund whose investors expect a return, with the founding family and executives holding a meaningful but minority share.
Is Lazy Dog publicly traded? Is it a franchise?
No on both counts. Lazy Dog is a private company with no stock ticker. Brentwood Associates is itself private, so there is no public filing that shows you Lazy Dog's numbers, only what executives choose to share with the trade press. Two figures they have shared: revenue of $175.9 million in 2018, and average sales of nearly $8.5 million per restaurant as of late 2025.
It does not franchise either. Simms has said the concept is too complicated to hand to franchisees, so every Lazy Dog is company-owned. That matters for the local question in one specific way. At a franchised chain, the person who owns your nearest unit might actually live in your town. At Lazy Dog, nobody local owns anything. The restaurant is a corporate outpost, however warm the room feels.
How many Lazy Dog locations are there?
51 as of May 2026, in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, Texas and Virginia. California still has the largest share, since the chain spent its first decade almost entirely in the state.
Four more were listed as coming soon on the company's site in September 2026: Mira Mesa in San Diego, Castle Rock in Colorado, Algonquin in the Chicago suburbs, and King of Prussia outside Philadelphia, which will be the first Lazy Dog in Pennsylvania. Growth has been steady rather than explosive: 12 units in 2013, 26 in 2018, 30 in 2019, and past 50 by 2025.
Why Lazy Dog feels independent when it is not
The design is the trick, and it is a good one. Simms has said the whole concept grew out of family trips to the Rocky Mountains, and the name came from the family's black Lab dozing by a lodge fireplace on a Jackson Hole ski trip. Every restaurant is built to deliver that feeling: exposed beams, a fireplace, a patio with its own menu for dogs.
Those cues read as local because they are the cues local places use. A mountain lodge in a Texas strip mall is still a template, though, and the same template shows up in Florida and Virginia. Lazy Dog deserves credit for executing it well. It does not deserve credit for being independent.
- Mountain-lodge design meant to evoke a small town in the Rockies, repeated at every location.
- A name with a real backstory (the family dog), which sounds like an owner-run bar.
- Scratch-made comfort food and house beers, the menu of a neighborhood place, served at 51 addresses.
Is that a bad thing?
Not on its own. The food is made from scratch, the beer program is better than it needs to be, and the service culture wins industry awards. A lot of towns would be worse off without one.
The only problem is the assumption. If you picked Lazy Dog because you wanted your money to stay in town, most of it did not. Wages stayed, and the sales tax. The profit went to corporate headquarters in Orange County and to a fund on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
Building each restaurant to look like a mountain-town local is a design choice. It does not change whose fund owns the majority.
How to find genuinely independent restaurants
Nearly every town with a Lazy Dog also has a real owner-run American restaurant, the kind where the person who signs the checks is on the floor at dinner. They are hard to spot on the usual apps because the chains buy the ad slots and pile up the review counts.
Anything But A Chain maps only independent, locally owned restaurants and filters every chain out automatically, Lazy Dog included. Open the map, search near you, and everything you see is the real thing.