The private equity vultures circled American business for decades.
They bought beloved brands, stripped them for parts, and walked away rich while everyone else picked up the pieces.
And Hooters CEO just exposed what private equity did to this restaurant chain.
Private Equity Caught Serving Fake Sauce For 20 Years
Neil Kiefer has been with Hooters since 1983 when six buddies opened the first location in Clearwater, Florida as a beach-themed hangout.
He watched as his restaurant became an American institution with over 400 locations nationwide.
Then he watched private equity tear it to pieces.
Kiefer is now CEO of Hooters Inc., the founding group that just reclaimed 140 locations from bankruptcy after private equity firms drove Hooters of America into the ground.¹
What Kiefer found when he took over should make every American furious.
"I can tell you, of those 110 stores we've taken over, [those locations] haven't had the original sauce on them in 20 years," Kiefer told Fox News Digital.²
Twenty years of fake sauce.
Two decades of customers paying good money for counterfeit wings while private equity pocketed the difference.
"They had a substitute sauce, which was not the real sauce," Kiefer said. "It's the craveable thing that makes our food so good."³
The company had to clear out inherited inventory "that didn't meet our specifications" before restoring recipes to their original "taste profiles."⁴
Kiefer called the original Hooters sauce "a craveable sauce" that was lacking in locations from El Paso, Texas to Fairfax, Virginia.⁵
Private equity didn't just cut corners on sauce.
They destroyed everything that made Hooters successful.
The Private Equity Playbook Destroyed An American Institution
The pattern is always the same with these Wall Street raiders.
Private equity firms bought Hooters twice since 2011 when the original founders first sold.
First came Chanticleer Holdings in 2011. Then Nord Bay and TriArtisan Capital Advisors in 2019.
Each time they borrowed hundreds of millions using the restaurants as collateral, forcing Hooters to pay interest on loans the private equity firms pocketed.
Nearly a quarter of locations closed between 2019 and 2024.⁶
Average revenue per restaurant dropped from $4.6 million at Hooters Inc. locations to just $2.3 million at private equity-owned stores.⁷
The same playbook destroyed Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, and Buca di Beppo.
Golden Gate Capital bought Red Lobster in 2014, immediately sold all the real estate for $1.5 billion, then Red Lobster had to pay $200 million yearly to rent buildings it once owned.⁸
Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May 2024.
The private equity owners walked away rich while 36,000 workers lost their jobs.
"Red Lobster is yet another example of that private-equity playbook of harming restaurants and retailers in the long run," said Andrew Park, senior policy analyst at Americans for Financial Reform.⁹
More than 20 restaurant chains filed for bankruptcy in 2025, with ten backed by private equity.¹⁰
Original Owners Fight Back Against Corporate Vultures
Kiefer and the other Hooters founders kept their 22 original Florida and Chicago locations separate from Hooters of America.
Those restaurants thrived while private equity drove the rest into the ground.
Average revenue hit $4.6 million per location.¹¹
When Hooters of America filed for bankruptcy in March 2025, Kiefer saw his chance.
"We're not just acquiring restaurants — we're taking back the Hooters name to show the world who we really are," Kiefer said.¹²
The founders invested $40 million to fix what private equity broke.¹³
Real wing sauce made with Grade AA butter instead of margarine.
Fresh fish instead of frozen.
Original athletic-style uniforms instead of the skimpy shorts private equity introduced that embarrassed servers and drove away families.
"I think the ones that have made the mistake, they oversexualized the concept," Kiefer said. "[Hooters] is not about that really. It's a beach hangout place."¹⁴
Customer demographics tell the story.
At Hooters Inc. locations with original uniforms and food, women and children make up 28% to 40% of customers.
At private equity stores, only 5% to 18%.¹⁵
The new Hooters location in The Villages, Florida retirement community became a six-figure weekly revenue store since opening in June 2025.¹⁶
Americans over 60 grew up with Hooters in the 1980s and now have disposable income to dine out frequently.
They remember what the real restaurant was like before Wall Street got its hands on it.
Kiefer isn't rushing to expand until he fixes every location private equity destroyed.
"We want to get the brand right again everywhere… before we start signing people up for the sake of just bringing money in," Kiefer said. "This is about getting the thing right. We're not in this to sell this. I'm not a young person. We got into all this to keep this around forever."¹⁷
That's the difference between founders who built a business and private equity vultures who strip it for parts.
Hooters is fighting back.
The question is how many other beloved American brands will get destroyed before Washington does something about Wall Street's legalized looting.
¹ Jonathan Maze, "Hooters founders reclaim company after court approves bankruptcy exit," Nation's Restaurant News, November 4, 2025.
² Peter Burke, "Hooters CEO reveals most customers were served wrong wing sauce for 20 years," Fox News, December 23, 2025.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Lizzy Gurdus, "How Hooters' founders plan to fix the brand," Restaurant Business Online, December 18, 2025.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Gretchen Morgenson and Chloe Atkins, "How private equity rolled Red Lobster," NBC News, June 4, 2024.
⁹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Natasha Piñon, "How private equity played a role in Red Lobster and TGI Fridays bankruptcies," CNBC, February 25, 2025.
¹¹ Gurdus, "How Hooters' founders plan to fix the brand."
¹² Maze, "Hooters founders reclaim company."
¹³ "Hooters' Founders Aim to Revive Chain: 'America Needs Us,'" El-Balad.com, October 20, 2025.
¹⁴ Gurdus, "How Hooters' founders plan to fix the brand."
¹⁵ Phil Wahba, "Hooters CEO Neil Kiefer said private equity took the restaurant chain 'too far.' Now he's spurring its family-friendly comeback," Fortune, November 14, 2025.
¹⁶ Burke, "Hooters CEO reveals most customers were served wrong wing sauce."
¹⁷ Ibid.