When Hady Kfoury opened his first Manhattan restaurant in 2008, he had already run out of money. He had raised funds from friends and family to bring the Lebanese food of his childhood to New York, but construction had cost more than anticipated. He still owed his general contractor and resorted to buying equipment on eBay just to open the doors of the 54-seat restaurant.

"It was a nightmare," Kfoury told Fortune.

That nightmare has since turned into 48 restaurants and counting. NAYA now employs more than 1,000 people, generates average annual sales of roughly $3 million per restaurant, and posts same-store sales growth above 10% a year. Its footprint has expanded by more than 40% in each of the past four years, just as Mediterranean bowls have become a staple of the fast-casual lunch—a format pioneered at scale by chains like Chipotle, whose build-your-own-bowl model reshaped the American workday meal. Kfoury's next target is 200 NAYAs by 2030.

The fast-casual restaurant he couldn't open

Kfoury was born in Lebanon in 1981, during the country's civil war. He recalls some days going to school and other days sheltering in basements as bombs fell nearby. After studying hospitality in Switzerland and working in New York with chef Daniel Boulud, he returned to Lebanon, only to live through another war in 2006.

"I'm like, all right, that's not going to work," he recalled. "I have to move to the U.S., start a restaurant, and take the flavors that I was raised on and do it over there."

By 2007 he was back in New York, searching for space for a fast-casual Lebanese concept in the city's office-heavy neighborhoods. But landlords wouldn't lease to him.

With no track record as a restaurant owner, Kfoury searched Midtown and Wall Street for months before taking a space at East 56th Street and Second Avenue. It happened to sit across the street from the aunt he had stayed with during childhood trips to New York. The location wasn't busy enough for the high-volume concept he envisioned, so he opened NAYA as a fine-dining Lebanese restaurant instead.

His mother and aunt became what he calls the "culinary mastermind" behind it. His mother, a talented cook who never measured ingredients, was convinced by Kfoury to turn the food he grew up eating—chicken kebabs, falafel, rice with vermicelli, baba ghanoush and hummus—into written recipes.

The restaurant drew attention, but Kfoury never abandoned his original idea. In 2010 he finally shifted NAYA to fast casual. The challenge was reproducing his family's food quickly and cheaply enough to serve hundreds of customers without stripping away what made it Lebanese.

"The most difficult part is how do you do it at scale," Kfoury said.

Ingredients weren't necessarily the problem. Lebanese cooking is labor intensive, he said, so NAYA introduced equipment, preparation techniques and systems designed to make that labor more efficient. The fast-casual model also relied on higher volumes at smaller margins.

Being early didn't mean customers immediately understood the concept.

"The first two years were very hard at the fast casual," Kfoury said. "People didn't get it."

America catches up to the Mediterranean bowl

Kfoury spent nearly a decade refining the model. By 2019, NAYA had just seven restaurants. Since then, the category around it has changed dramatically. Mediterranean and Middle Eastern flavors have become increasingly common in grocery stores and on restaurant menus, while the customizable bowl has become a fixture of the American workday lunch.

Fast-casual Mediterranean chains generated just under $2.5 billion in sales last year, according to Technomic data provided to Fortune. Category sales jumped 16% in 2025, significantly outpacing the 6% growth of the broader fast-casual segment. Technomic tracks about 30 leading Mediterranean fast-casual chains with a combined footprint of roughly 1,500 restaurants.

The biggest player offers a glimpse of how large the category can get. Publicly traded Cava ended its latest quarter with 476 restaurants, nearly 10 times NAYA's total, yet the two chains generate similar sales per location. Cava reported average unit volume of $3.1 million in the second quarter, compared with roughly $3 million at NAYA. Cava's same-store sales rose 9% during the quarter, driven in part by a 5.3% increase in traffic.

That growth has coincided with a broader familiarity with foods Kfoury once had to introduce to customers.

"Ten years ago, you would say shawarma to someone, maybe you would get three out of 10 people who would know what it is," he said. "Today, eight, nine out of 10 would know what shawarma is."

Kfoury believes Americans are also becoming more discerning about what "Mediterranean" actually means. Because the label can encompass cuisines from Lebanon and Turkey to Greece, Italy and Morocco, he compares it to the way Americans once broadly grouped distinct cuisines under "Asian food." Over time, diners learned to distinguish Japanese from Korean, Taiwanese or Sichuan cuisine, and Kfoury expects a similar evolution for Mediterranean food.

"I think the same thing is about to happen in the Mediterranean," he said. For now, he doesn't mind NAYA falling under the broader umbrella, even as the company emphasizes its Lebanese roots.

From seven restaurants to 50

By 2019, Kfoury believed he had finally refined NAYA's model enough to scale. After years without institutional backing, he brought on restaurant-focused private equity firm TriSpan in 2020.

Then COVID hit.

NAYA's seven restaurants were concentrated in Midtown and the Financial District, leaving the company particularly exposed when office workers disappeared. The restaurants shut down for months before gradually reopening, and Kfoury said TriSpan's arrival gave NAYA the financial backing to survive the disruption.

What followed was a dramatically faster period of expansion. NAYA's unit count grew 55.6% in 2022, 42.9% in 2023, 45% in 2024 and 44.8% in 2025, according to the company. It ended last year with 42 restaurants after opening 14 and now operates 48, all company-owned. Its 50th is expected to open in September.

NAYA came roaring back, aided by Manhattan's rebound. Office leasing across the borough totaled 22.8 million square feet in the first half of 2026, the strongest first half since 2002, according to Colliers. By July, Manhattan's office availability rate had fallen to 12.7%, its lowest level since September 2020. Tech has helped fuel the demand: Manhattan tech leasing reached a record for the first half of the year as AI companies expanded.

New stores aren't the only source of growth. Same-store sales are up more than 10%, while catering accounts for roughly 10% of total sales. NAYA has also had to adapt as it pushes beyond the Manhattan office districts where its model was born. City restaurants remain heavily weighted toward lunch, while suburban locations can approach an even lunch-dinner split and draw more families, prompting NAYA to add kids' meals and develop family meals.

The expansion comes as restaurants contend with higher labor and food costs without unlimited room to raise prices. Kfoury said NAYA won't respond by shrinking portions or compromising ingredient quality. Instead, he is willing to let margins tighten during periods of higher costs rather than immediately pass every increase on to customers.

"If there's a few months or a period or a quarter that we don't perform as well as the bottom line, it's totally fine," he said. "It's part of running a business."

The bigger concern for Kfoury is whether NAYA can find enough good real estate while maintaining the food, service and consistency of a much smaller chain as it races toward 200 locations by 2030.

And 200, he insists, isn't a ceiling. His ultimate goal is to put NAYA "in every neighborhood." The ambitions extend beyond store count.

"If all goes well," he said, "an IPO could be an option."

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.