GEN Hands 47 Korean BBQ Restaurants to Chubby Group

GEN Restaurant Group spent years filling dining rooms with Korean barbecue grills. Now it is handing nearly all of them to a rival and betting its future on grocery shelves.

Chubby Group, the company behind Chubby Cattle, Wagyu House and The X Pot, said Oct. 15 that it signed a letter of intent to acquire GEN Korean BBQ's 47 U.S. restaurants and four development sites from GEN Restaurant Group (Nasdaq: GENK) in a transaction valued at up to $100 million. Closing still depends on definitive agreements, license and lease transfers and regulatory approvals, the company said.

The currency is unusual. GEN will hold a note convertible into Chubby equity at a $1.5 billion valuation, three times the $500 million valuation Chubby set in the same announcement for a $50 million Series A led by Prysm Capital. Chubby also gets a perpetual license to the GEN brand.

The handoff comes in four phases over 12 months, starting with 12 restaurants targeted for Nov. 1, and Chubby will pay for the conversions itself. Each unit will relaunch either as GEN X, which Chubby describes as a wagyu-forward take on the concept, or as one of Chubby's own brands. GEN keeps the operating profit from each restaurant until it changes hands and holds on to three locations, in Cerritos, Boston and Hawaii, for training, research and development and packaged goods work, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal.

Why sell? Leases. GEN carried roughly $160 million in lease liabilities, the Business Journal reported, and CEO David Kim is steering the company toward consumer packaged goods. That line launched last October in 30 Southern California grocery stores and now reaches more than 2,000 doors, including Costco and Albertsons, Kim told the paper. “We haven’t even hit 1% of the market,” he said.

Chubby's case rests on its supply chain. It buys whole cattle and whole chickens and processes and distributes them itself across more than 25 brands. The company says it has already grown unit revenue “up to 6x” at former GEN sites it converted, a claim it did not back with published figures. Systemwide revenue reached $233 million in 2025 and is projected at $400 million for 2026, Chubby said, with roughly 100 locations expected by year-end.

For multi-unit operators, the pattern matters more than the cuisine. A lease-heavy brand sells its restaurants to an operator with scale advantages and keeps the asset-light product business. Capital keeps chasing that kind of operator scale: earlier this month a 388-unit franchisee rebranded around capital with no exit date, and Crisp & Green agreed Oct. 13 to absorb 33 MAD Greens and Snappy Salads units from the Coors family's Salad Collective.

The first test comes Nov. 1, when a dozen restaurants change hands. GEN shareholders, meanwhile, now hold two bets at once: one on grocery aisles, and one on Chubby growing into a $1.5 billion valuation.