It is impossible to take any decent sit-down restaurant concept and scale it up beyond a handful of locations and truly maintain quality. Once you must resort to commercially prepared meals you're relying entirely on the experience and marketing and as you scale up it gets too variable.
That's not even what has happened to some of these places. They get bought and added to some portfolio. because they are profitable. Then they get spun off with debt from the portfolio and are forced to cut costs as they deal with the leveraged debt, If the company survives the debt, great, otherwise they declare bankruptcy, shutters some locations, and try to survive until they are profitable again. Then the cycle begins anew.
They usually don’t even want the business. They want the land. They take over a successful enterprise, slash expenses to the bone by cutting quality and staff, keep the prices as high as customers will pay, then when they’ve extracted the maximum amount of short-term profit and the customer base finally falls off (because they’re no longer getting the value they used to expect), the PE owners put the business into bankruptcy and sell the land - because that’s still valuable.
