Juicy Birds opens its first Downtown Toronto location this Saturday, August 29, at 118 John Street in the Entertainment District. It’s the halal Nashville hot chicken chain’s sixteenth location and its first inside the core of the city where it started four years ago, with Kingston and Bowmanville still to come before the count reaches 18 by year end.
It’s also being treated as something more than a sixteenth store. Mohammad Sameer, CEO and co-founder of Juicy Birds, said the John Street location is being built as the brand’s flagship, eventually the first Juicy Birds to run 24 hours a day and the store where any new menu item will debut before it reaches the rest of the chain. That ambition will take time to show up on opening day itself. Sameer expects heavy lineups through the first weeks, so the location is launching with a shorter menu than the rest of the chain rather than trying to run everything at once.
“It’s going to be our flagship,” Sameer said. “Any new item we’re working on debuts here first, and we watch how it performs before it goes anywhere else.”
Part of what makes Sameer confident enough to make that bet is the neighbourhood itself. 118 John Street has seen five restaurants come and go before this one, and he sees the surrounding market, not the building’s track record, as the real reason now is the moment.
“With Downtown, the fundamentals are already there,” Sameer said. “The order volume, the population, all of it. What’s been missing is an operator who actually knows what they’re doing with the space.”
The space’s own history bears that out. Most recently it was Abby’s Indian Chinese Haka Fusion. Before that, SOS Choose Your Pasta, which opened in 2019 and didn’t make it past the pandemic. Before that, Corrados, a Greek and Italian spot that ran about four years. Further back than most people in the neighbourhood remember, it was Naz’s Falafel House.
The building has outlasted every one of them, and Sameer sees the Entertainment District right now the same way, a neighbourhood mid-transition, with condo development reshaping the blocks around John Street and long vacant storefronts, including the former Jack Astor’s directly across the street, still waiting on their next tenant. The bet, essentially, is that a brand with four years and fifteen locations behind it can do what five previous tenants couldn’t, and turn 118 John Street into something the neighbourhood grows around instead of another name that comes and goes.
News of the opening was already circulating well before Juicy Birds confirmed anything. 6ixRetail spotted the crew installing the hoarding at 118 John Street on July 10th and posted it before the company had said a word publicly. Other outlets picked it up within days, and it’s the same pattern the brand has leaned on since its first location: little to no paid promotion, and a following that spreads mostly on its own.
“Nobody knew who we were when we started,” Sameer said. “Now it’s grown into something that spreads on its own. We don’t spend much on marketing at all. It’s organic, and that’s exactly how we want it to stay.”
That kind of following didn’t happen by accident, and the brand’s own account of how it built one starts smaller than a hoarding photo. It starts with a complaint. Three friends, Sameer, Bilawal Hussain, and Faisal Salahuddin, kept running into the same problem: Toronto had plenty of places calling themselves Nashville hot chicken, and almost none of them tasted like the real thing. So they went looking for it properly, travelling to try the originals, taking notes on heat and crust and what made one plate work where another fell flat, then coming home and turning their own kitchen into something closer to a lab. Spice blends that were too mild got scrapped. Batches that were all heat and no flavour went in the bin.
Sameer had spent his whole career leading up to that point in restaurants, starting as a dishwasher at eighteen and working his way to sous chef before running his own catering business. When the timing lined up, a hot chicken trend building across North America during the pandemic and a space open at Danforth and Pape in Greektown, Sameer, Hussain, and Salahuddin took it.
“We just wanted to make sure it’s different than the other joints,” Sameer said. “Not another Nashville hot chicken shop.”
The first location opened with one goal: serve the best fried chicken in the neighbourhood and see what happened. What happened was a line out the door, and a template the brand has stuck to ever since, the same spice blend ground in house, the same halal integrity, the same refusal to shortcut the sides at every location that followed. Juicy Birds’ chicken is hand-slaughtered and fully halal-certified, a decision the brand says was built in from day one rather than added on later once it started to scale. That single Greektown shop has since grown into fifteen locations open today, spanning Pickering, Etobicoke, Hamilton, Mississauga, Barrie, Uptown Toronto, Scarborough, Whitby, Waterloo, Aurora, Brampton, Burlington, Woodbridge, and London, alongside the original store on Pape Avenue.
Fifteen locations only stay consistent with each other if someone is checking, and that oversight is where Sameer spends a lot of his own time. His general manager visits every Juicy Birds twice a week, running each store against the same internal standard operating procedures whether it’s in Waterloo or Woodbridge. The same discipline shows up in how the food itself gets made. Nearly everything served, aside from the chicken, runs through a company owned commissary in Oshawa, then out to every location six days a week by truck, so the flavour and heat level don’t drift from one store to the next.
“We used to hand cut our fries and cook them in beef tallow, but as we’ve scaled, keeping that process consistent everywhere became impossible,” Sameer said. “Everything else, we’d still rather make ourselves than buy something premade because it’s easier.”
That standard shows up in the price too, and Sameer isn’t apologetic about it.
“We sit a little higher on price than some of our competitors,” he said. “But people don’t seem to mind paying a bit more for the quality. That’s always been a trade we’re comfortable making.”
The menu built on top of that consistency has grown well past a single sandwich. The G.O.A.T Sandwich anchors the lineup, alongside a Hot Honey Sandwich, a Tenders and Dip plate, and a Chicken and Waffles combo that’s become one of the brand’s more talked about items on TikTok. Heat runs on a five step ladder, from No Heat through Mild, Medium, and Nashville Hot, up to a top tier the brand calls Burnin’, with shareables like loaded mac and cheese rounding things out for anyone splitting a table. Alongside the food, Juicy Birds has built out a full merchandise line, t-shirts, baseball jerseys, tote bags, aprons, trucker hats, released in limited drops the way a streetwear label might run them. For a brand that’s grown almost entirely on word of mouth, giving people something to wear the following around hasn’t hurt.
That same restraint that shows up in how Juicy Birds runs its stores also shows up in how it decides where to open new ones. Franchising is where Sameer keeps the brakes on hardest, despite the interest.
“We’ve got somewhere around 60 franchise applications sitting with us right now, and we haven’t touched them,” Sameer said. “We’d rather grow at a pace where we can actually protect what makes the brand work than rush into something we can’t manage.”
The same logic holds inside markets the company already operates in, no matter how much a city could clearly support.
“Mississauga alone could probably support two or three of our locations,” he said. “We’re intentionally holding off. One market, one location, at least for now.”
Where that caution loosens is outside Ontario entirely. Sameer said the company has spent months laying the groundwork for its next phase of growth, one that looks nothing like handing out a franchise agreement.
“We’ve spent the better part of six to eight months just working out the logistics of expanding into the U.S. while keeping our supply chain in house,” Sameer said. “Ontario is nearly built out at this point, and Texas is already in the works.”
None of this, including this weekend’s opening, has gone through a public relations firm. Juicy Birds still runs its own social media in house, the same instinct that’s carried the brand from a single Greektown storefront to fifteen locations, soon to be eighteen, without ever having to buy its way into the conversation.
Dustin Fuhs is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail, Toronto’s premier source for retail and hospitality industry news. As the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication, Dustin brings over two decades of expertise spanning retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality sectors. His experience includes roles with industry giants such as The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, The Canadian Opera Company, Starbucks Canada and Blockbuster.
Recognized as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024, 2025 and 2026, Dustin delivers insider perspectives on Toronto’s evolving retail landscape, from emerging brands to established players reshaping the city’s commercial districts.