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One Family Owns 38 of Chicago's 46 Burger Kings

Mert Iseri

Chicago has 46 Burger Kings. We pulled the business license behind every one.

38 belong to Tri City Foods of Illinois LLC. The city's Business Owners records name the people behind it: Shoukatali, Zohaib, and Gulshan Dhanani. Tri City is the Dhanani Group of Sugar Land, Texas, the second largest Burger King franchisee in the world.

The map

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Owner entityLocationsPrincipals (per city records)
Tri City Foods of Illinois LLC38Shoukatali, Zohaib, and Gulshan Dhanani; Kerry Todd Bartmess
Cave Enterprises Operations, LLC2Adam Velarde
ASAF, Inc.1Faisal A. Poonja
SFA, LLC1Faisal A. Poonja
SAF1 LLC1Nooruddin T. Matani
AM-PM Fast Foods, LLC1Nooruddin T. Matani
Golden Star Hospitality1Karim Khowaja, Sanjeev Khatau
MJG Belmont, LLC1Michael Gould; VMJ, LLC

Two people, four companies

ASAF, SFA, SAF1, and AM-PM Fast Foods read as four unrelated single-store operators. The owner records collapse them to two people: Faisal Poonja owns ASAF and SFA. Nooruddin Matani owns SAF1 and AM-PM. We call these hidden chains.

24 years of data

The license history goes back to 2002. 37 legal entities have held a Burger King license in Chicago since then:

  • National Restaurant Enterprises: 24 addresses, 2002 to 2003.
  • C.H. James Restaurant Holdings: 13 addresses, 2004 to 2011.
  • Heartland Food LLC and Heartland Midwest LLC: 35 addresses combined, 2004 to 2014.
  • Tri City Foods of Illinois: first license February 23, 2015. 40 addresses since.

The Dhananis bought Heartland's portfolio, 163 restaurants in the Chicago area. The license data records the handoff: Heartland goes quiet in 2014, Tri City appears in early 2015.

Nationally the churn is bigger. Burger King's parent bought Carrols, its largest franchisee at 1,022 restaurants, for $1 billion in 2024 and is refranchising those stores to smaller operators. Carrols never operated in Chicago.

Sources

  • Ora Google Places sweep: 45 operational Burger King listings inside city limits.
  • Chicago's Business Licenses dataset: 46 Burger King addresses actively licensed, each with its legal entity and account number.
  • The Business Owners dataset, joined on account number: named principals and titles.

Limitations: city limits only, no suburbs. License data lags reality by days to weeks.

Download the dataset: 46 rows with address, owner entity, named principals, and license dates.

Ora tracks the license filings, transfers, and closures that change this table. Contact us to learn more.