Bareburger
Dining · 28+ locations · New York City, Long Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, Westchester/Hudson Valley NY, Columbus OH
Bareburger built its name on organic, farm-sourced burgers from a converted Astoria bakery in 2009. It's since pulled back from a peak near 40 locations on four continents to under 30, mostly in the New York area, settling three separate wage-and-hour lawsuits along the way.
The Big Picture
Bareburger is still run by co-founder Euripides Pelekanos, and no outside equity investor has ever held a stake. That independence has come with friction: three wage-and-hour suits settled between 2013 and 2018, one of them naming Pelekanos personally, and a bankruptcy fight with a former franchisee. The chain answers to its founding group, not an outside investor, and the business has shrunk sharply since its mid-2010s peak.
The Dirty Details
Ownership
Feenix Venture PartnersPrivate Equity
Feenix Venture Partners is a New York investment firm founded in 2017 that provides growth capital to small and mid-sized consumer businesses through both debt and equity; its wider portfolio includes The Slanted Door and Capital Tacos. Its three Ferret companies show the range of what that can mean: already the majority owner of Jack's Stir Brew by the time it led that chain's 2022 merger, a lender to Bareburger whose 2018 loan never converted, and an investor in OddFellows on undisclosed terms. The label on the check matters less than whether control ever changes hands.
See all Feenix Venture Partners companies on FerretWhat do these scores mean? Learn more.
See for Yourself
Find Bareburger near you
Enter your neighborhood or address
Keep Discovering
Explore all diningCompany data last updated September 2026
How does one person build and research all this? They don't: here's how it actually works. Verdicts are our opinions, based on the public sources cited above as of September 2026. Spotted something off? or learn more.