If you have driven North Congress Avenue this year, you have probably noticed the same thing twice. First Dave's Hot Chicken opened at 320 N. Congress Ave., and a few months later Cluck Face Nashville Hot Chicken opened a mile up the road at 1787 N. Congress Ave. Add a new Culver's on Woolbright Road, a seventh Bud's Chicken & Seafood on the west end of Boynton Beach Boulevard, and a rotisserie chain called C.R. Chicks getting ready to move into the Publix plaza at Jog Road, and you have five separate chicken concepts landing in the same city inside a single year.
The obvious read is that chicken is having a moment. The more interesting read is that two things happened at the exact same time for entirely different reasons, and they happened to land on the same three roads.
The Five Spots, Mapped
Here is what has opened, and what is still on the way, address by address:
| Restaurant | Location | Status | What It Serves |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dave's Hot Chicken | 320 N. Congress Ave., Suite A | Open | Nashville-style chicken sliders and tenders across seven heat levels |
| Cluck Face | 1787 N. Congress Ave. | Slated for spring 2026 | Nashville hot chicken tenders and sandwiches with a choice of 11 sauces |
| Bud's Chicken & Seafood | 8801 W. Boynton Beach Blvd. at Lyons Road | Opened Feb. 10, 2026 | Hand-breaded Southern-fried chicken and wild-caught Alaskan cod |
| Culver's | 4860 W. Woolbright Rd. | Open | Wisconsin-style butter burgers, chicken tenders, and frozen custard |
| C.R. Chicks | 6677 Boynton Beach Blvd. at Jog Road | Expected later this year | Rotisserie chicken slow-roasted over Brazilian oak logs |
Lay those five addresses on a map and a pattern shows up fast. None of them sit downtown. All five sit west of I-95, spread across three corridors that run through the growing side of the city: North Congress Avenue, West Woolbright Road, and the far western stretch of Boynton Beach Boulevard near the Turnpike.
The 69-Year-Old Business Making Its Biggest Bet
The Bud's opening is the one with a real story behind it, and it is not really about chicken.
Bud's Chicken & Seafood started in the mid-1950s when Alphonse "Bud" Brinkman and his wife Pat moved their family from Minnesota to Boynton Beach and opened a tiny take-out counter on Federal Highway selling a 99-cent chicken dinner. Bud died of pancreatic cancer in 1968 at age 47, leaving Pat to raise eight kids and run the business with her son Michael's help. In 1984 she handed the company to four of her sons, Mark, Mike, Tim, and Tom, who spent the next several years modernizing the stores into the drive-through format Palm Beach County knows today.
Late in 2025, that second generation finished the next handoff. On Dec. 31, they completed a ten-year process of turning the business over to a third generation, brothers Chris, Nick, Phillip, and Luke Brinkman. The new west Boynton store, their seventh location, is the first major project the four of them have led on their own, and they chose to build it not near the original counter downtown but out on Boynton Beach Boulevard between Lyons Road and the Turnpike.
Phillip Brinkman, who handles marketing, explained the choice to a local reporter in plain terms: "It's a growing area and a great community."
That is a family business reading the same growth signal that four national chains happened to read at the same time.
Why the Chains Picked the Same Corridor
Dave's Hot Chicken, Cluck Face, Culver's, and C.R. Chicks have nothing to do with each other. Dave's is a national fast-casual chain expanding across South Florida. Cluck Face started as a single Boca Raton shop in 2023 under founder Sabri Arslankara and had grown to locations in Boca Raton and Fort Lauderdale before setting its sights on Boynton Beach. Culver's is a Wisconsin-based chain bringing its butter-burger format to new Florida addresses. C.R. Chicks has been a Palm Beach County name since 1992, founded by Rick Davis and Chris Sallen, and picked up a new ownership group in 2024 that is pushing the seven-location chain into new markets, Boynton Beach among them.
Four unrelated companies, on four different timelines, all pointed at the same stretch of Boynton Beach inside the same year. Chain expansion follows rooftops and retail vacancy more than it follows any single trend, and the west side of Boynton Beach is where that combination currently exists. Bud's did not need a real estate consultant to tell it the same thing its own founder's grandsons could see driving the neighborhood themselves.
Downtown Still Runs on Its Own Clock
None of this touches the other Boynton Beach, the one built around Ocean Avenue and the Intracoastal, and that is the part worth noticing if you live closer to the water than to Congress Avenue.
The longtime Bud's location on East Boynton Beach Boulevard, the one closest to where the family settled after leaving Minnesota, still sits nowhere near the new west side store. A few minutes from there, Two Georges Waterfront Grille has been serving crab cakes under its thatched roof at Boynton Harbor Marina for more than 60 years, and the restaurant recently completed a seawall and dock upgrade to keep the boat-and-dine crowd coming for another few decades. A short walk from the marina, the Boynton Beach Arts & Cultural Center occupies the restored 1927 Boynton Beach High School, a William Manly King-designed building that spent decades boarded up before reopening in 2020 with a 39-foot domed event hall. Centennial Park & Amphitheater, right on East Ocean Avenue, still hosts the recurring Boynton Beach Night Market that fills the green space with local vendors and live bands.
That side of the city is not competing with the chicken corridor. It is simply operating on a different clock, one built around institutions that have already proven they last, rather than concepts betting that they will.
Which of the Five Is Actually Worth the Drive
If you are trying to figure out where to send a Friday night, the five spots split into three real categories rather than one big chicken pile:
- If you want heat, Dave's Hot Chicken and Cluck Face are both built around spice ladders, from mild to genuinely punishing, with sliders and tenders as the base format for both.
- If you want a full sit-down or take-home dinner, Bud's is the one built for that, with hand-breaded bone-in chicken, corn fritters, and a cod sandwich that has been the same recipe for close to seventy years.
- If you want something other than fried, C.R. Chicks is the rotisserie option once it opens, and Culver's covers the burger-and-custard crowd with chicken tenders as a secondary menu item rather than the headline.
None of these five replace each other. They serve different nights, different cravings, and in Bud's case, a genuinely different generation of the same family than the one that opened the first counter on Federal Highway.
What This Means If You Live Here
The takeaway is not that Boynton Beach has a new favorite food. It is that the west side of the city, the stretch along Congress Avenue, Woolbright Road, and the far end of Boynton Beach Boulevard, just became legible as the address where new retail is landing. Four national chains and one 69-year-old local institution all read the same signal about that corridor and placed their bets within the same year, for reasons that had nothing to do with each other.
Meanwhile the older core of the city, the marina, the amphitheater, the restored high school, keeps doing what it has always done, on its own schedule, without needing a chain to validate it.
If you are watching what is happening in this city block by block, whether it is a new chicken spot on Congress Avenue or a shift in what a particular corridor is worth, that is exactly the kind of ground-level read Roxy Campbell tracks across Palm Beach County every day. Call or text Roxy at (561) 714-9673 anytime you want the real story behind what is changing in your neighborhood.
