Mooyah!

Founded only six years ago, the Dallas-based burger chain, Mooyah, has been metastasizing like crazy; they now have over 50 stores in 12 states and are opening soon in Bahrain, Kuwait, Dubai, and Qatar!  
  
Save for one little thing I would find their success praiseworthy.  The "little thing" is that, like "McDowell's" in the Eddie Murphy movie "Coming to America", their initial "business plan" was a total "rip-off". 
 

 
In 2007, before Five Guys got around to expanding into Texas, Mooyah's opened their first store in Plano.  Flat out, it was a Five Guys with a different sign - right down to the store layout, service line, color scheme, menu, fries, bulletin board, and 'free' peanuts-in-the-shell; even their web-site was identical!  The only "differentiation" I could detect was the fact that they served milkshakes. 
 
I wrote Five Guys about this and they evidently got their lawyers after them, but even now, six years later, you'd swear you were in a peanut-less, milkshake-serving Five Guys.
 
This guy certainly isn't fooled:
 
 

"See, they're McDonald's... I'm McDowell's. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick."

Back when they started in 2007 I read the initial news story/review in the DMN in which the founders of Mooyah claimed that they were trying to bring some elements of In-n-Out to Dallas - fresh ground beef, yada, yada - but made no mention of Five Guys.
 
When I visited both their store and web-site I was astounded by the exact duplication of Five Guys:  right down to the menu style & items, pricing, fries style & service, red & white tile, free peanuts, malt vinegar, stacks of cans and potato sacks in the dining area, bulletin board, posted reviews, etc. 
 
The owners were on-site and I asked them why they hadn't named the place "Five Gals" or "Five Cowboys".  Both of them got red in the face and pretended never to have heard of this "Five Guys"!   But in an area as large and as transient as Dallas I don't know how long they thought they could be so blatant.
 
In any case, these days the peanuts are gone, the bulletin board has been replaced by a "writing wall", the bags and foil are printed, and they have bottles of A-1 and Lea & Perrins available along with the malt vinegar. 
 
I wish the Guys would "steal" the A-1 and L&P "idea"!

And, I do not see any red & white tile on the walls, either!