The Fifth Taste

The founder’s palate

In 2005 Adam Fleischman was eating a Double-Double at an In-N-Out in Culver City when a word he had been seeing on food blogs and in Heston Blumenthal’s books came to mind: Umami, the fifth taste. Hamburgers, he decided, were America’s preferred intake device for it.

Four years later he opened the first Umami Burger on South La Brea Avenue, where a failed Korean-taco shop once stood, with forty thousand dollars from the sale of his stake in a wine bar. Within two years that single location was doing two million dollars in sales. What happened next is a pattern, and it starts with something that cannot be written down.

“Half beef and half beyond belief,” food critic Alan Richman wrote in GQ in December 2010. He praised the signature Umami Burger as a cross-cultural blend of Japanese savoriness and American burger craft. Lines formed and celebrities followed. The Umami Burger was deliberately layered: Parmesan crisps, shiitakes, caramelized onions, roasted tomato, house ketchup, and a soy-based sauce that Fleischman had blended in his kitchen after a trip to a Japanese market. It was meant to be global from the start.

By 2011 Sam Nazarian’s SBE and Nîmes Capital had taken a substantial stake. Plans called for dozens of new units. Fleischman stayed involved.

The chain moved into San Francisco, then New York, Chicago, Miami. In 2014, Fleischman stepped down as CEO while remaining chairman. In 2016, SBE increased its holding to a majority stake and talked about eight to ten openings a year plus international licensing. Japan followed. At peak the company claimed more than twenty-five locations. The original La Brea store had already closed; it was too small and lacked a liquor license. Umami Burger was now a brand, yet still carried the founder’s vision and signature.

Rapid expansion came with a cost. Burgers arrived smaller and more often overcooked; the careful layering of Parmesan crisp, soy, and mushroom that had defined the original became inconsistent. The long lines that once signaled demand shortened. Investors get the blame, and the shift from a founder’s clear vision to unit growth explains part of it. But the market also moved. Smash burgers, food trucks, and social-media-driven casual concepts pulled customers toward simpler, faster formats. The pandemic closed many of the remaining full-service locations; most never reopened. By 2026 the only significant U.S. outlet left was a single location at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). A handful of mall-based restaurants continue in Japan. Fleischman told Inc. Magazine in 2016 that you never want a co-founder; he has since moved on to other ventures.

Two more chains

The Umami Burger story is not unique in the restaurant industry. Quiznos and Boston Market are two other examples of a rise, aggressive growth and then a crash. Those two failed more on money than on taste; the Umami story is the taste half. Quiznos began in Denver as a toasted sub-sandwich concept in 1981. After changes in ownership, Quiznos scaled aggressively through franchising to 4,700 stores by 2005. Much of the corporate revenue came from selling food and paper to its own franchisees. A captive distributor charging elevated prices impacted franchise margins. Subway answered with the five-dollar footlong. A free-sandwich coupon issued by corporate created public friction when many franchisees refused to honor it. Lawsuits followed. The Great Recession of 2008 hit franchises and corporate hard. Quiznos filed for bankruptcy in 2014 with hundreds of millions in obligations. Today 200 or so stores remain.

Boston Market followed a similar arc, and its collapse came earlier. In 1985, Steven Kolow and Arthur Cores opened Boston Chicken in Newton, Massachusetts around rotisserie chicken and sides sold at fast-food speed and price. The concept was a hit and rapid expansion followed, but by the mid-1990s, the company had taken on substantial debt. In 1998, Boston Market filed for bankruptcy. McDonald’s bought it in 2000 for the real estate footprint, and operated the company before spinning it off to private equity. Subsequent owners repeated bankruptcy filings. Grocery stores and retailers like Costco had begun offering their own rotisserie chickens at lower prices, and the operational systems required to deliver consistent homestyle food at scale never locked in.

Why the standard doesn’t travel

The pattern is older than any of these chains. The McDonald brothers invented the Speedee Service System, the kitchen choreography that made high-volume burgers possible, but they struggled to expand it. Ray Kroc’s contribution was less the hamburger than the systems and franchise controls. Harry Sonneborn built the real-estate model. Together they wrote the standards down so they could survive without the original operators at the counter. Most founder-led concepts never take that second step.

The entrepreneurial challenge is structural. Much of what makes an early restaurant concept feel distinct is tacit. Fleischman could taste when the Parmesan crisp, the soy note, and the beef ratio were right. That fifth taste was not easily written into a training manual that hundreds of line cooks would execute identically. Quiznos’s toasted advantage required consistent equipment, temperature, and bread handling undermined by franchise economics. Boston Market’s rotisserie timing and side quality depended on kitchen discipline that costs could not scale. In each case, once capital arrives, the incentives change. Investors and professional managers are measured on unit counts, revenue growth, and eventually public-market or exit metrics. Maintaining the original experience becomes expensive. The founder who stays becomes a bottleneck; the founder who leaves discovers that the standards lived more in his or her presence than in the organization.

Quality dilution is the visible symptom, but the original constraint (the founder’s taste or direct oversight) has been replaced by a different one (cost targets or volume goals). Consumer tastes and preferences can change too, but the companies that institutionalize successfully have already built the systems that let them keep the core while they adapt.

Some founder concepts avoid this trap by refusing to scale conventionally. In-N-Out has remained family-controlled, limited its geographic footprint, and kept operations simple so that the original standards can still be enforced. The trade-off is obvious: it is not a national or global brand in the same sense but has become a California institution as the company expands in the Western US and even Tennessee is planned.

Umami Burger’s remnant at LAX shows the pattern precisely. What survives of the original concept of engineered savoriness is a name on an airport menu board. The Japanese franchise operation continues in a more standardized, mall-based form, which may be the version that can travel. The founder-driven original—the one that required a particular hand on the blend and a particular standard in the dining room—did not. The same sequence appears in Quiznos’s captive-supply model and Boston Market’s debt-fueled openings.

The first mistake was scaling before the standard could be written down. The lasting businesses in food are the ones that eventually treat the founder’s taste and vision as a design problem. They build the checks—similar to Van Halen’s brown-M&M clause—that reveal whether the system is still being followed when no one is watching. Umami Burger’s fifth taste was real. The systems required to keep delivering it were not.

Sources

• LAist, “Savvy Dudes Hail Umami the Burger of the Year,” December 1, 2010; Alan Richman, “The Best Burger in America,” GQ, December 2010 (gq.com/story/umami-burger-los-angeles-best-burger-alan-richman); Business Insider, “The ‘Aha Moment’ That Inspired the Umami Restaurant Empire,” May 11, 2012; LA Magazine, “Empire of the Bun,” May 2012; Eater, “Anatomy of an Icon: The Original Umami Burger,” April 18, 2013.
• Los Angeles Times, “Umami Burger’s brand sizzles with SBE backing,” August 11, 2011; Nation’s Restaurant News, “SBE acquires stake in Umami Restaurant Group,” July 2011, and “SBE takes majority stake in Umami Burger,” October 2016; Eater, “Umami Burger Plots Major Global Expansion,” October 17, 2016; Forbes, “Umami Burgers: Going Global in Japan, Bouncing Back in New York and Taking on the World,” October 18, 2019.
• SFGate, “One of California’s most revered burger chains is now a dead dream,” July 14, 2026; Newser, “Once-Thriving Burger Chain Hangs On at LA’s Airport,” July 19, 2026; Yahoo Lifestyle, “The Rapid Rise and Fall of Umami Burger”; Adam Fleischman, “Why You Never Want a Co-Founder,” Inc., 2016 (inc.com/adam-fleischman/why-you-never-want-a-co-founder.html); Japanese franchise and location reporting via Web-Repo and Tabelog, 2026.
• Restaurant Business, “A Brief History of Quiznos’ Collapse,” 2018, and related coverage; Food Republic, “What Actually Happened to Quiznos and How Many Locations Are Left?”; Chowhound and The Takeout summaries of franchisee lawsuits, American Food Distributors markups, Subway’s five-dollar footlong, the free-coupon episode, recession impact, and the 2014 bankruptcy; SBA loan-default data cited in franchise analyses.
• Wikipedia, “Boston Market”; Boston Globe / Boston.com, “The last Boston Market in Mass. has closed. What happened to the once-beloved chicken chain?” May 15, 2026; Restaurant Business and The Daily Meal timelines covering the 1985 founding by Steven Kolow and Arthur Cores, mid-1990s expansion and debt, 1998 Chapter 11 filing, McDonald’s 2000 acquisition, later private-equity ownership, and post-2020 contraction under Jay Pandya amid vendor and wage litigation.
• Standard accounts of the McDonald brothers’ Speedee Service System, Ray Kroc’s franchising and systems contribution, and Harry Sonneborn’s real-estate model (e.g., Grinding It Out and subsequent business histories).