Restaurant brands come and go, but when a concept is new and attractive it can lead to exciting stories on Wall Street. That's basically what's going on today with Cava Group (NYSE: CAVA), a Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant that's drawing in customers in huge numbers. The next three years are likely to see the company grow at a rapid clip.

But investors need to go in with their eyes wide open, and keenly focused on this key industry metric.

Cava's restaurant concept isn't really new. It basically rips off Chipotle Mexican Grill's (NYSE: CMG) assembly line approach to food preparation, but it does it with Mediterranean food instead of Mexican fare. However, this fact makes the comparison here pretty obvious. To lay some important groundwork, at the end of 2023 Chipotle had 3,371 locations in the United States (and another 66 foreign locations). Cava's store count at the end of 2023 was just 309.

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Source Fool.com