Eh. I think everyone’s overthinking here.
The correct answer is, I think, that the premise is incorrect: Bay Area diners are not, in fact, chain-averse. They aren’t averse to Asian chains, and they also aren’t averse to non-Asian chains. (I remember all the hysteria over Krispy Kreme coming to the Bay, but there are plenty of less-dramatic examples. Jack in the Box was many, many people’s late-night food of choice when I was in my 20s, and people went nuts over Halal Guys’s arrival simply because it was frequently discussed by people who had tried it in New York.) The fact is that any novel concept that 1) has a lot of marketing hype behind it, 2) doesn’t have a reputation for terrible food, and 3) is considered a big deal by people somewhere else, will probably attract large crowds of people who want to brag that they were among the first to check it out. (Ahem.)
The Bay Area’s laws are chain-averse, because they reflect the preferences of a small minority of people who have historically had an amount of power that is very disproportionate to their actual numbers. But that is not the same thing.
