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Tom Curtis is making the rounds at a newly remodeled Burger King in Hialeah, Florida, just outside Miami. He approaches a table to make sure a dad and his school-age sons are enjoying their meal. “How’s the Whopper?” asks Curtis, who doesn’t tell the family he’s the president of Burger King’s US and Canada business. “A lot better,” the man replies. Better than what? The last time he came in. The man can’t remember the last time he’d eaten at Burger King, but this early fall afternoon, he decided to stop by with his kids to try the chain’s newly revamped chicken nuggets, which the company had been advertising hard since their Sept. 1 relaunch.

Curtis asks the younger boy how he likes them. Mouth stuffed, the boy gives a thumbs up. “So, you’re going to come back here next time, or McDonald’s?” The father says it will be here. As we walk away, Curtis seems so delighted by the exchange, I ask if he planned it. “No,” he says, half laughing, half scoffing.

It’s the kind of interaction Curtis says he’s increasingly having as more Americans give Burger King another shot. For the past four years, Curtis has overseen a turnaround plan backed by more than $700 million from the company plus more spending by individual franchisees, focused on remodeling outdated locations, upgrading core menu items including the Whopper and pushing restaurants to offer friendlier service.

For a while, results were uneven. “You’re doing the work, you’re spending the money, but you don’t have some great thing to talk about,” Curtis says. The tide finally began to turn last year, and Burger King has now posted five straight quarters of same-store sales growth in the region. Last quarter those sales rose 8.5%, compared with 0.8% at McDonald’s Corp., a trend Wall Street expects to continue. Burger King also wrested back its title as America’s No. 2 burger chain by sales from Wendy’s Co., having lost it in 2020.

For all the money spent on remodeling, advertising and improvements to the food, Curtis’s playbook also draws on his less technical tendencies: He’s a chatty 63-year-old dad who likes to ask people how they like their food.

In a move that would make many executives shudder, Burger King in February set up a phone number and voicemail where Curtis and his team could solicit unfiltered thoughts and complaints from customers. The initiative was supposed to last a couple of weeks, but it’s still going. Curtis and his team have received more than 100,000 calls so far, he says. He still personally returns about 40 a week, sometimes from home on the weekends. His wife has warned him not to call anyone back after 9 p.m., even if it doesn’t strike him as all that late.

He also drops into restaurants once or twice a week, such as this one, where paperboard crowns stacked into pyramids dot the tables. He usually starts by introducing himself to the staff. “I try to make them at ease because when you say, ‘Hey, I’m the president,’ they go into full freakout mode, and you’re like, ‘I’m not here to inspect or anything,’” he says. Curtis then walks around the dining room, asking customers if he can pull up a chair to chat while they eat. “People think it’s very weird,” he admits. Still, “if you just ask questions and talk to them, they quickly warm up.” Customer feedback has helped shape upgrades to the Whopper (a new bun, better mayo) and nuggets (100% white meat chicken, more sauces), prompted a store to repair a broken storefront sign and may even help influence which stores get remodeled next.

Here in Hialeah, Curtis gets to show off what a Burger King is supposed to look like after such a face-lift. In a bright, high-ceilinged lobby, kiosks where customers can punch in their orders line one wall, and there’s an open view of the pickup area, kitchen and drive-thru. Past the self-serve soda fountain (lest we forget rival McDonald’s is phasing out its self-serve soda fountains in the US), an alcove for larger groups that Curtis calls the “king’s booth” sits against a bright orange wall plastered with groovy, bubble-lettered descriptors one might apply to a perfect burger: “juicy, savory, leafy, melty, crispy.” Overhead, light shines through a large metal awning with cutouts in the shape of sesame seeds.

Of course, only about 60% of Burger King restaurants in the US look anything like this. “I literally could go down the street, and I could find you a restaurant that you wouldn’t be that impressed with,” Curtis says. “Right now, I believe we’re a brand of contradictions,” he adds. “We’re this,” he says, gesturing around the gleaming restaurant, “and we’re still that,” motioning down the road toward whatever stuck-in-the-’90s location needs an overhaul next.

In fact, Curtis wagers Burger King is only about a third of the way into the turnaround, at most. Next on his list is boosting franchisees’ profits, getting back to building more restaurants and taking a closer look at the chain’s breakfast menus and chicken sandwiches. (Burger King currently has four battered chicken sandwiches but no grilled alternative, an option that Curtis is pitching internally. Parent Restaurant Brands International Inc. also owns Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen, among other fast-food chains, so it’s not like chicken’s an unknown quantity.)

Curtis also needs to keep his eye at all times on McDonald’s, which remains the country’s largest burger chain, with more than 13,700 locations to Burger King’s roughly 6,600, and is working to roll out its own $8.5 billion growth plan — far more than RBI is allocating to Burger King’s comeback. Curtis credits McDonald’s with years of consistency and an ability to build loyalty among families, despite its recent traffic struggles. “They’re a formidable brand,” he says. “They have incredible resources that they can bring to bear.” That makes Burger King’s ultimate goal of becoming the world’s top burger chain a distant one. “I won’t be here when we’re No. 1,” Curtis says. “I might be in a rocking chair.”

Burger King isn’t Curtis’s first fast-food turnaround. During college, he worked as a Domino’s pizza delivery driver, then became a store manager, ran his own shops as a franchisee in Connecticut for about 20 years and ultimately joined the corporate team. Management acknowledged that its pizza wasn’t good enough, asked for feedback and reintroduced it with a new recipe. The chain went from trailing competitors to becoming the largest pizza chain in the US. “I lived 10 years of magic,” says Curtis. “I want to do it again.”

He joined Burger King in 2021, first as chief operating officer, soon rising to president of the US and Canada business. At the time, Burger King was struggling with weak sales, aging restaurants and subpar service. Annual franchisee profits had fallen to a low of $125,000 for the average location, well below the $300,000 that Curtis says would put operators in a position to open new locations. To save money, restaurants stopped giving out crowns, which Curtis says cost only about a penny apiece.

In short order, Curtis axed slow-selling items such as salads, nixed discounts on the Whopper and standardized the instructions for making burgers. Burger King in 2022 pledged $400 million over two years to boost its advertising and spruce up restaurants, replacing outdated registers, fryers and other equipment. In 2024 it pledged an additional $300 million to get at least 85% of US restaurants into newer designs by 2028. It also agreed to buy its biggest franchisee, which owned roughly 1,000 locations, for about $1 billion to help accelerate the remodels.

Earlier this year, Burger King was ready to ask diners to give the chain another chance in a big marketing push. Chief Marketing Officer Joel Yashinsky pressed Curtis to star in the ads, an idea he’d resisted for years. It was “somewhere between a challenge and offensive,” Curtis says. “But I took it to heart.” The first takes didn’t work. He couldn’t remember his lines. “It was so fake,” Curtis says. So the crew suggested following him around as he went about his day. In Burger King’s test kitchen, Curtis took a big bite of the Whopper, wiped his mouth with his hand and said, “Only one thing missing: a napkin.” The line, he says, was spontaneous. “If they had told me to say that, it would have sucked.”

The video drew little fanfare at first. Then a post of McDonald’s Chief Executive Officer Chris Kempczinski taking a modest bite of his own company’s burger went viral, and Burger King’s social media team reposted the clip of Curtis’s enthusiastic Whopper chowdown. It went on to rack up 24 million views on TikTok. (The company has sold 20% more Whoppers since the recipe revamp, he says.) He also appeared in a 90-second ad during the Oscars that acknowledged Burger King’s earlier shortcomings (it even retired in primetime its polarizing mascot) and touted its progress.

But can it keep the momentum going? Operators pay for much of the renovations, and their profits took a hit in 2025 because of higher beef prices, squeezing their ability to spend on remodels. The company originally aimed to upgrade almost all US restaurants by 2028. Curtis now says the goal is to have most of the work done by around 2030. Reaching a critical mass is vital to the turnaround. There are other signs of how far Burger King has to go. Workers hand customers the crowns at the drive-thru only about 28% of the time. It’s silly, Curtis admits, but “nobody can frown when you give out a crown,” he says, laughing and promising that he hadn’t rehearsed the rhyme. He has no plans for a broader rollout of artificial intelligence ordering at the drive-thru, even though a system Burger King is testing can complete about 93% of orders without human help. “We believe that people would prefer to talk to a human,” he says.

Speaking of the drive-thru, it’s his next stop. Curtis spies a woman waiting in her car and struts up to the window to help. He rummages through a cabinet to fetch sauces for her three chicken sandwiches and reminds her to grab a straw. When she mentions she has three kids, he offers more crowns, on top of the one he’d just given her. “No, they’re big kids,” she says. “Those are the best kind,” Curtis replies. He walks away beaming. “I’ll screw up any drive-thru, because I just start talking and the line gets really long,” he says. “The manager is like, ‘Get this guy out of here.’”