Max’s Restaurant Brand Guidelines: Fried Chicken From a 1945 Quezon City House

A teacher’s house and his niece’s kitchen.

Max’s Restaurant dates from 1945 and from a house in Quezon City. English Wikipedia gives the month as October and the founder as Maximo Gimenez, a Stanford-educated teacher. Tatler Asia reported in September 2024 that after the Second World War Gimenez often hosted American soldiers for drinks at his home on Scout Tuazon, in Diliman; when his guests grew hungry, he asked his niece, Ruby Trota, to prepare fried chicken and steak for them. English Wikipedia adds that the soldiers insisted on paying for what they were served, which led Gimenez to open a café, and that the first restaurant stood on the street now called Scout Tuason.

The kitchen was Ruby Trota’s. English Wikipedia says she managed it and created the chicken recipe that became popular first with the soldiers and then with the wider public, and it names other relatives who joined the business, among them Gimenez’s wife, Mercedes, and Trota’s husband, Claro. In the Tatler Asia report, the group’s chief marketing officer describes Trota as his grandmother and the creator of the fried-chicken recipe, and a marketing manager who is her great-grandson credits her with expanding the restaurant to other locations.

The original site is still part of the business. Tatler Asia says the first Max’s was built where Gimenez’s home stood and still stands there today, and Interaksyon, the news site of the Philstar group, quoted the marketing head in October 2025 calling Scout Tuazon the only heritage store of Max’s. The family remains involved: the same 2025 report quoted a fourth-generation member of the family working in marketing and a director of Max’s Group Inc. from the Trota family.

Fried chicken and a family table.

The menu began with chicken, steak and drinks, English Wikipedia says, and fried chicken remains the signature dish; the restaurant also serves Filipino dishes such as kare-kare, sinigang, lumpia and pancit. Tatler Asia describes the fried chicken as the dish behind the restaurant’s reputation and repeats its nickname, “The House That Fried Chicken Built.” The magazine notes that diners often eat it with banana ketchup and Worcestershire sauce.

Its advertising has long leaned on family. English Wikipedia says earlier television and cinema advertisements presented Max’s as a place for Filipino families to get together, and that the line “Sarap to the bones!”, roughly “delicious to the bones,” dates from 1993. A series of television advertisements called “Forever Yours,” shown from April to June 2004, told the story of a Max’s employee and a television star who had known each other as children, the same source says. The founding story itself was dramatised in an episode of the long-running anthology series Maalaala Mo Kaya, titled “Sino si Max?” (“Who is Max?”).

The chain grew across the Philippines and then abroad. English Wikipedia lists branches in Metro Manila, Luzon and Cebu, and in the United States, Canada, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates; it dates the Kuwait opening, in Salmiya, to 2016, and a restaurant in Woodside, New York, to May 2022. Counts vary with the date. Tatler Asia gave more than 185 branches in the Philippines and 30 overseas in September 2024, while Interaksyon reported 160 branches nationwide and 28 abroad in October 2025.

How Asian restaurant chains present themselves.

Asian restaurant chains tend to present themselves through what happens in the kitchen. Din Tai Fung’s own history page opens with the xiaolongbao and its count of 18 folds, and the Taipei Times traced that formula to the founder’s son working alongside the shop’s first dim sum chefs.

Names and shop fronts carry a lot of the identity. Tim Ho Wan’s Chinese name means “to add good luck,” English Wikipedia says, and Din Tai Fung’s joins the names of a former employer and an oil supplier, according to the company and the Taipei Times. Long-kept signs, such as the brushed board that Din Tai Fung says still hangs at its first restaurant on Xinyi Road, link a chain of many branches back to one room.

Dish naming is usually plain and descriptive: barbecue pork buns, steamed rice rolls, pan-fried turnip cake, soup dumplings. Groups can list signature dishes by name when they announce deals, as Jollibee Foods Corporation did for Tim Ho Wan in November 2024, GMA News reported. Guidebook recognition travels with a name too: Tim Ho Wan’s first shop in Mong Kok appeared with a star in the 2010 Michelin Guide, Gourmet Traveller reported in 2015, and that star still features in how the chain is introduced in press coverage.

The corporate side is published too. Company pages set out founders and founding years, parent groups describe their portfolios in stock exchange disclosures, and franchise partners appear in trade press when rights change hands. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and how it grew — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A listed group, a lounge and an anniversary museum.

The restaurant now sits inside a listed company. In February 2014 the Max’s group completed its purchase of Pancake House Inc., a listed restaurant operator, and on 1 July 2014 moved its 20 entities into Pancake House through a share swap, GMA News reported; that July the board approved renaming the company Max’s Group Inc., with the stock ticker MAXS, subject to shareholder and regulatory approval. The deal brought more than 150 Max’s stores together with over 300 outlets of the Pancake House brands. Rappler reported in November 2014 that the Philippine Stock Exchange had approved a follow-on share offering by Max’s Group, and that at the end of June 2014 the group ran 525 stores across 11 brands, among them Pancake House, Teriyaki Boy, Yellow Cab and Dencio’s, with 27 outlets in the United States, Canada, the Middle East and Malaysia. The group says it is based in Makati.

Recent design work has been built around the founders. Tatler Asia reported in September 2024 on Ruby’s, a 12-seat lounge of about 21 square metres inside the Scout Tuazon branch, renovated with the architect Sarah Canlas. The lounge’s logo is based on Ruby Trota’s own handwriting, and its brand designer described working from family photo albums, paintings and papers in the Max’s archives; the branch also gained a coffee station and a bakery. For the 80th anniversary in October 2025, Interaksyon reported, the group opened a museum of artefacts, photographs and memorabilia in the same branch and recreated a dining room of the 1950s and 1960s. The studio Goods From Scratch styled a Birthday Cake Room, Studio Yakal redesigned Gimenez’s living room with antique furniture, and a General Store for anniversary merchandise took its cue from sari-sari shops and American general stores.

For a design guide, Max’s Restaurant shows how a family house, a founder’s handwriting and an archive of photographs can become the material of a restaurant identity. Compare Jollibee and Chowking, two other Filipino chains. For this guide we use a brick red, cream and a warm gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Max’s Restaurant’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.