Kichi-Kichi Brand Guidelines: Golden Gate’s 2010 Conveyor-Belt Hotpot Buffet From Hanoi

A mushroom-hotpot company tries a second idea.

Kichi-Kichi is a brand of Golden Gate, the Hanoi restaurant group, and its story starts with the group’s first restaurant. In 2005, the entrepreneur Đào Thế Vinh opened the first Ashima mushroom-hotpot restaurant on Phan Đình Phùng street in Hanoi with the help of two friends, VnExpress International reported in July 2018. The paper says the idea came from a hotpot dish of Shangri-La in Yunnan, China.

Ashima grew quickly. Within two years it had six restaurants, three of them in Ho Chi Minh City, according to the same report. That growth drew the Vietnamese private-equity firm Mekong Capital, which invested in the company and, VnExpress International says, helped turn it into a restaurant-chain operator by introducing several new restaurant concepts. Ashima itself stayed in the group: Golden Gate’s brand pages, read in November 2026, still describe it as a mushroom-hotpot restaurant founded in 2005, offering more than 23 kinds of natural and prized mushrooms.

Kichi-Kichi was among those concepts. In 2010, the owner of Ashima opened the Kichi-Kichi rotary hotpot restaurants, alongside the Sumo BBQ grill-and-hotpot restaurants, VnExpress International reported.

The brand describes that system on its own website, where its tagline reads “Buffet Lẩu Băng Chuyền,” conveyor-belt hotpot buffet. Kichi-Kichi says diners pick from more than 60 items for dipping into the hotpot, carried past the table on a belt, and that the conveyor style combines the Japanese kaiten way of serving with modern interiors. Those are the company’s own descriptions.

Inside a group of more than 40 brands.

Kichi-Kichi grew as part of a much larger portfolio. Golden Gate’s busiest period came after 2013, VnExpress International reported in 2018, when it set up a food distribution and processing centre in Hanoi and launched new brands including Gogi House, 37th Street and Ba Con Cừu. Later chains included Cowboy Jack’s, Vuvuzela beer clubs and City Beer Station.

Ownership changed along the way. Mekong Capital sold its holding in Golden Gate to Standard Chartered Private Equity, the private-equity arm of Standard Chartered Bank, in 2014, according to the same VnExpress International report. The paper described Golden Gate and a second group, Redsun, as Vietnamese-founded restaurant operators, naming Kichi-Kichi and Gogi House among Golden Gate’s grill and hotpot brands.

Later press reports keep Kichi-Kichi among the group’s named brands. In April 2023, VnExpress International said Golden Gate ran more than 20 restaurant and café brands, starting the list with Kichi Kichi, Gogi House and Manwah, followed by Kpub, iSushi, Hutong, Sumo, Vuvuzela and The Coffee Inn. A year later, in April 2024, the same paper described Golden Gate as the operator of Kichi Kichi, Gogi House and Manwah, with about 400 outlets and 17,000 employees.

The group has kept adding to its portfolio. Tuổi Trẻ News reported in April 2025 that Golden Gate had completed the purchase of a 99.98 percent stake in the operator of The Coffee House on 8 January 2025, according to its 2024 audited financial report. In June 2025, Vietnam News described the group as the operator of Kichi Kichi, Gogi House, Manwah and The Coffee House, and said that by the end of 2024 it owned more than 40 brands and nearly 500 restaurants in 42 provinces and cities, serving about 18 million customers a year. The paper started its list of those brands with Kichi Kichi.

Golden Gate’s own website, read in November 2026, gives a similar picture: it says the group was founded in 2005, owns close to 40 brands with around 600 restaurants in 42 provinces and cities, and sorts its restaurants into hotpot, barbecue, Asian, Western and café styles. The company’s figures are its own; the dated press counts above are the independent ones.

Design and documentation.

Vietnam’s café and restaurant chains grew up in a country with a deep street culture of coffee, tea and noodle soup, and most of them present themselves through the shop itself. A chain’s identity is carried by its shopfronts and seating, by the cup a drink is handed over in, and by the bags of ground coffee and boxes of tea sold at the counter or in supermarkets.

Menus are built around named drinks and dishes rather than abstract promises. Coffee chains list house blends, iced coffee with condensed milk and ice-blended drinks; tea chains list fruit teas, milk teas and loose-leaf varieties from Vietnam’s highland growing areas; phở, pizza and hot-pot chains name their broths, toppings and set menus. Store formats vary too, from large flagship cafés to kiosks placed inside supermarkets, and the press has followed which formats the chains keep and which they close.

Ownership is often part of the story. Several of the chains in this set belong to wider groups: Highlands Coffee sits under SuperFoods, in which the Philippine group Jollibee Foods holds a stake, alongside Phở 24; Phúc Long is a subsidiary of the Vietnamese consumer group Masan; others covered here belong to the restaurant group Golden Gate or the retail group Seedcom, as their own guides set out. Store counts change quickly, so each guide gives its figures with the date and the publication that reported them.

Each guide sets out what can be checked about a brand from independent, dated reporting by publications such as VnExpress International, Tuoi Tre News, Viet Nam News and Vietnam Investment Review: who founded it, who owns it, how it trades and what its stores and products look like, with company statements marked as the company’s own word.

One brand on a shared group platform.

On the web, Kichi-Kichi sits inside Golden Gate’s shared system rather than standing alone. Its site carries the same group footer, table-booking service and app as the group’s other restaurants, and its navigation sorts the portfolio into hotpot, BBQ, Japanese, Western, delivery and other concepts, with links out to sister brands such as Ashima, Gogi House and Manwah.

The group app, called Golden Gate, offers members cash back into an in-app wallet at its restaurants, the group’s homepage says, and the Kichi-Kichi site asks diners to choose a province, from Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City to Cà Mau and Đắk Lắk, before showing its restaurants.

The brand’s own language stays close to the format. Its pages repeat the conveyor-belt hotpot buffet tagline and describe the dishes by what they are, such as American beef, whole salmon and cheese sausages for the pot.

For dates, the independent record is clear on the essentials. VnExpress International dates the brand to 2010 and its parent group to 2005; VnExpress International, Tuổi Trẻ News and Vietnam News name Kichi Kichi among Golden Gate’s brands in 2023, 2024 and 2025; and the group was still listing its restaurants across Vietnam on its website in November 2026.

For a design guide, Kichi-Kichi shows how a restaurant brand can be built around a serving system, with the belt, the small plates and the hotpot buffet doing much of the work that a logo or a founder story does elsewhere. Compare its sister brands Gogi House, Golden Gate’s Korean barbecue chain, and Manwah, its Taiwanese hotpot chain. For this guide we use hotpot red, sesame gold and belt steel on steam white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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