Bar B Q Plaza Brand Guidelines: The Bangkok Grill Chain of 1987 and Its Green Dragon, Gon

A grill table in a Bangkok shopping centre.

Bar B Q Plaza is a Thai restaurant chain built around the table grill: diners cook sliced meat, seafood and vegetables themselves on a pan set at their table. Its operator was established in 1987 as The Barbecue Plaza Co, The Nation reported in February 2016. The company’s own history page names its founder as Choopong Choopojcharoen and says the first Bar B Q Plaza opened in July 1987 at the Central Plaza Lad Phrao shopping centre in Bangkok, serving grilled food in a style it describes as Mongolian mixed with Japanese.

That history page sets out a steady build-up. A second branch followed in 1988 at Robinson Ratchada; a first central kitchen and training centre opened in 1990 in a Sukhumvit townhouse; and in 1997 the restaurants switched their table burners from gas to electricity. In 2008 the company opened a central kitchen and distribution centre at the Nava Nakorn industrial estate in Pathum Thani, north of Bangkok, which it says supplies fresh ingredients to its restaurants and makes the chain’s dipping sauce for branches in Thailand and abroad. By its own count it reached 91 branches at its 25th anniversary in 2012, and 100 in 2014.

The shopping-centre location became the pattern. The company says its Thai branches sit in major shopping centres and large retail stores, in Bangkok and in provincial cities, and its history page, read in November 2026, gives the Thai total as more than 156 branches.

From Barbecue Plaza to Food Passion.

In February 2016 the company announced a reorganisation and a new corporate name. The Barbecue Plaza Company Limited became Food Passion Company Limited, The Nation reported, and the change was meant to let each of its chains be managed and expanded independently, with the parent supplying staff, budgets, infrastructure and other support. At that point Food Passion ran 111 Bar B Q Plaza outlets, 27 JumSaap Hut restaurants and five Hot-Star outlets, the paper said. Chataya Supanpong, then described as chief engagement officer, said the parent would act as a central unit for the three brands. Food Passion’s website lists her today with the title Chief Engagement Officer–CEO, and Brand Inside called her the company’s chief executive in December 2024.

Bar B Q Plaza remains the group’s main brand. The restaurant’s website says JumSaap Hut, a Thai-style hot-pot brand, opened in 1993 at The Mall Bangkapi; that Charna, a restaurant brand, opened at Siam Center in November 2018; and that Space Q, a grill and shabu concept developed from Bar B Q Plaza, opened at The Taste Thonglor in December 2018. It also says Food Passion bought 74% of Food Sun Co., the Thai operator of the Korean chain Red Sun, in 2019.

The chain has also moved beyond its own dining rooms. Its dipping sauce went on sale outside the restaurants in November 2022, and from April 2023 the original and a lighter version were sold at six Gourmet Market supermarkets, part of The Mall Group, under the GON Product line, Brand Inside reported. In October 2021 the chain and the dessert café After You launched GON X After You, an okonomiyaki mix combining Bar B Q Plaza’s dipping sauce with After You’s pancake batter, sold through the chain’s delivery line and in After You shops; earlier tie-ups had included AIS, the Double Goose shirt brand and Betagro, the same publication said.

Design and documentation.

Thailand’s restaurant, bakery and café chains tend to present themselves through the places where people meet them: shopping centres, hypermarkets, community malls and their own stand-alone sites. Thai Wikipedia says most MK Suki branches sit in shopping centres and community malls, and in 2015 the Bangkok Post described MK Restaurant Group opening a food mall of its own in Bangkok, London Street, with five of its brands under one roof.

Menus are published by named dishes and drinks rather than by abstract promises. Chains sort their websites into sets, single dishes, desserts and drinks, run seasonal promotions around one dish or sauce, and tie repeat visits to member cards; MK and Yayoi, for example, share the MKONE card. Shopfronts, mascots and packaging are described brand by brand in each guide, as far as dated sources and the companies’ own pages show them.

Ownership is often layered. Several chains in this series sit inside larger groups, among them MK Restaurant Group, PTT OR, the CP group and Food Passion, and some international brands reach Thailand under licence: Yayoi, a Japanese set-meal chain, is run in Thailand by MK Restaurant Group under rights from the Japanese company Plenus, the Bangkok Post reported in 2017. Thai chains also go abroad through franchisees and joint ventures, as MK did in Japan, Vietnam and Singapore.

Corporate pages usually tell a founder story, a list of milestone branches and a record of franchise partners, and listed companies add filings with the Stock Exchange of Thailand. This guide separates what independent, dated sources record (founding dates, owners, listings, branch counts as of a stated date) from what rests only on a company’s own pages, and attributes the latter plainly.

A green dragon at the shop door.

The chain’s most visible design asset is its mascot. According to the company’s timeline, Bar B Gon, a green dragon, joined in 1996 as the brand’s symbol, nine years after the first branch; the character was redrawn to look more modern in 2012, a new Bar B Q Plaza logo followed in 2013, and a second character, Kama-chan, was added later. Brand Inside described Gon in December 2024 as green, standing on two legs and looking a little like a crocodile without being one. That year Food Passion set out to turn Gon into a brand in its own right, with a fan page separate from the restaurant’s and a business fable book, Bar B Gon and the Mission for the Sacred Fire, retelling the chain’s history; Gon stays on duty as the mascot at the shop front. In June 2026 the same publication described the chain’s familiar image as a golden pan and round slices of pork.

The formats keep changing. In September 2025 a branch at Central Park in Bangkok opened a single-diner layout under the line “Tasty Easy For Me”: a long counter with personal grills, light wood and green tiles, and mobile ordering, Brand Inside reported. In June 2026, in what it called the chain’s 39th year, the publication described four store models — Beyond for families, Easy for office workers eating alone, Smart for community malls and Late Night, open until 2 a.m. or 5 a.m. — and more than 30 new dishes.

Abroad, the company’s timeline records a joint venture with W.A. Food Holdings for a first Malaysian branch at 1 Utama in Kuala Lumpur, a joint venture in Jakarta in 2013, and a master franchise with Express Food Group for Cambodia, signed in April 2017, with a first branch at AEON Mall Phnom Penh that July. In December 2024 the chain opened its first branch in Vientiane, Laos, with a menu using local ingredients and a Lao dipping sauce, Brand Inside reported.

For a design guide, Bar B Q Plaza shows how a mascot can carry a restaurant brand across decades, formats and grocery shelves. Compare MK Restaurants, another Bangkok table-cooking chain, and After You, its partner on GON X After You. For this guide we use a dragon green, a pan brass and charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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