BigChefs Brand Guidelines: The 2007 Ankara All-Day Restaurant Listed on Borsa İstanbul

One restaurant, then a partner in Istanbul.

BigChefs, which the company writes as one word, was founded in Ankara in 2007 by Gamze Cizreli, a business graduate of Middle East Technical University. In a conversation with the columnist Vahap Munyar in Ekonomi Gazetesi, she described opening it after two or three earlier café and restaurant ventures in the city.

The move to Istanbul came with a partner. Cizreli told Ekonomi Gazetesi that her path crossed with Saruhan Tan in 2009, when the brand opened its first Istanbul restaurant; the company’s own timeline says Tan bought half of the business that year and set up its head office in Istanbul. Turkish Wikipedia says the first Istanbul restaurant was near Nispetiye Caddesi. The operating company, Büyük Şefler Gıda, was registered in 2009, according to the company’s investor pages.

Growth followed in the company’s own restaurants in Istanbul and through franchisees in Anatolia. The company’s timeline gives 13 restaurants in four cities in 2011, 23 in 2014 and 27 in 2015. In 2017 it moved its management to Istanbul and set up an integrated central kitchen, and in 2018 Cizreli stepped back from day-to-day management and a new chief executive was appointed; she told Ekonomi Gazetesi that she stayed on as chair of the board. The same year the first Buselik restaurant opened at Hisar, the company says.

The menu mixes regional Turkish dishes in modern versions with dishes from other cuisines, served from breakfast through to dinner, the company says; it presents its restaurants as places to spend the whole day, from a weekend breakfast to an evening meal.

Taxim Capital, new brands and a listing.

In September 2016 the private equity firm Taxim Capital took a 40 percent stake, both Cizreli, speaking to Ekonomi Gazetesi, and the company’s timeline say. At that point the two founders each held 30 percent, Cizreli said.

The group added brands. The company says it bought NumNum in 2020 to reach younger customers and began delivery the same year, and later added NumNum Streetfood and a cooking school, Academy BigChefs. In June 2025 it opened the first store of a new coffee chain, Kont, in Moda on Istanbul’s Asian side, according to a stock-exchange filing reported by Ekonomist on 2 July 2025.

The company went public in 2023. The Hürriyet Daily News reported on 1 May 2023 that book-building for the shares would run from 3 to 5 May, that the offering combined new shares with a sale by existing shareholders, and that the chain had about 100 outlets in Turkey and abroad at the end of 2022. Ekonomist reported the same month that the 100 restaurants were spread across the BigChefs, NumNum and Buselik brands; Cizreli told the magazine that 92 of them were in 19 Turkish provinces and eight in six other countries, Cyprus among them. Turkish Wikipedia says the shares began trading on Borsa İstanbul on 10 May 2023; the company’s investor pages say they trade on the exchange’s main market under the code BIGCH.

The founders remain the main named shareholders. The company’s investor pages list Saruhan Tan and Gamze Cizreli as the two named shareholders, with the rest of the shares held by others, and say the founders’ class of shares carries rights to nominate board members.

Turkish chains at home and abroad.

Turkish café, bakery, kebab and casual-dining chains tend to build their names around a single dish or a single place. Some carry a city in the name, as Mado does with Maraş, the older name of Kahramanmaraş; others carry the food itself, as Simit Sarayı does with the sesame-covered simit. On their own websites the companies present the dish first and the shop second, with menus organised by named dishes such as künefe, baklava, simit or döner rather than by abstract product lines.

Many of these chains grew by moving street food indoors. Hürriyet Daily News wrote in 2013 that simit, once sold from carts, had become a large business run by chain restaurants, and the companies themselves describe their shopfronts as cafés, bakeries or restaurants with seating, counters and displays that make the food the main sight.

Franchising carries the brands abroad. Turkish chains publish franchise pages and lists of foreign branches, and some work through master franchisees that run a whole region; Daily Sabah reported in 2017 that a Saudi retail group had held such a franchise for Simit Sarayı across the Middle East and North Africa since 2014. Shops abroad often sit in malls and on main shopping streets, according to the companies’ own branch lists.

Ownership is usually described plainly on corporate pages: a family company, a holding company behind several brands, or a founding partnership that later sold a minority stake. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and where its food is made, using dated press reports where they exist and marking what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the Gulf to Frankfurt and back.

BigChefs went abroad through franchisees. The company says its first international restaurant, run by a franchisee, opened in the Middle East in 2014; Turkish Wikipedia dates the first foreign branch to September 2014 in Dubai. Its first European restaurant opened in Frankfurt in 2019, according to the company and Turkish Wikipedia, and the company says a third European restaurant opened in Antwerp, Belgium, in March 2023 and a branch in Uzbekistan in the second quarter of that year. In between, the company says, it introduced QR-code menus and some robotic systems in its restaurants in 2021, and in 2022 signed its first joint-venture agreement covering Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States. Cizreli also named branches in Almaty, Erbil and Baku in her conversation with Ekonomi Gazetesi.

The size of the network has moved up and down. A stock-exchange filing reported by Ekonomist on 2 July 2025 gave 140 branches as of 1 July 2025: 127 in 29 Turkish cities and 13 in 10 other countries. Capital reported on 4 November 2025 that the company had 138 branches, 125 of them in Turkey, with no change during October. The company’s investor pages give a lower figure for 30 June 2026: 124 branches in 29 Turkish cities and four abroad in four countries, a total of 128 across BigChefs, NumNum, NumNum Streetfood, Buselik and Academy BigChefs.

The company’s list of cities today runs from Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir to Trabzon, Erzurum and Şanlıurfa, and abroad to Germany, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Georgia and Uzbekistan, according to its own “Who we are” page. Its head office is in Sarıyer, on the European shore of the Bosphorus.

For a design guide, BigChefs shows how a single restaurant name can stretch from a neighbourhood breakfast room to a listed group with several sister brands. Compare Midpoint, another Turkish casual-dining chain, and Kahve Dünyası, an Istanbul chain built by a manufacturer. For this guide we use olive, linen and terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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