A restaurateur, a football player and a nickname.

Chi-Chi’s began in Minnesota in 1975, founded by the restaurateur Marno McDermott and Max McGee, a former Green Bay Packers player. English Wikipedia places the original restaurant in Richfield, a suburb of Minneapolis. The International Directory of Company Histories (St. James Press, 2003) says the pair opened Chi-Chi’s Mexican Restaurante in a section of the Left Guard, a bar and restaurant McGee owned in Minneapolis. The name came from the nickname of McDermott’s wife.

McDermott already had restaurant experience: the directory says he had created a fast-food Mexican concept called Zapata after leaving the University of Minnesota, and English Wikipedia says that chain later became Zantigo. According to the directory, the original Chi-Chi’s menu was built around Sonoran-style Mexican food, and its aim was a full-service Mexican restaurant for the Midwest.

The business soon changed hands. The directory says a Minnesota stockbroker, John Stephens, persuaded McDermott to sell him the rights to operate and franchise Chi-Chi’s restaurants, and that Shelly Frank, previously vice-president of concept development at Kentucky Fried Chicken, was brought in to run it. Frank became president and chief executive in 1977 and moved the headquarters to Louisville, Kentucky, his home town; Louisville stayed the chain’s base for the rest of its American life.

The early 1980s were a period of rapid expansion across the Midwest, the directory records, followed by a harder period in the middle of the decade. When Frank retired in 1986, Hal Smith, who had led the Chili’s chain, took over and set about rebuilding morale among managers and franchisees. In April 1988 Chi-Chi’s was bought by Foodmaker, the San Diego owner of Jack in the Box, and kept its own corporate staff as a Foodmaker division. Early in 1994 it passed to Family Restaurants Inc., which also owned the El Torito chain; the directory says each chain kept its own name and style under the new parent, which took the name Prandium in 1999.

Neon, banners, a salsa slogan and a fleet of Beetles.

Each owner reworked the restaurants. Under Foodmaker, the directory says, tortilla-making machines were placed in the lobbies of company-owned restaurants so that guests saw them on the way in. In 1993 the chain continued store makeovers that brought a festive colour scheme with banners, striped neon lighting, new tiling and wood, a sun room and a display cart of fresh fruit. The same history says a group of Consul restaurants taken over in 1992 were refurbished with new uniforms and tableware, so the look reached the staff and the table as well as the room.

Advertising carried the identity outside the building. Later in the 1990s, the directory records, Chi-Chi’s hired a new advertising company and adopted the slogan “Life Always Needs a Little Salsa,” while remodelling stores with a more modern look. In 1999 it launched a “Get Salsafied” campaign, followed by a travelling “Bug Tour” of Volkswagen Beetles decorated with Chi-Chi’s advertising and sombreros; the tour began in Philadelphia and New Jersey and moved into the chain’s main markets in 2001. English Wikipedia lists “A celebration of food” as the earlier slogan.

Chi-Chi’s filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in October 2003, English Wikipedia records. In November 2003 a hepatitis A outbreak was traced to green onions served at the chain’s restaurant in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, the Associated Press reported in September 2004. That month Outback Steakhouse closed a deal for the rights to many Chi-Chi’s restaurant properties; an Outback executive told the AP the deal did not include the Chi-Chi’s brand, its restaurant operations or its recipes, and that Outback planned to convert many of the sites to its own restaurant brands. A statement on the chain’s website thanked customers “of the past 27 years” and said goodbye.

The name survived on the shelf. English Wikipedia says Hormel Foods acquired the rights to produce and market Chi-Chi’s salsa and related products in the United States in 1987, and CNN reported in December 2024 that Hormel had made Chi-Chi’s chips, salsas and other products since the late 1980s, with the branding still used on packaged food and margaritas. In 2009, English Wikipedia says, Hormel formed MegaMex Foods, a joint venture with the Mexican food group Herdez Del Fuerte, and Chi-Chi’s became one of its brands. The MegaMex website lists Chi-Chi’s beside Herdez, La Victoria, Doña María and Búfalo, with the tagline “Let the fiesta begin!”

Design and documentation.

The chains in this group are restaurant names that closed, shrank to a handful of locations or came back under new owners. A restaurant brand lives in more places than a packaged product does: on a pole sign seen from the road, on a menu board and a printed menu, on uniforms, napkins and cups, and in the shape of the building itself, which was often designed so that a passing driver could recognise the chain before reading a word.

That is why so much of a restaurant identity outlasts the business behind it. Buildings are sold and reused with their rooflines still recognisable; signs are taken down and kept; menus, matchbooks and advertising characters survive in collections and in memory. When a name is revived, the new owner usually works from those surviving pieces, so the identity a guest meets today may be a reconstruction of an older one.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the chain, who has owned the name, when it closed or came back, and how its signs, logos, mascots and buildings have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A grocery brand that went back to being a restaurant.

The restaurant name came back two decades after the chain closed. On 3 December 2024 a new company, Chi-Chi’s Restaurants LLC, announced an agreement with Hormel Foods, which it described as the owner of the Chi-Chi’s trademarks, granting Michael McDermott, son of the founder Marno McDermott, the use of the name on physical restaurants. CNN reported the deal the next day and noted that McDermott had earlier launched the Kona Grill chain. The new company says it aims to combine the classic Chi-Chi’s restaurant experience with modern influences, and that the packaged salsas, tortillas and seasonings would stay on sale alongside the restaurants.

McDermott’s company opened its restaurant in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, on 6 October 2025, TODAY reported, a few miles from where the chain had started half a century earlier. Its press release promised updated spaces with comfortable seating and modern decor, and a menu that mixed “original favorites” such as the chimichanga with newer dishes. Hormel Foods has owned the Chi-Chi’s trademarks throughout.

A restaurant brand is usually experienced as a place — signs, neon, banners, uniforms and a dining room — while a grocery brand lives on a label. Chi-Chi’s has been both: a chain of decorated dining rooms until 2004, a name on salsa jars and tortilla packs after that, and since October 2025 a restaurant sign again.

For a design guide, Chi-Chi’s shows how a restaurant name can survive its restaurants on packaged food and then return to a sign over a door; compare Herdez, its stablemate at MegaMex, and Friendly’s, another American restaurant name that also sells on the shelf. For this guide we use terracotta, marigold and agave green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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