Gerry’s Grill Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Tomas Morato Bar That Became Simply Gerry’s

A bar for after work.

Gerry’s Grill opened on 14 February 1997 on Tomas Morato Avenue in Quezon City, part of Metro Manila. English Wikipedia says it was opened by Gerry Apolinario as a bar where people could unwind after work, and The Philippine Star named him as the owner when it reported a new branch at the Embarcadero in Legazpi, in the Bicol region, in December 2009. That 2009 report described the menu as grilled seafood, Filipino dishes, “beermates” and pica-pica, the small shared plates meant to go with a drink, and counted 40 branches, two of them in the United States.

The original identity was a night out. The Daily Tribune, in December 2022, described the old Gerry’s Grill as an open-air, dimly lit “party place” with a bar in the middle of the room; Apolinario told the paper that customers had once come mainly for drinks. In February 2020 The Manila Times marked the chain’s 23rd year, calling the business “Gerry’s Restaurant and Bar, more widely known as Gerry’s Grill.”

Behind the restaurants is an operating company. In March 2015 The Philippine Star identified it as Prime Pacific Grill Corp., with Apolinario as president and chief executive, and listed its other brands at the time: Aresi for Italian-American food, Sweet Chili for Thai food, Kusina ng Gerry’s, a do-it-yourself fast-casual format, and Ramen Sora, a ramen house that had opened its first branch in Subic in December 2014. The same report covered Gerry’s Grill Plus, a new format at UP Town Center in Quezon City that mixed dishes from the company’s different brands under one roof, with its own interiors and decor.

Grilled seafood, sisig and a blue marlin.

The brand travelled with Filipino diners. English Wikipedia records four branches in the United States, an opening at Marina Bay in Singapore in December 2010 and an entry into Qatar in 2012; SunStar Cebu gave the same Singapore and Qatar years in October 2023. A photograph caption in The Manila Times in 2020 showed Avenida Restaurant, described as a new Gerry’s concept store in San Mateo, California.

Those overseas years were not smooth. Apolinario told the Daily Tribune in December 2022 that the company lost 20 stores in 2020 and that its international branches in the United States and the Middle East shut that year. In the same interview he said the company had turned to selling online and in supermarkets, with a Gerry’s iced tea, a kare-kare sauce and a packaged sisig on grocery shelves.

The menu has stayed close to the grill. SunStar Cebu named sisig, inihaw na pusit, or grilled squid, and crispy pata as long-running dishes in 2023, along with grilled tuna belly, nilagang bulalo, a beef-shank soup, and cold desserts such as halo-halo and leche flan. English Wikipedia adds sizzling bangus, or milkfish, and says a blue marlin appears in the company’s logo. The 2009 Philippine Star report shows that drinks and shareable plates were part of the offer from the early years.

Branches reach well beyond Metro Manila. In Cebu, SunStar listed branches at Ayala Center Cebu and, more recently, at Ayala Central Bloc in the IT Park in Lahug. In 2022 Apolinario named new restaurants opened that year in Panglao, Bohol, in San Fernando and Mexico in Pampanga, and in Sierra Valley in Marikina. English Wikipedia says the chain had more than 110 branches in the Philippines as of January 2025.

Filipino dining chains.

The Philippines’ restaurant, bakeshop and snack chains tend to present themselves through a small set of recurring elements: a shop name and sign that customers can spot in a mall or on a busy road, menus organised around named dishes and named cakes, and packaging that travels home with the order. Some brands take their names from a place or a founder; Red Ribbon, by its own account, takes its name from the ribbon once tied around its cake boxes.

Many of these chains now sit inside a few restaurant groups. Jollibee Foods Corporation, which adopted “Jollibee Group” as its corporate brand in July 2025 according to BusinessWorld, owns brands including Jollibee, Chowking, Greenwich, Red Ribbon and Mang Inasal. Max’s Group, which traces itself to the Max’s Restaurant fried-chicken café of 1945, runs another portfolio of casual-dining brands, according to its own website.

Franchising is the usual route to growth, at home and abroad. Group and brand websites publish franchising pages for the Philippines and, in several cases, for international partners, and some chains have opened abroad. Red Ribbon is one example: it opened in California in 1984, according to English Wikipedia, and had 39 stores in the United States by October 2022, The Philippine Star reported.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it, when and where, who owns it now, and how its own pages and the Philippine press describe its menu, stores and franchise network. Counts of stores are given with the date of the source, and claims that rest only on a company’s own word are marked as such.

From party place to family table.

The clearest design story is a rename. In late November 2022 the main Tomas Morato branch reopened after more than two months of renovation, the Daily Tribune reported, under the shorter name Gerry’s. Apolinario said the company had worked with an architectural firm to move the look away from its party-place image: brighter lighting, full air-conditioning, plants and wooden interiors meant to feel like dining at home, and a dining room in place of the central bar. He said the renovation had first been planned for 2020.

SunStar Cebu described the result in its Cebu branches in October 2023: tables set for groups of four to ten, a brighter and more inviting atmosphere, and the signature bar cut back to a smaller service bar. The paper called the business “Gerry’s Restaurant and Bar, formerly known as Gerry’s Grill,” and the company’s website carries that name today. English Wikipedia uses the same form, with Gerry’s Grill as the former name.

So the name on the door has moved from Gerry’s Grill to Gerry’s Restaurant and Bar and to simply Gerry’s, while the founder and the Tomas Morato flagship have stayed in place. The sisig and crispy pata named in 2009 and 2023 are still on the menu, while the room around them has changed from a bar to a family dining room.

For a design guide, Gerry’s shows how a restaurant brand can move from night-out bar to family table through lighting, materials and a shorter name. Compare Max’s Restaurant, another Filipino chain that began in Quezon City, and Kuya J, a Cebu chain built on grilled and home-style Filipino dishes. For this guide we use a marlin blue, a charcoal and a grill-ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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