Gindaco Brand Guidelines: A 1997 Gunma Takoyaki Stand, Open Griddles & Hotland

A takoyaki stand from Kiryu that took a Tokyo market’s name.

Gindaco is the trading name of Tsukiji Gindaco, a chain of takoyaki stands run by Hotland. Takoyaki are small balls of batter with a piece of octopus inside, cooked in rows of half-round moulds and turned with picks, and they are usually linked with Osaka. Gindaco’s story starts elsewhere. On 8 March 2012 TV Tokyo’s business programme Cambria Palace profiled the founder, Morio Sase, who comes from Kiryu in Gunma Prefecture, north of Tokyo. According to the programme, he opened a yakisoba shop at the age of 25 and went on to try taiyaki, imagawayaki, rice balls and ice cream, none of which lasted.

In 1997, the programme says, he opened Tsukiji Gindaco, a shop given over to takoyaki alone, and then took it across Japan. The name pairs Tsukiji, the Tokyo district long known for its fish market, with “gin,” the Japanese word for silver, and “tako,” octopus. Hotland itself is older than the brand: the company’s own profile gives its founding as June 1991.

By the time of the 2012 broadcast, Cambria Palace said, there were about 350 Tsukiji Gindaco shops in Japan, and the company ran twelve formats in all, including the Gindaco Highball Sakaba bars, which serve takoyaki with highballs, whisky and soda. The same programme recorded a move outside the snack trade. In July 2011 Hotland opened Hot Yokocho Ishinomaki, a cluster of ten food outlets in trailer houses in Ishinomaki, Miyagi, set up to create local jobs, and in December 2011 it moved its head office to the city. A ramen format, Sendai Ramen Miso Yashiki, was developed there and opened in Shinagawa, Tokyo, that December. Today the company profile gives the head office as Chuo-ku, Tokyo.

Crisp outside, soft inside, cooked in public.

The product is the brand. Hotland describes its takoyaki as crisp on the outside, soft and molten inside, with octopus that springs back when bitten, and calls them “absolutely delicious takoyaki,” a line that runs through its brand pages. Cambria Palace gave the method behind that texture as the company tells it: Gindaco uses madako, the common octopus, which it boils to a medium-rare finish in its own factory before the pieces reach the shops.

The shops are built around the griddle. A Taipei Times review of 29 May 2009, written after a visit to the chain’s Taipei shop on Roosevelt Road, described takoyaki made from a batter mixed with pickled ginger, spring onion and boiled octopus, cooked to order on griddles in full view at the front of the shop, each ball about two centimetres across. They were finished with sweet mayonnaise and soy sauce and one of three toppings: bonito flakes, scrambled egg, or green onion with shavings of seaweed. The paper also noted fried noodles in three styles and side dishes such as miso soup and matcha ice cream, and said a Japanese chef had often worked the griddle in the shop’s early days.

That review is also the clearest outside account of how a Gindaco room looked. It called the Taipei shop airy and minimalist, “a bit like a Japanese inn,” with natural colours, low wooden tables and benches and round paper lanterns, while a recording of the shamisen played and staff in matching hats and blue robes called out a welcome in Japanese. For a designer, the review shows the griddle doing the work of a shopfront.

Hotland has since varied the format around the same product. Its investor pages describe Gindaco Sakaba shops placed at the entrances of shopping streets in residential districts, with exteriors and interiors meant to feel easy for women and families and a takeaway menu that goes beyond takoyaki, and the Gindaco Yokocho halls, which gather tempura, yakitori and teppanyaki counters in a street-stall layout.

How Japanese food chains present themselves.

Japan’s restaurant and food chains cover a wide spread of formats: takeaway bento shops, tempura and set-meal counters, family restaurants, ramen and champon chains, takoyaki stands, burger shops and yakiniku grills. Most present themselves first through the shopfront. A sign over the door, a colour that can be read from across the street and a short name, often written in both Latin letters and Japanese script, do much of the work of telling passers-by what is sold inside.

Menus carry the rest. Chains tend to describe themselves by named dishes rather than by abstract promises: a standard bowl, a set meal, a takeaway box, a seasonal special that changes through the year. Menu boards, printed menus, ordering screens and ticket machines repeat those names, and many chains publish their menus online as well, so the dish names themselves become part of the identity.

Store networks are another way these companies describe themselves. Corporate pages and annual histories list store counts, prefectures and the year a chain opened in a new region or country, and many chains mix company-run stores with franchised ones. Some brands operate abroad directly, others through joint ventures or local franchise partners, and the overseas store design and menu can differ from those at home.

Ownership is often layered. A single chain may sit inside a larger restaurant group, alongside sister brands with their own names and looks, and some brand names have changed when a franchise arrangement ended or a parent company reorganised. Corporate pages usually set out the founders, the operating company, the owner and the franchise network, and those pages, read alongside dated press reports, are a useful record of how each chain came to look the way it does today.

From Gunma to Hong Kong, Taipei and a Tokyo listing.

Gindaco went abroad early. Hotland says its overseas business began in Hong Kong in 2004, through its local arm, and by 2012 Cambria Palace listed shops in Hong Kong and Singapore. The Taipei Times reported in May 2009 that long queues had formed when Gindaco opened its first Taiwan branch, in Gongguan, Taipei, in 2005, and that branches in Tianmu and Ximending followed in 2008. The company’s overseas page today lists 52 Gindaco shops outside Japan; that is its own undated figure.

The group has grown around the brand. Hotland’s company profile now names the parent as Hotland Holdings, with subsidiaries that run takoyaki shops in eastern and western Japan, among them the Ookamaya takoyaki format; bars; frozen takoyaki made and sold by Hotland Foods; businesses in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the United States; and a design company that handles graphic design, shop interiors and sign work. Its brand list adds the Gin no An taiyaki shops, tonkatsu, yakiniku, oden and soba restaurants, and Cold Stone Creamery shops. Its investor pages say the shares trade on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and give the listing date as 30 September 2015.

For a design guide, Gindaco shows how a single snack, made in view of the street, can carry a chain with little more than a name, a griddle and a uniform. Compare Marugame Seimen, a Japanese udon chain, and Ringer Hut, another Japanese restaurant chain in this series. For this guide we use griddle red, sauce brown and batter cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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