HD İskender Brand Guidelines: The 1995 Ankara İskender Chain Behind HD Holding

One restaurant, one dish, 1995.

HD İskender began in Ankara in 1995. Milli Gazete, in a profile of the founder published in August 2026, reports that Hakan Demirağ opened the first restaurant on the ground floor of a family-owned business centre in the capital. He had studied law, the paper says, but built his career in trade, investment and restaurant management, and he is today the founder and honorary chairman of the group the restaurant grew into. Turkish Wikipedia’s list of restaurant chains in Türkiye places the chain’s founding in Çankaya, the central Ankara district, in 1995, and the company’s own website dates its “journey of flavour” to the same year; the brand’s social media handles carry the year in their names.

The name points to the dish. İskender is the familiar Turkish plate of thinly sliced döner meat served over bread with tomato sauce, butter and yoghurt, and HD İskender built its business on serving that one plate in a standard format. Milli Gazete describes the founder’s approach as taking a dish long tied to street-front restaurants and offering it through a different restaurant model.

The decisive change came with the spread of shopping centres in Türkiye. As mall culture grew, the paper reports, the company changed its growth strategy and placed HD İskender in shopping-centre food courts, which carried the brand to a wider audience in more cities. The company itself describes HD İskender as a restaurant concept in shopping centres serving the traditional İskender at accessible prices; that framing, rather than a single flagship, is how the brand presents itself.

From one brand to a holding company.

The chain did not stay a single brand for long. Milli Gazete lists the launches that followed: HD Döner in 1999, a separate döner brand; Pidem, a pide chain, in 2010; and Pideko in 2013. As the number of brands grew, the paper says, the businesses were brought together under one company, HD Holding. Turkish Wikipedia’s list of chains adds Makarnam, a pasta brand, and gives Pidem’s origin as Tepebaşı, in Eskişehir. HD Holding says Makarnam opened in May 2021 at the ANKAmall shopping centre in Ankara and had about 30 restaurants as of May 2025.

The group was founded in Ankara but is now run from Istanbul: the company’s websites give its head office in Maslak, in the Sarıyer district, and Turkish Wikipedia’s list also places the headquarters in Sarıyer. Milli Gazete reports that Kaan Demirağ is chairman of the HD Holding board, while Hakan Demirağ holds the honorary chair.

Counts vary by brand and by date, so each is given here with its source. Turkish Wikipedia’s list, citing the company in May 2024, gives HD İskender about 80 restaurants and Pidem about 200. HD Holding’s brands page describes HD İskender as having more than 100 restaurants, and its about page says the group runs close to 300 restaurants in 50 provinces and serves about 40 million guests a year; those are the company’s figures. The same list gives Makarnam 28 restaurants in May 2024. In September 2025 Forbes Türkiye described HD Holding as having more than 30 years in the sector and a portfolio of more than 300 restaurants.

On the plate, the company presents İskender in set formats rather than as a single dish. Its campaigns page lists a family menu, a student menu, a lunch menu and an İskender Burger menu. HD İskender says its meat is prepared in the group’s own meat-processing plant; that is the company’s statement.

Design and documentation.

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.

A franchise system and a new partner.

HD İskender grows partly through franchising. Its franchise page sets out the steps the company follows: a candidate fills in an application form, HD Holding interviews the applicant, a proposed site is visited for a feasibility study, or the group’s teams help find one, and an architectural project is drawn up for the approved space. Staff hiring and training are directed by HD Holding, and its operations team supports each stage until the opening.

In September 2025 the group took on an international brand. Forbes Türkiye reported on 11 September 2025 that HD Holding had announced a franchise agreement with KFC, the chicken chain, which the magazine noted had operated in Türkiye since 1989. The article named HD İskender, Pidem and Makarnam as the group’s brands and described HD Holding’s role as supporting KFC’s restructuring in the country. HD Holding’s brands page now lists KFC next to its own three brands and notes that KFC is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc.

This guide makes no claim about who drew the mark or which colours it uses. It follows how the company presents the brand in its own words and pages: as a chain built on one traditional dish, served at accessible prices in a standard restaurant format, with set menus for families, students and lunchtime customers.

For a design guide, HD İskender shows how a single-dish restaurant can scale through one repeatable format, from an Ankara ground floor to shopping-centre food courts in many provinces. Compare Usta Dönerci, a döner chain created inside another Turkish restaurant group, and Köfteci Yusuf, another Turkish grill chain. For this guide we use a tomato red, a butter yellow and a yoghurt cream with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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