Madero Brand Guidelines: A 2005 Curitiba Burger House, Wood, Brick and a Ponta Grossa Kitchen

A chef’s second restaurant in Curitiba.

Madero grew out of a restaurant that was already there. Brazil Journal reported in August 2022 that its founder, Luiz Renato Durski Junior, who calls himself “Chef Junior,” had returned to Curitiba to open his first restaurant, Durski, serving international cuisine in the bohemian São Francisco district of the city. The business was slow to take off, and the chef blamed the bar next door. He bought the neighbouring bar, and it was there, in 2005, that the first Madero opened, according to the same report.

From the start the founder wanted to control the whole chain of supply. Brazil Journal quoted him as saying that, to guarantee the quality of the service, the company would have to “produce, transport, own the brands and run the restaurants.” That plan became a large production complex in Ponta Grossa, about an hour from Curitiba, which the publication put at more than 80,000 square metres. There, it reported, Madero makes breads, burgers, cheeses and smoked products every day and sends them to its restaurants in its own fleet of about 60 trucks; organic lettuce is grown on the same site. The company’s website lists the Ponta Grossa site as its central kitchen and gives Curitiba as its administrative headquarters.

The chain grew into several formats. In January 2019 the Curitiba newspaper Gazeta do Povo described the group as four restaurant brands plus the Ponta Grossa factory, and reported that two brands launched in 2018, Dundee Burger and A Sanduicheria do Junior Durski, were still being tested, while a fifth, Vó Maria, a restaurant built around a single dish, was being closed. The same report said Madero had closed its restaurant in Miami in 2018.

Steak House, Container and Jeronimo.

By 2022 the group worked with four formats, Brazil Journal reported: the Madero Steak House, a restaurant with a broader menu and table service; the Madero Container, a fast-casual format serving only burgers; Jeronimo, the group’s smash-burger brand; and Dundee Chicken, focused on fried chicken. At that point the group had 274 restaurants, 91 of them Jeronimo units, the publication said. A fifth idea, the Italian Legno, was being tested inside Steak House units in Curitiba, with a separate menu and a different uniform for the staff who served it. The same report said Madero had not offered online delivery before 2020, because the founder feared the food would lose quality on the way.

Counts by format were published in 2024. Bloomberg Línea reported in March 2024 that at the end of 2023 the group had 95 Madero Steak House restaurants, 84 Madero Container units and 86 Jeronimo restaurants, plus restaurants inside other brands and roadside stops it calls ecoparadas. In total it had 276 units, including six franchises; almost all of the restaurants were company-owned. São Paulo state had the most, with 128, followed by Paraná with 38, and the group employed about 7,400 people.

The formats have since been combined in single sites. In August 2026 the Rio de Janeiro paper Diário do Rio reported that Grupo Madero had opened a unit at Shopping Metropolitano Barra bringing together, for the first time at that address, Madero Steak House, Jeronimo Burger and Empório Madero, the group’s convenience format selling Madero products to take home. The paper said the Steak House menu there includes the traditional Cheeseburger Madero, chicken versions and a vegetarian option, alongside starters, pasta, meat and desserts, while Jeronimo Burger serves smash burgers on brioche buns.

The interiors follow one idea. Madero’s website says its restaurant designs keep the same concept in every unit: plenty of wood, exposed brickwork and a reinterpretation of the original facade of the first restaurant. Diário do Rio said the architectural project for the Barra unit was signed by architect Kethlen Durski and planned around large, connected spaces for socialising.

Shopfronts, menus and franchise networks.

Latin American restaurant chains tend to present themselves through a small set of public surfaces: the shopfront, the menu, the delivery box and the corporate page. The shopfront carries the name and colours to the street, often on a corner unit or inside a shopping centre. Many chains refresh it on a cycle, and anniversaries are a common moment for a new look across dining rooms and signs.

Menus do much of the brand work. A chain is often remembered for one or two named dishes, such as a taco, a pizza or a breakfast plate, and the company repeats those names in its signs, its menus and its own telling of its history. Where a chain says it created a dish, the claim belongs to the company, and independent food writers do not always agree; a careful guide keeps the two apart. Mascots, packaging and delivery boxes extend the same vocabulary to takeaway and app orders.

Ownership is often a group matter. Several chains in Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Colombia sit inside larger restaurant or retail groups that run national brands next to international franchises, and some, like Toks within Grupo Gigante, began as a sideline of a supermarket business. Groups buy, convert and rename chains, so the same dining room can carry two names in a decade. Dated reports and stock-exchange filings are the plain record of who owns what, and when.

Franchising is the other common thread. Corporate pages describe founders, owners and franchise networks, and the business press counts units at a stated date, at home and abroad. Those counts change quickly, and openings in new countries do not always last, so each figure in these guides is tied to the report and the date that gave it.

A founder-led group with a fund as partner.

Madero has stayed under its founder’s control while taking in an outside investor. In January 2019 Gazeta do Povo reported that the group had confirmed the sale of a 23.3 percent minority stake to the American private-equity firm Carlyle. In November 2021 NeoFeed reported a further capital injection from Carlyle through an investment vehicle called Madrid, under which the founder sold shares but kept control of the business. By March 2024, Bloomberg Línea reported, Junior Durski held 59.3 percent of the company and Carlyle, through the Madrid fund, 34.4 percent, with two of the nine seats on the board.

A stock-market listing has been discussed for years without taking place. In August 2021 Grupo Madero filed a request for an initial public offering with Brazil’s securities regulator, the CVM, NeoFeed reported; Bloomberg Línea later wrote that the company gave up the offering after filing the prospectus, and that as of March 2024 neither the founder nor Carlyle had decided whether to try again.

For a design guide, Madero shows how a restaurant group can carry one interior language, wood, brick and an echo of its first facade, across very different formats, from table-service steak houses to fast-casual burger counters and combined sites. Compare Bob’s, the Rio de Janeiro burger chain, and Giraffas, the Brasília fast-food network. For this guide we use a brick red, a charred-oak brown and a linen cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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