Manwah Brand Guidelines: Golden Gate’s Taiwanese Hotpot Buffet Chain in Vietnam

Taiwanese hotpot from a Hanoi restaurant group.

Manwah is a Taiwanese hotpot chain operating in Vietnam, and it belongs to Golden Gate, the Hanoi restaurant company whose full name is Golden Gate Group Joint Stock Company. Vietnamese business coverage lists it among Golden Gate’s chains, next to the group’s other hotpot and barbecue names. In April 2025, VnExpress International headlined its report on a Golden Gate acquisition by describing the buyer simply as the operator of the Manwah and Gogi restaurants.

The parent company’s history explains the brand’s place. Golden Gate began in 2005. In that year, VnExpress International reported in July 2018, the entrepreneur Đào Thế Vinh, then in his early thirties, opened an Ashima mushroom hotpot restaurant on Phan Đình Phùng Street in Hanoi with the help of two friends; Ashima grew to six restaurants in two years, three of them in Ho Chi Minh City, the same report says. The company’s website gives the same starting point. A September 2024 report in the Vietnam Investment Review names Đào Thế Vinh as Golden Gate’s chief executive.

Hotpot has been central to the group from the start. After Ashima, VnExpress International says, the group opened the conveyor-belt hotpot chain Kichi-Kichi and the Sumo BBQ grill-and-hotpot chain in 2010, and in 2013 it set up a food distribution and processing centre in Hanoi and introduced several new brands, among them Gogi House. According to the same report, the private equity firm Mekong Capital had invested in the company early on and sold its holding to Standard Chartered Private Equity in 2014.

A buffet built around the broth.

On its own website the chain calls itself Manwah Taiwanese Hotpot, and it describes the format as a Taiwanese hotpot buffet. The company says its broths are naturally sweet and simmered with spices typical of Taiwan, and that guests choose from more than 68 Taiwanese-style dipping items to cook in the pot, with a self-service counter for drinks and desserts. These are the company’s own descriptions. The format places Manwah next to Kichi-Kichi rather than against it: one is a conveyor-belt hotpot, the other an all-you-can-eat hotpot buffet with its own Taiwanese theme.

That kind of division is how Golden Gate has built its business. In a January 2017 article on the group’s own website, its strategy was described as creating restaurant concepts of its own, modelled on dining styles from abroad and then adjusted for urban Vietnamese diners, with only a few brands, such as Crystal Jade and Osaka Osho, taken on as franchises. A July 2018 report in VnExpress International drew the same contrast, setting Golden Gate’s “made-in-Vietnam” brands against rivals that relied more on buying franchises, and observing that many diners did not realise the group’s grill and hotpot names were Vietnamese-founded and Vietnamese-run.

Restaurant listings on the brand’s website include branches in Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hải Phòng, Đà Nẵng, Huế and Cần Thơ, many of them inside shopping centres, and the site marks some former branches as closed.

Design and documentation.

Vietnam’s café and restaurant chains grew up in a country with a deep street culture of coffee, tea and noodle soup, and most of them present themselves through the shop itself. A chain’s identity is carried by its shopfronts and seating, by the cup a drink is handed over in, and by the bags of ground coffee and boxes of tea sold at the counter or in supermarkets.

Menus are built around named drinks and dishes rather than abstract promises. Coffee chains list house blends, iced coffee with condensed milk and ice-blended drinks; tea chains list fruit teas, milk teas and loose-leaf varieties from Vietnam’s highland growing areas; phở, pizza and hot-pot chains name their broths, toppings and set menus. Store formats vary too, from large flagship cafés to kiosks placed inside supermarkets, and the press has followed which formats the chains keep and which they close.

Ownership is often part of the story. Several of the chains in this set belong to wider groups: Highlands Coffee sits under SuperFoods, in which the Philippine group Jollibee Foods holds a stake, alongside Phở 24; Phúc Long is a subsidiary of the Vietnamese consumer group Masan; others covered here belong to the restaurant group Golden Gate or the retail group Seedcom, as their own guides set out. Store counts change quickly, so each guide gives its figures with the date and the publication that reported them.

Each guide sets out what can be checked about a brand from independent, dated reporting by publications such as VnExpress International, Tuoi Tre News, Viet Nam News and Vietnam Investment Review: who founded it, who owns it, how it trades and what its stores and products look like, with company statements marked as the company’s own word.

A group brand, reshaped in 2026.

The owner behind Manwah has changed shape several times. In March 2022, The Investor reported that a 35.95% stake in Golden Gate had passed to three Singapore-based investors, Temasek, Seatown Private Capital Master Fund and Periwinkle Pte Ltd, made up of a 32.92% holding sold by Prosperity Food Concepts Pte Ltd and a 3.03% stake from two of the company’s co-founders; the transaction was reported to Vietnam’s State Securities Commission.

The group has also grown wider. In April 2024, VnExpress International described Golden Gate as running over 20 food and drink brands with about 400 outlets; a year later the same publication put the figure at over 40 brands and nearly 500 restaurants. Tuoi Tre News reported in April 2025 that Golden Gate had completed the purchase of a 99.98% stake in the operator of the coffee chain The Coffee House on 8 January 2025, citing the group’s audited 2024 financial report, which named GoGi House, Manwah and Kichi-Kichi among its chains. In June 2026, The Investor reported that the company’s website listed 40 food and drink brands across more than 500 outlets.

Manwah’s own network has been trimmed in places. In June 2026, the business section of Báo Pháp Luật reported that the chain had closed two restaurants in central Hanoi within a month: the outlet on Lê Thái Tổ stopped serving on 18 May 2026 and the one on Thái Hà on 13 June 2026. The paper linked the closures to the cost of prime street sites and to a review of outlets that had not met expectations, and it said the rest of Manwah’s restaurants across the country were operating normally. The closures came shortly before Golden Gate’s annual shareholders’ meeting, which the paper said had been called for 29 June 2026.

For a design guide, Manwah shows how a home-grown restaurant group can borrow a regional cuisine, give it a short name of its own, and run it beside sister chains without one blurring into the next. Compare Kichi-Kichi, Golden Gate’s conveyor-belt hotpot, and Gogi House, its Korean barbecue chain. For this guide we use a lacquer red, a deep plum and a broth gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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