Midpoint Brand Guidelines: The Bağdat Caddesi Bistro Chain That Opened in 2002

A meeting point in the middle of the avenue.

Midpoint is a casual-dining chain from Istanbul. It opened in 2002 on Bağdat Caddesi, the long shopping avenue on the city’s Asian side, Time Out İstanbul reported in October 2021, when the chain marked twenty years. The magazine gave its founding motto as “Herkesin Buluşma Noktası,” or “everyone’s meeting point,” and the company’s own history page says the same: the opening branch was on Bağdat Caddesi, and the slogan came with it.

The name and the motto are the brand idea. When Time Out İstanbul listed the Midpoint in Kadıköy in April 2011, it described the restaurant as living up to its name: a point where people of different styles, ages and tastes meet in the middle. The listing said the menu drew on world cuisine and ran from early morning to the evening, with salads, hot and cold starters, American-style snacks such as chicken fingers, main courses and desserts.

That spread of times and dishes is what sets the format apart from a single-cuisine restaurant. The company describes its restaurants as places where shoppers take a break, business meetings turn into longer conversations and Sunday breakfasts are eaten at an easy pace. Its history page says the menu takes dishes chosen from world cuisines and adapts them to different tastes, and it names professional service, fair pricing, quick service and a modern interior as the things it builds on. It lists breakfasts, lighter dishes and a children’s menu alongside a drinks list of wines and cocktails, and says the music played in its restaurants is chosen with conversation in mind.

The chain also trades under the fuller name Midpoint Bistro Cafe on social media, and Time Out İstanbul pointed readers to that account in its 2021 report. The website itself uses the short name Midpoint throughout, with Turkish and English versions.

Its own pasta, sauces and jams.

Midpoint makes part of its menu itself. In October 2021 Time Out İstanbul reported that the chain produces its own pasta, sauces and jams — a detail the company supplied for the anniversary.

The twentieth anniversary was marked with food rather than a new logo. For a month in autumn 2021, Time Out İstanbul reported, Midpoint brought back three older dishes under a “20 years of nostalgia” banner: chicken with béchamel sauce, chicken with Borbulan sauce and steak Parmesan. Diners were invited to order them and share their memories of the chain, and the magazine said the most-ordered of the three would go on to the new menu. Coca-Cola was named as the drinks partner for the campaign, and readers were told they could find the menu at any Midpoint branch during that month. The anniversary campaign leaned on the chain’s own past: recipes regular diners would recognise, rather than a redesign.

The chain’s size has been reported several times, and each figure belongs to its date and its source. In October 2021 Time Out İstanbul said Midpoint ran 50 restaurants in seven cities. The chain’s own website, undated, lists 38 locations in seven cities: Istanbul, Ankara, İzmir, İzmit, Bursa, Antalya and Mersin. The group that owns it gave a figure of 56 restaurants in seven cities on its website in November 2026, a count that covers all of its brands rather than Midpoint alone.

Across those cities the format stays the same: an all-day menu, a bar list and a dining room meant for long stays rather than quick turnover. The company describes the architecture of its restaurants as modern and its atmosphere as warm, and treats service speed and consistent standards as part of the offer.

Turkish chains and their stories.

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.

The brand that started a restaurant group.

Midpoint is the founding brand of Allpoints Restaurant Group, an Istanbul company with its head office in Üsküdar, on the Asian side of the city. The group’s website says its story began when the Midpoint on Bağdat Caddesi opened in 2002, and that it has added a brand of its own or taken one on at intervals since then.

The group gives the dates itself. It says it set up Welldone in 2013, opening at the Zorlu shopping centre; that Kırıntı joined the group in 2019 while keeping its own character; and that Catch Restaurant opened in Caddebostan in 2025. It also runs BiDaha, which it describes as a dining-and-music venue, and Akbaba’lı, a meyhane in the Tünel quarter. On its website the group sorts the six brands by format: Midpoint for every hour of the day, Welldone as modern kitchen, Kırıntı as an American diner, Catch as a restaurant and bar with Mediterranean and Asian cooking, BiDaha for dining with music and Akbaba’lı for the meyhane.

For the brand, that structure means Midpoint has become the everyday name in a portfolio of more specialised places. Each of the group’s brands keeps its own name, menu and interiors, the group says, while Midpoint stays the broad, all-day restaurant that the business grew from. Its press archive lists coverage of Midpoint in Marie Claire Turkey in July 2018.

For a design guide, Midpoint shows how a single idea, a meeting place in the middle, can carry a name, a slogan and a menu across seven cities and two decades. Compare BigChefs, another Turkish all-day restaurant chain, and Kahve Dünyası. For this guide we use a bistro green, espresso, linen and terracotta with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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