Pizza 4P’s Brand Guidelines: A 2011 Ho Chi Minh City Pizzeria, House Cheese & Brooklyn

Two Japanese founders and one restaurant on Lê Thánh Tôn.

Pizza 4P’s is a pizza restaurant chain based in Ho Chi Minh City. It was founded in 2011 by the Japanese entrepreneurs Yosuke Masuko and Sanae Takasugi, English Wikipedia and VnExpress International say; English Wikipedia names Masuko as founder and chief executive and Takasugi as co-founder and deputy chief executive. The first restaurant opened on Lê Thánh Tôn Street in the city centre, in the area known for its Japanese restaurants, Vietnam Briefing reported in November 2025.

Why Vietnam? In a January 2026 interview with Vietnam Investment Review, Masuko said the decision to start there in 2011 rested on four things: a young and fast-growing market, the goodwill and personal connections he found in the country, the smaller amount of capital needed to open a restaurant than in Japan, and the fact that Japan already had many pizza restaurants. In the same interview Takasugi spoke about recruiting and training staff as the company grows.

The chain grew through Vietnam before going abroad. The private equity firm Mekong Capital invested through its Mekong Enterprise Fund III in 2018, VnExpress International reported; English Wikipedia gives the year as 2019. By November 2022, when VnExpress reported that the fund had sold its stake, the chain had grown from eight restaurants to 27 in Vietnam and Cambodia. The newspaper named the operating company as 4P’s Holdings Pte. Ltd., which runs the restaurants and produces cheese and other dairy products.

Cheese from its own dairy, pizza with local flavours.

Cheese is central to the brand. English Wikipedia says the company runs its own dairy in Đơn Dương district to make its cheese. Vietnam Briefing describes a fresh-cheese factory in Đà Lạt, set up in 2011 to make burrata and mozzarella in-house rather than rely on imports, with deliveries to its restaurants in Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Nha Trang and Đà Nẵng. Inside Retail Asia summed up the chain in October 2025 as known for a farm-to-table philosophy and house-made cheese, served with Japanese omotenashi hospitality.

The menu mixes Italian forms with local flavours. English Wikipedia records a bún đậu mắm tôm pizza with fermented shrimp sauce, offered in 2019, and in Cambodia a num banhchok pizza with a yellow kroeung, coconut milk and prahok sauce. Vietnam Briefing described the style as fusion pizza that brings Japanese craftsmanship to an Italian tradition.

Site choice follows a method. Vietnam Briefing reported that before entering a market the company ranks candidate cities on operating costs, market size and competition, and that Ho Chi Minh City came out top, followed by Hanoi, Manila and Jakarta. In Vietnam it looks for high-end residential areas with large expatriate communities, central business districts and modern shopping malls.

The group runs more than pizza. As of November 2025, Vietnam Briefing reported, Pizza 4P’s also managed three Ippudo ramen outlets, About Life Coffee Brewers and Cafe 4P’s alongside its pizza restaurants.

Cafés, chains and their owners.

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.

From Asian cities to Greenpoint.

International growth came in steps, and the counts depend on the date. English Wikipedia gives 32 locations in 2024 across Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Indonesia and Japan. Inside Retail Asia wrote in October 2025 of more than 30 locations across Asia, and Vietnam Briefing of more than 40 restaurants a month later. The two name slightly different markets: Inside Retail Asia listed Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia and India, while Vietnam Briefing listed India, Cambodia, the Philippines and Indonesia.

The United States followed. The company announced Pizza 4P’s USA, with a first restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, to open in summer 2026, and Inside Retail Asia called it the brand’s fifth international location. In July 2026 the local guide Brooklyn Bridge Parents listed Pizza 4P’s in Greenpoint among new Brooklyn restaurants that had opened, describing it as a Japanese-inspired Italian pizza restaurant. In the January 2026 Vietnam Investment Review interview, Masuko called New York the benchmark for any pizza brand.

Keeping a chain consistent across that spread is, by Masuko’s own account in the same interview, the hard part. He described two supports: standardisation, using data, clear processes and strict operating rules in both the kitchen and front-of-house service across every market from Vietnam to India; and education, by developing local management teams so that they understand why the standards matter as well as how to apply them. He called the work an unfinished process that is reviewed every day. Inside Retail Asia described the Brooklyn restaurant in October 2025 as a testbed for the brand’s operating model and for how American diners respond to it.

The Brooklyn room is where the company has said most about its design. Its announcement says the space draws on memories of peace in nature — walks through forests, open fields, quiet rain — woven into the food, the art, the music and the objects in the room, under the line “This is what the earth told us.” That is the company’s own description of the concept.

For a design guide, Pizza 4P’s shows how a restaurant brand can be built around an ingredient it makes itself and then carried from one city to several countries. Compare Phở 24, another restaurant chain from Ho Chi Minh City, and Kichi-Kichi. For this guide we use tomato red, burrata cream, basil green and oven char with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Pizza 4P’s’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.