A borrowed building, a round table and a missing letter.

Round Table Pizza opened on 21 December 1959 on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, California. Its founder was William R. “Bill” Larson, and the local news site InMenlo told his story in an August 2018 article by Bo Crane, written as the restaurant approached its 60th anniversary. Crane wrote that Larson had served in the Navy, then worked a series of jobs that included driving a Coca-Cola truck, working at Safeway and helping at a San Mateo pizza place called Hambone’s Parlor & Olde British Pub, where he revised menus and handled promotion.

With money borrowed from his father, Henry, and from banks, Larson took over a vacant former California Water Service building and furnished it simply, InMenlo reported. Larson and his wife, Toni, did most of the interior work, and Henry helped build the tables — including a large round one that gave the restaurant its name. English Wikipedia gives a similar account, saying the restaurant was named after the round redwood tables that Larson and his father built.

The earliest signage was improvised. According to InMenlo, the big overhead sign read “PIZZA PARLO” because the letter R had been removed to make room for a fan required by the health inspector. The original menus joked that the restaurant was “just 10,000 miles WEST of Tokyo, Japan” and claimed cheeses “flown to us directly from the moon”.

The restaurant moved a few years later to the building next door, Wikipedia and InMenlo both record, and that address is still selling pizza. InMenlo had marked the restaurant’s 50th year in a September 2009 piece by Linda Hubbard, noting that the original Round Table was still trading on El Camino Real half a century after it opened. Crane reported in 2018 that Larson’s son Bob, who had cleared tables there as a child, bought the Menlo Park restaurant in 1987 and still owned it, and Wikipedia says he still operated it as of 2020.

Employee owners, franchisors and a 2026 sale.

Larson grew Round Table through franchising, then let the company go in stages. InMenlo reported in 2018 that he sold a controlling share of the business in 1978 and retired the following year. Wikipedia says that in 1995 the controlling partners bought out his remaining share, and InMenlo reported that Larson died in 2006.

For a long period the company belonged to the people who worked in it. Wikipedia says investors formed an employee stock ownership plan in 1985 and that Round Table was wholly employee owned by 1992; Crane’s 2018 article dates the employee purchase of the business to 1998. Round Table filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2011 and emerged the same year, according to Wikipedia, with its employee owners keeping ownership.

Outside owners followed. On 15 September 2017, Wikipedia records, Round Table announced that it had been acquired by Global Franchise Group, the owner of Great American Cookies. In 2021 Global Franchise Group itself was bought by FAT Brands, the owner of Fatburger and Johnny Rockets, with the deal completed on 22 July 2021, according to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia records that FAT Brands filed for Chapter 11 protection on 26 January 2026. In June 2026, the trade publication Retail & Restaurant Facility Business reported that FBG Bid Co. had completed the acquisition of substantially all the assets of certain FAT Brands subsidiaries, covering 13 restaurant brands including Round Table Pizza, after a court-supervised sale approved by the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. FBG Bid Co. has owned Round Table since June 2026.

Round Table’s restaurants have traditionally been concentrated in the Western United States, and Wikipedia describes a second format, Round Table Pizza Clubhouse, which adds arcade games, big-screen television and a wider drinks list to the parlour model. Wikipedia also says the chain reached the Dallas–Fort Worth area in 2019.

Design and documentation.

A pizza chain’s identity is carried by a handful of everyday objects more than by any single advert: the box that leaves the counter, the sign above the door, the shape of the building itself and, for some names, a character who stands in for the company. Each of these is a surface that the brand reaches customers through, often far from any office where the identity was drawn.

The box is the piece most people handle. It travels home, sits on a table and is printed in large numbers, so its lid tends to carry the name, a colour scheme and sometimes a slogan or illustration. Storefront signs do similar work at street level, in shopping centres and in food courts, where a name and a colour have to be read quickly and from a distance.

Buildings and mascots add a further layer. A distinctive roofline, an interior theme or a costumed figure can become part of how a chain is recognised, and those elements may be kept, revised or dropped as owners change. Each guide that follows records who started the chain, who has owned it over time and how its name, signs and marks have been presented, separating what independent sources report from what the company says about itself.

King Arthur, three shields and a knight.

The Arthurian theme arrived after the name. In 2009 InMenlo quoted the company’s own website: the round table had originally meant a gathering place and had nothing to do with King Arthur, but in about 1961 a friend of Larson’s, eating in the restaurant, began drawing characters from King Arthur’s court, all eating pizza. Larson liked the drawings so much that he adopted the theme and began making the restaurants look like English castles, the company said.

The same company text explained the logo. The shields were added in about 1970, and there are three of them, which the company says stand for the letters “F”, “U”, “N”. Wikipedia describes them as three banners added to the official logo in 1970 with the same meaning.

Architecture followed the story. Crane’s 2018 InMenlo article says the later Menlo Park building is often taken for Elizabethan Tudor but was in fact modelled on the Danish look of Solvang, the California town that was one of Larson’s favourites.

Slogans and characters have changed over the decades. Wikipedia says Larson wrote the line “share a little pizza with someone you love”, later replaced by “The Last Honest Pizza”. From about 2003 to 2005 the chain’s television commercials featured two puppets, Matt and Marcus, and in 2007 the mascot became the Pizza Knight, billed as the “defender of family night”; the actor Billy Gardell has also appeared as a spokesperson, Wikipedia records. In 2019, for its 60th anniversary, Round Table rebranded with a new logo and the motto “Pizza Royalty”.

For a design guide, Round Table Pizza shows how an accidental name can be given a full theme, from heraldic shields to castle-like buildings and a knight mascot. Compare Papa Murphy’s and Domino’s. For this guide we use banner crimson, crown gold and castle navy with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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