Spur Brand Guidelines: Allen Ambor’s 1967 Golden Spur and a Badge Redrawn in 2023

A Newlands steak ranch in 1967.

Spur began in Cape Town in 1967. Allen Ambor opened the first Spur Steak Ranch, called the Golden Spur, on Dean Street in Newlands, SAPeople reported in August 2025, describing it as a Wild West-themed restaurant that laid the foundation for today’s Spur Corporation. English Wikipedia gives the same founder, year and suburb. Spur Corporation’s own history timeline starts at the same point, with one line for 1967: Spur Steak Ranches opens its doors in Cape Town.

A second restaurant followed a year later. The Seven Spur in Sea Point opened in 1968, first on the corner of Main and Conifer Roads, and moved twice before settling on Arthurs Road in 2006, EWN and the Cape Times reported in August 2025. That month the branch announced that it would close. EWN described the Seven Spur as South Africa’s second-oldest Spur and put the brand’s count, as of August 2025, at 29 branches in Cape Town and 307 in the country.

Ambor led the business for half a century. Spur Corporation says he announced his retirement in 2018 and stepped down as executive chairman with effect from 1 March 2019, after 51 years at the company he founded, and that Mike Bosman became chairman. The timeline names Val Nichas as chief executive from 2021, and the Sunday Times and Moneyweb still quoted her in that role in 2026.

From one ranch to a listed group of brands.

The company grew into a group of restaurant brands. Spur Corporation’s timeline says the group listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1986, developed a second restaurant brand, Panarottis, in 1990 — English Wikipedia says the pizza and pasta chain started in 1989 — and in 1999 went through a major restructuring that formed and listed Spur Corporation in its present shape. The company trades on the JSE under the code SUR, English Wikipedia says.

Acquisitions followed. The company says it bought 60% of John Dory’s Fish, Grill & Sushi, a KwaZulu-Natal franchise of seven outlets, in 2004, added 5% in October 2006 and took the remaining 35% on 25 January 2012. It bought The Hussar Grill, a steakhouse franchise founded in 1964, in 2013; took 51% of the burger chain RocoMamas in 2015; launched an in-house brand, Casa Bella, in 2016; and bought Nikos Coalgrill Greek, with nine franchised outlets, in 2018. In 2020 it added several delivery-only virtual brands; in 2021 Spur Steak Ranches opened its first drive-thru; and in 2022 the chain launched a virtual wings brand, Just Wingz, the timeline says.

The group now reaches well beyond Cape Town. The Sunday Times reported in February 2026 that Spur Corporation, which owns brands including Panarottis, John Dory’s, RocoMamas and Doppio Zero, had 640 outlets in South Africa and 113 in other countries, including Australia and Mauritius, and that the Spur brand had returned to Lesotho with a restaurant in Maseru in September 2025. Moneyweb reported in August 2026 that Panarottis had opened its 100th store during the year to June 2026 and that the group counted more than 2.6 million active loyalty members. The group’s website lists Spur Steak Ranches in countries including Zambia, Mauritius, Namibia, Kenya, Nigeria, Eswatini, Botswana, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Australia.

How the category presents itself.

Africa’s restaurant and café chains present themselves through a small set of public surfaces: the shopfront and its signage, the menu with its named dishes, the delivery and loyalty apps, and the corporate pages that explain who founded a brand and who owns it now. Several of the groups in this guide run their brands as franchise networks, and their corporate sites set out franchise terms, country lists and brand line-ups beside the menus.

Ownership is often grouped. English Wikipedia describes Famous Brands, formerly the Steers Group, as a South African company founded in 1960, based in Midrand and listed in Johannesburg, which runs its restaurant brands on a franchise model. Spur Corporation traces its start to the Golden Spur, opened in Newlands, Cape Town, in 1967, and its chains include Spur Steak Ranches and RocoMamas, according to the same encyclopaedia.

Further north the pattern repeats. Simbisa Brands says it opened its first Chicken Inn in 1987 and now trades in nine African countries, running its own brands such as Chicken Inn and Pizza Inn beside franchised names. English Wikipedia describes Chicken Republic, founded in 2004, as the flagship of the Lagos-based Food Concepts, with restaurants in Nigeria and Ghana. In Kenya, café chains such as Java House and Artcaffé have passed through private equity owners, each change reported in the business press.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: when and where it began, who has owned it, how many outlets a dated source counts, and how its menus, shopfronts and own websites describe it. Counts and ownership are given with their dates, and anything that rests only on a company’s own word is marked as such.

A badge redrawn after 27 years.

The Spur badge is an eagle-feather headdress, the Financial Mail reported in September 2023, when the chain refreshed its look and logo. The company told the magazine that since 2021 it had been phasing Native American imagery out of its advertising and dining rooms, on the five-year cycle on which franchised restaurants are revamped, and that the redesigned symbol, now a stylised mosaic, kept its colour, shape and name; the previous look had stayed in place for 27 years.

The redesign reached the dining rooms one restaurant at a time. IOL reported in May 2024 that only a few restaurants had the new concept so far, two of them in Cape Town: Texas Spur at N1 City Mall and the Golden Spur in Rondebosch. It described the changes as subtle but cumulative: brighter, lighter interiors, the return of the cow-hide bench seats of earlier years, a central dining space with booth seating, a quieter area aimed at adults and smaller occasions, and a reworked children’s play area with themed spaces. The Golden Spur, it reported, had also added a walk-in wine cellar. The same article put the chain at 304 franchised restaurants in South Africa and about 30 elsewhere in Africa as of May 2024, and described the chief emblem as kept but given a modern, stylised look. The play area has long been part of the format: IOL wrote that the Golden Spur was conceived in 1967 as a restaurant where children were welcomed, and SAPeople recalled the Sea Point branch in 2025 for decades of steaks, birthday songs and family celebrations.

For a design guide, Spur shows how a family-restaurant brand can redraw a long-standing badge in stages, in public, across hundreds of franchised restaurants that refit on their own schedules. Compare Steers, another South African chain that grew from a 1960s steakhouse into a listed group, and Nando’s, another restaurant chain that began in South Africa. For this guide we use a warm ochre, a deep red and a teal with a slab serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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