The Snack v. La Grande Cuisine

Confronted with a menu offering him the choice of "Le Wimpy," "Le Super Wimpy," "Le Wimpy King Size" or "Le Super Wimpy King Size"--all hamburgers--a Frenchman might be expected to cry out for a double cognac and forget about lunch. In fact, more and more Frenchmen are gobbling a snack and forgoing a leisurely feast at lunchtime. The man leading the assault on gastronomical tradition is Jacques Borel, 39, proprietor of 107 snack bars and cafeterias in Paris.

Borel has nothing against grande cuisine but thinks the modern Frenchman and his overworked liver should be able to sneak in a snack. "The sole difference between America and France is in the attitude of mind toward this kind of restaurant," says Borel. "American restaurants are doing more than most French restaurants to meet the needs of present-day clients."

With a contract from the British-owned Wimpy chain, he opened his first four hamburger havens in Paris in 1961 and proceeded to lose money for two years. But gradually the idea of "a complete meal on a round bun" caught on. Now Borel serves 60,000 meals a day in Paris, and sales will run to $15 million or $16 million this year. Next week Borel will open his first Wimpy outside Paris in Lille, and then he moves on to the gastronomic bastion of Lyon. By the end of the year there will also be Wimpys in Nice, Bordeaux, Toulouse and Marseille, as well as five more in Paris.

Borel, who was once IBM manager in Viet Nam, has his eye on the slowly growing network of superhighways in France, which by 1970 will run 700 miles from the north through Paris to Nice. Only 2% of French auto travelers stop at restaurants for meals, as against 60% of Americans, says Borel. The rest prefer to "pique-nique" on the roadside. Borel wants to change all this with a string of Howard Johnson-style restaurants.

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