用意大利菜偷走法国人的胃

用意大利菜偷走法国人的胃

八月初的一个周日，当Big Mamma旗下的新餐厅Pizzeria Popolare开张营业时，本该在沙滩上晒太阳的巴黎人早早聚集在这家意大利餐厅门口排起了长队。专心于经营意餐餐馆的Big Mamma在法国市场一路高奏凯歌，是什么让他们偷走了法国人的胃？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

arrondissement法国的行政区[ɑːrəndɪ'səmənt]

cashmere开士，山羊绒['kæʃmɪə(r)]

fickle易变的，轻浮的['fɪkl/

eatery小餐馆['iːtəri]

liability债务，不利因素[ˌlaɪə'bɪləti]

truffle松露['trʌfl]

absinthe苦艾酒['æbsɪnθ]

ceramic陶器，陶瓷[sə'ræmɪk]

Paris entrepreneurs tap into millennials' taste for Italy（866 words）

By Harriet Agnew

It is a Sunday evening in early August and while most of Paris has decamped to the beach, outside Pizzeria Popolare in the city's trendy 2nd arrondissement, millennials are queueing up waiting for the Italian restaurant to open.

The establishment does not take bookings so they have come early to be sure of getting their hands on its trademark €5 Neapolitan margherita pizzas. It opened in April and each day 1,300 diners pass through its doors. Pizzeria Popolare is part of the Big Mamma food group, and since it opened its first restaurant in Paris two years ago it has shaken up the French capital's restaurant scene — typically associated with haute cuisine and bistronomie rather than homemade Italian street food.

The group has grown to six restaurants, employs more than 400 people, and this year will close a €20m fundraising round at a valuation of just over €100m, according to investors, to fund a European expansion. Last year it recorded revenues of €15m, which it expects to more than double this year.

Behind the Big Mamma group is Victor Lugger and Tigrane Seydoux, a pair of entrepreneurs in their early thirties who have been friends since they met at HEC Paris business school. Over rare beef and burrata (made 36 hours ago in Puglia) at Pink Mamma, their latest venture that opened in June, Mr Lugger reflects on how Big Mamma became the fastest-growing restaurant group in Paris.

“Our number-one obsession at the start was how can we have the best value for money,” he says. “The restaurant industry is not about margin, it's about volume. In France, no one seems to understand that.”

Mr Lugger likens Big Mamma's approach to fast fashion brands such as Zara and Uniqlo, which — by operating vast stores in prime locations and producing enormous quantities of products — are able to offer items like cashmere jumpers, once deemed luxury items, at mass market prices.

Big Mamma is seeking to do the same with Italian food. The restaurant world is a notoriously fickle business and the sheer size of its six Paris-based restaurants — a key asset — could easily turn into a liability if the brand falls out of favour and millennials opt to queue elsewhere.

For now this obsession with achieving volume seems to be paying off. The group feeds 3,600 people a day across its six eateries, which have a total of 850 seats between them. On average this means that each restaurant is receiving at least two sittings of guests a day for both lunch and dinner.

“One reason why we have succeeded so far is that we always made the ambitious choice,” says Mr Lugger. This meant persuading Martin Brudnizki, an interior designer known for creating the interiors of top London establishments, to design the inside of its first Big Mamma restaurant, and two subsequent ones. Well-priced food did not have to be at the expense of a high-end dining experience. All of the plates and bowls, for example, are hand-painted ceramics from Deruta in Italy — a deliberate choice since the bright colours Deruta is known for are perfect for Instagram (the group has 52,300 followers on the social-networking site).

Mr Lugger believes another important reason for Big Mamma's success is that the group always had access to capital. “There is no market for financing the food market in France,” he says. “Restaurants are a real business in France but until recently, very few people were willing to invest capital in [them]. Bistronomie is very linked to the fact that no one finances big restaurants.”

Mr Lugger and Mr Seydoux initially raised €1.5m in cash at the start of 2014. In a second round they received investment from telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel. In June Big Mamma did the catering for the launch party of Station F, Mr Niel's new campus, in a former railway depot, that will house 1,000 start-ups. There are plans to open a 1,000-cover Big Mamma restaurant there in the coming months, which would make it the largest restaurant in France.

French nouvelle cuisine emerged in the 1960s to rebel against the complexity of the haute cuisine that preceded it, only to be followed in the 1990s by the bistronomie movement that aimed to democratise gastronomie by making it cheaper and more accessible. Now there is a next wave of restaurateurs who want to make high-quality food available to everyone. “I believe that Big Mamma along with a few others are initiating a real change in the game. There are huge business opportunities in France for doing what we're doing with Italian food, but with other cuisines like Asian,” Mr Lugger says.

For Big Mamma, the focus is distinctly Italian. “Big Mamma is a place where you open the door and you're in Italy. We work very hard to make you feel like you're in Italy,” Mr Lugger adds.

The next stage for the group is to recreate Italy in the UK, Spain, and Italy itself. It has already started to scout potential sites in London, Madrid and Milan, and plans to open restaurants in at least one of these cities next year.

“Every time we make a restaurant it's all about breaking new ground,” Mr Lugger says. “But we must not forget why it's working. It's working because we're having fun.”