In Paris’s Banlieues, New Recipe for Success Is Local

“We came from a place where there was injustice and a lack of opportunity,” Mr. Benamer, 36, recalled of his banlieue, Bondy. But there he was in the heart of tourist Paris, on a winter afternoon in 2007, with his mother pointing incredulously to truffle-and-foie-gras maki being rolled out to patrons at Eat Sushi, which since then has expanded into a chain of 38 restaurants across France.

“How did you manage to do all this?” she asked.

His answer was simple: he did it on his own.

“I was not going to let this feeling that we have no chance keep me closed inside the banlieue,” Mr. Benamer recalled recently.

For decades, the disadvantaged suburbs that ring Paris and other large French cities have been places of privation, plagued by discrimination and poverty. France has long vowed to improve the plight of the banlieue populations, often Muslim and primarily people with Arab or sub-Saharan African family roots in the French colonial past. Despite pledges by Nicolas Sarkozy when he was president to address economic and social inequality after a series of violent riots in 2005 and 2007, though, critics say little has changed.

That is why a new generation of people like Mr. Benamer are trying to turn the suburbs into incubators for entrepreneurs, who see using their own initiative as the only way up and out of the banlieues, which are home to an estimated 10 percent of France’s 63.7 million people.

Through persistent lobbying, banlieue entrepreneurs have been founding “angel” investment funds, persuading big French companies like AXA Insurance and BNP Paribas to contribute seed money that fuel start-ups ranging from trash removal to taxi fleets. It was one such fund that recently helped finance the national expansion of Mr. Benamer’s Eat Sushi chain.

No one can yet quantify the new businesses emerging from this movement, or measure its success. But the activity is occurring largely outside the sphere of the French state.

“If we wait for the government to do something, people will just remain stuck,” Mr. Benamer said. “If we want things to improve, we have to do it ourselves.”

As part of the self-help effort, banlieue-based organizations that promote ethnic diversity have been aggressive about placing minorities into mentoring and jobs programs at French companies that as little as a decade ago routinely rejected applicants with non-French names.

“Things are changing,” said Majid El Jarroudi, a consultant of Moroccan origin, who grew up in the Paris banlieue of Montreuil.

Mr. Jarroudi, 36, started his career operating a small restaurant. He founded an organization, Adive, to assist banlieue entrepreneurs after visiting the United States and marveling at how much easier it seemed for minorities to move ahead.

Attitudes have shifted slowly in France, he said, but these days, “there is a growing recognition that the banlieues should not be seen as a place to fear, but as a source of dynamism, full of people who are eager to work and to succeed.”

Mr. Benamer is a case in point. One of the youngest in a family of 10 children, with illiterate parents, he grew up in the gritty Bondy suburb, which was engulfed in the 2005 and 2007 riots, although he and his family avoided the trouble. After getting a vocational degree when he was 18, he started a small sandwich business with his younger brother, Yahia. Working 13-hour days, they were quickly selling more than 2,000 sandwiches a day to local colleges.

Soon, they set their sights on takeout sushi, a market in which Mr. Benamer saw greater potential. In 2006, the brothers co-founded Eat Sushi, with a flagship outlet in the heart of Paris. Last year, an angel investment fund, Citizen Capital, took a 30 percent stake, with plans to double by 2015 the number of stores and sales that last year topped 20 million euros (about $26 million).

Today, Eat Sushi employs 550 people in cities and banlieues around France in a work force, including managers, with origins in 30 different countries.

Stefania Rousselle contributed reporting.

Mintz Levin Tries New Recipe in San Francisco Bay Area

Paul Churchill, former head of Goodwin Procter's San Francisco office, has joined Boston-based Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo to manage its San Francisco office.

He's joined by litigator Evan Nadel, a former partner in Greenberg Traurig's San Francisco office.

Churchill, a real estate attorney, set up Goodwin's San Francisco office in 2006 and helped the office grow to 28 attorneys. Now he said he's looking forward to doing the same for Mintz Levin, where he officially started his new job Monday.

"I've done this before and I know what it takes," Churchill said. "I expect to have challenges just like any new entry to the market would, but I already have all the support I need from day one."

Like Goodwin, Mintz Levin made a big push in California starting in 2006, opening offices in both Palo Alto and San Diego. But while the San Diego office has since grown to more than 30 attorneys, the firm's office at 5 Palo Alto Square, which focused on patent prosecution work, never gained traction. At its peak, the office had about 15 lawyers, but only a few remained by March of this year.

In April, those attorneys relocated to the firm's newly opened San Francisco office, where Mintz Levin is hoping to have better luck. The San Francisco office will service the firm's roster of life science and tech clients based in South San Francisco, said New York-based Mintz Levin managing partner Robert Bodian. And it will focus on practices like litigation, real estate and employment, as opposed to patent work.

Bodian said he expects that within a few years, the San Francisco office will be as large as the firm's San Diego office, if not bigger.

"San Francisco is an attractive place for firms to be, and there are advantages to being there, especially if you have a strong litigation practice," Bodian said. "But I wouldn't rule out being back in Silicon Valley, depending on how we grow and what practices we attract."

Before joining Goodwin in 2006, Churchill spent 12 years at Cooley, where he headed the firm's real estate group. Some of his clients have included Menlo Equities, Juniper Networks Inc., Misawa Homes of America Inc., Digital Realty Trust Inc. and Woodside Hotels.

Commercial litigator Nadel began his legal career in 1998 at what was then O'Sullivan Graev & Karabell, and then moved to what was then Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin in 2000. He joined Squire Sanders & Dempsey in 2006 and departed for Greenberg Traurig in 2010. Recruiter Larry Watanabe of Watanabe Nason brokered Churchill's move.

New Sbarro Pizza Recipe to Drive Chain’s Turnaround Plans

Executives at Sbarro, the chain ubiquitous at shopping malls and airports, are hoping to elevate their restaurants in consumers’ minds with a better quality of pizza.

Aided by some technological changes, the company will return to making tomato sauce fresh and shredding cheese in each restaurant, instead of using prepackaged ingredients. The reformulated pizza is intended to help transform Sbarro into a “fast casual” restaurant chain like Panera Bread and Qdoba, said James J. Greco, who became chief executive at the beginning of the year.

Such restaurants offer customers better food quality and specialization without full table service, thus falling somewhere between fast food, or what the industry calls quick service, and casual dining restaurants. Customers often can select the ingredients for, say, a basic item like a pizza or a sandwich, which is made in a few minutes and handed over a counter for a meal costing $8 to $15.

Several pizza chains that have emphasized quick service are making the transition to the fast-casual category, said Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic, an industry consulting firm. Pizza Inn, which has 300 restaurants, recently started Pie Five Pizza, a fast-casual chain that bakes nine-inch pizzas “designed” by customers in five minutes. Naked Pizza of New Orleans and 800 Degree Pizza out of Los Angeles are other examples.

“Sbarro fits into the quick service category because of its price point and service format, where nothing is made to order,” Mr. Tristano said. “In malls and food courts, they’ve struggled during the recession, and in their stores in urban and suburban locations, they’re really up against much larger chains in the delivery space.”

A 56-year-old pizza chain founded in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Sbarro staggered into bankruptcy in April 2011 with more than $400 million of debt. Its sales, like those of many other restaurants, had slid during the recession as customers ate out less and prices rose for commodities like flour. It exited bankruptcy eight months later, after shedding 28 stores and securing a $35 million line of credit.

Now Apollo Global Management and more than two dozen other investors are banking on Mr. Greco to achieve the same kind of turnaround at Sbarro that he did in his last post, at Bruegger’s, the bagel chain. A private company, Sbarro said it had $650 million in worldwide sales in 2011, $420 million of which was in the United States.

“We have to change people’s perception of us,” Mr. Greco said over one of the company’s new cheese pizzas at its store north of Times Square. “We feel there’s no better way to do that than to get this pizza into as many mouths as possible as fast as we can.”

Thus, two vintage trucks are beginning a national tour, starting in New York and Los Angeles and working their way around the country, handing out free slices.

Mr. Greco faced a similar challenge at Bruegger’s, one of the many bagel chains that thrived during the bagel enthusiasm of the 1980s but suffered when consumer preferences changed. He added soups, wraps, salads and sandwiches to that menu and, while the stores still sell bagels, it is a place to have a light lunch today.

Bruegger’s was sold in 2011 to Groupe Le Duff, a French restaurant company that also owns Brioche Dorée, earning a hefty return for Sun Capital, the private equity firm that had hired Mr. Greco to fix it.

“He grew the brand and shifted it into a fast-casual place,” Mr. Tristano said. “He did a nice job of moving it more to a cafe.”

Since June, Sbarro has been testing a fast-casual format at 10 locations across the country. The updated restaurants offer pastas made to order in front of customers in 45 seconds in sauté pans on induction stovetops or in fast boilers sunk into countertops.

But the test has shown that pizza still drives Sbarro’s sales. Pizza accounted for almost half of sales in the test sites, according to Nation’s Restaurant News, while pasta generated just 6 percent.

For advice, Mr. Greco turned to a local pizza restaurant in New Haven, where he lives — though he would not divulge the name of the shop or its owner. The goal was to come up with a basic, Neapolitan-style pizza that could stand up to the local pizza wherever there is a Sbarro store. “Why can’t we do that?” Mr. Greco asked.

Along with changing ingredients, the chain is adding open-flame ovens to increase the “theater” of the experience as well as cut the time it takes to cook a pizza and reheat a slice.

To ensure consistency, the company long ago began making its tomato sauce and shredding its cheese in central locations and shipping it to restaurants.

Every pizza was the same — but every pizza did not taste as good as it could, said Anthony J. Missano, president of business development at Sbarro.

The company is now shipping whole peeled San Marzano tomatoes, which are put through a food mill as needed and made into a sauce with minimal ingredients at the restaurants.

Cheese is shipped in blocks and shredded on site as well. “People are much smarter about what they’re eating,” Mr. Missano said. “They have higher expectations of what they’re going to get when they go to a restaurant, and we’re going to give it to them with this new pizza.”

The next step in Sbarro’s turnaround will be to adjust its real estate mix. The company has about 1,000 stores, about 420 of which it owns; the rest are franchised. Four-fifths of them are in mall and airport food courts, where rents are high and it is easy for customers to move to a different counter.

Mr. Greco’s plan is to open new stores on street fronts, where the company has about 70 restaurants.

“It’s as if we are doing a jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “You dump out all the pieces on the table, sort through them and look at the picture on the box — except that instead of putting the pieces back together to form the picture, you have to make a new picture out of them.”