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MCDONALD'S

US fast food giant opens burger battle with ‘McDo’ on Champs-Elysées

US burger giant Five Guys has taken the fight to McDonald’s and Burger King on Paris’s most famous street by opening its biggest restaurant in the world.

US fast food giant opens burger battle with 'McDo' on Champs-Elysées
Photo: AFP

The burger giant has opened doors to its second restaurant in Paris, this time on the famous Champs-Elysées avenue, in close proximity to “McDo” and Burger King as well as other burger-selling brasseries.

The chain, reportedly much-loved by US President Barack Obama, opened its 1,200 square metre restaurant in the former Haagen Dazs outlet on the famous avenue on Thursday.

It will be hoping to at least match the success of McDonald’s, whose store on the Champs-Elysées is its most lucrative in the world – bringing in €13.5 million in 2014.

It sits 350 people over five floors including a terrace and two open kitchens where chefs whip up burgers in front of clients. It has created 250 jobs.

But a meal at Five Guys costs around €15 – a little more than it does at rival US fast food outlets.

The chain says it justifies its higher prices by the quality of its products and separates itself from other chains by the fact the burgers are personalized and made in front of the customer.

The chain guarantees some 250,000 different choices.

Five Guys opened its first restaurant at Cour-Saint-Emilion, Bercy Village in the 12th arrondissement while another outlet is planned for Gare du Nord next year.

If it all goes well and the French show they have an appetite for their burgers then Five Guys will open around 40 restaurants across the country.

And the signs are good.

The French currently scoff around 1.1 billion burgers each year. To put that in perspective, that's almost the same number of jambon-buerre baguettes that are eaten each year (1.28 million).

A sign of the how dominant the burger has become in France came in a 2014 survey that revealed that burgers now had a home on the menu of “seventy-five percent of traditional French restaurants.

“Burger-mania is far from being over in France,” read the survey by Gira Conseil.

READ ALSO: Why do the French love McDonald's so much?

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LAUSANNE

‘We are not anti-American’: Lausanne residents fight against US fast-food giants

Thousands of Lausanne residents have joined forces to protest against an influx of US fast food restaurants, but insist they are not anti-American.

'We are not anti-American': Lausanne residents fight against US fast-food giants
AFP

Some 3,200 Lausanne residents signed a petition asking municipal authorities to limit the number of fast-food restaurants allowed to operate in the city. 

Members of the left-wing Workers’ Party (POP) launched the petition in response to the recent opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) restaurant in Lausanne’s Flon district and a Five Guys hamburger diner in the city center.

“This is not an anti-American campaign. It focuses on the devastating health, social, and environmental consequences of fast food”, the petition’s organizers said.

GastroLausanne, an association representing local restaurants, said that POP’s request to restrict fast-food eateries is hard to swallow because it “goes against the right of each person to choose what they eat”.

The association added that “a chain like KFC can occupy a place that would probably have remained empty for a long time and offers many students a job that allows them to finance their studies”.

Several US fast-food chains are present in Lausanne – as well as across Switzerland — including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Subway.

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