Toulouse. L’Entrecôte is 60 years old and the success is still there
L’Entrecôte restaurant is an institution in Toulouse. Sixty years after its opening, the demand for a table is not empty.
This is an establishment that does not offer take-out or delivery., despite the explosion of “click and collect” since the first confinement. And for good reason. The restaurant L’Entrecôte, located on the boulevard de Strasbourg, in the heart of Toulouse, already has a lot to do with the customers at the table. There is always a queue at the entrance.
In the space of sixty years, the establishment opened in 1962 has become a veritable institution in the Pink City. It is an almost obligatory passage point. “I have known this brand since my student days, more than twenty years ago,” writes Émilie in a comment posted on the Entrecôte page on a mapping site The restaurant is rated 4.3 out of 5.
A secret sauce, a pillar of success
Since its opening, the menu of this establishment has been based on a unique formula: sirloin and all-you-can-eat fries. All with a secret sauceone of the pillars of success, as for the confidential formula of Coca-Cola.
” We like to play on this mystery recipe. The ingredients of our famous sauce, only my grandfather, my cousin, my brothers, my mother and I know them” laughs Thomas de Roaldes, the grandson of the founder and today today general manager of l’Entrecôte, in the columns of France 3.
Entrecôte, from Toulouse to Barcelona
And the formula works. The family at the head of L’Entrecôte declined its recipe in Bordeaux in 1965, then in Nantes in 1978, in Montpellier in 1989, and in Lyon in 1999. The brand will even be deployed in Barcelona in 2019. “We have a lot of franchise requests, almost weekly, but we want to avoid developing in a reckless way to resolutely keep family values,” says Thomas de Roaldes on France Blue.
In the Pink City, the establishment sells a ton of meat every week and 2.8 tonnes of potatoes to serve some 250,000 customers per year.