A few years ago, restaurants were easy to categorize: fast-food joints, casual sit-down diners or white-tablecloth places. The quality of the food was proportional to the time you spent waiting for it.
These days, restaurants are busting the old boundaries. Wendy's has a pasta and salad bar. The gourmet places deliver. Boston Chicken offers home-style cooking on the go. And even burger stronghold McDonald's is selling carrot sticks now.
The theme is better food, faster. It's a trend that bread-and-pastry seller Au Bon Pain Co. Inc. is hoping will propel its growth even beyond the doubling of earnings per share and sales since 1991.
Traditionally a cafe serving croissants, breads, soups and sandwiches in smallish, 2,500-square-foot stores, Au Bon Pain is expanding its menu and ambitions.
The Boston-based company's second Au Bon Pain's Choices restaurant opened in Baltimore's Commerce Place building last week.
By offering more serve-yourself, chef-prepared fresh food, the restaurant aims to keep Au Bon Pain's traditional coffee-and-Danish clientele for breakfast but lure more of them back for lunch, too.
"This is an expansion of Au Bon Pain," said Ronald M. Shaich, co-chairman and co-CEO. "It's a place where we can deal with great amounts of volume at lunch."
The 4,000-square-foot store, at 1 South Street, carries more pasta dishes, extensive salad offerings, fresh vegetables, fruit and casse roles in addition to the usual Au Bon Pain fare. It's all available quickly, cafeteria style.
"It's situated between full-serve casual dining and fast food," said Robert M. Derrington, an analyst with Equitable Securities Corp. in Nashville, who follows Au Bon Pain's stock.
"High quality, fresh cooking, reasonable service: In the future, that will be the fastest-growing segment of the restaurant industry, and these guys are on the vanguard of that."
Au Bon Pain Co. Inc. was founded in 1981, building on a concept started by a French oven manufacturer a few years earlier. It decided to add sandwiches and coffee, seats and tables to its bakeries in 1983.
The concern grew and expanded from Boston. It opened its 100th store and issued public stock in 1991. Today it has 239 stores, most of them Au Bon Pain outlets in what Mr. Shaich called "high-density" urban locations.
The company earned $6.8 million in 1993 on revenue of $114 million. Earnings per share rose from 30 cents in 1991 to 60 cents last year.
Au Bon Pain stock rose from around $11 a share in 1991 to more than $28 last year. But recently it has been under pressure, as profit margins have suffered and investors have worried that the company is running out of prime cafe locations.
The stock has traded near $15 recently.
Company managers believe they have the keys to more growth. Au Bon Pain's Choices is one. The intention is to put the restaurants in urban spots where they'll pull customers from two and three blocks away or more -- farther than Au Bon Pain's drawing area.
Besides the first store in Boston, Choices stores are planned for Providence, R.I., and New York City.
The company won't close any existing Baltimore Au Bon Pain stores -- including others downtown in the Gallery at Harbor place and on Calvert Street.
In addition, the company has a suburban concept: the St. Louis Bread Company, a "neighborhood bakery" that also serves sandwiches and coffee.
Acquisitions of St. Louis Bread and a Midwest Au Bon Pain franchisee have hurt profit margins, though.
And profits at St. Louis Bread typically are lower than at Au Bon Pain's traditional stores, Mr. Derrington said.
"Earnings have underperformed expectations over the last several quarters, and that potential exists for the future," he said.
"In order to grow effectively, the company is going to have to have its margins in line and under control."
Au Bon Pain's newest store is no sure bet. The 30-story Commerce Place building, opened in 1992, is still two-thirds empty.
And downtown restaurants have had a mixed record of success -- especially ones, like Au Bon Pain's Choices, that aren't on the waterfront.
Mr. Shaich has no illusions. "This is a tough business," he said. "There's no business tougher than this."
But he's optimistic. He aims to have 1,000 stores within 10 years.