By MARION ISSARD

Paris

The end-of-meal treat taking over France is fast, feels like a bargain and is, of course, delicious.

It is called a “café gourmand,” and it’s breaking the long-standing luncheon tradition of separate courses of cheese or dessert, followed by coffee. As the French spend less time at lunch and favor healthier fare, more opt for the sweet shortcut of an espresso served on the same plate with a few bite-size desserts like chocolate cake, madeleine or fruit salad.

For decades, a typical lunch in a French restaurant ended with two questions: “cheese or dessert?” then “coffee?” But now, as the French spend less time at lunch and pay greater attention to their diet, more are opting for a “café gourmand.” Marion Issard joins Lunch Break to explains what it includes. (Photo: Beatriz Da Costa for The Wall Street Journal)

Café gourmand—which translates as “gluttonous coffee”—has gone from an experiment at a restaurant chain to a national dish with its own cookbooks and contests.

“I often order café gourmand because it’s smaller than a regular dessert,” said Anne Lataillade, the founder of popular food blog Papilles et Pupilles. “Plus, I like to have the opportunity to try two or three different mini-items.” Her favorite café gourmand component is a moist pastry with a caramelized crust called a cannelé.

Café gourmand is also emerging as a welcome new tool for a French restaurant industry struggling with tepid consumer spending. “Café gourmand is high-margin and allows restaurants to compensate for the limited benefits they get on main dishes,” says Miguel Casanova, the head of marketing at Traiteur de Paris, a wholesale frozen-pastry maker.

Restaurant spending has shrunk in France in recent years. The average restaurant bill slipped 2.5% to €12.61 ($16.39) in 2009 from the year before, according to the most recent data in a February report prepared by Eurogroup Consulting for the hotel-and-restaurant trade association UMIH. It forecasts 74% of restaurant bills will come in below about $16 this year.

The profitable café gourmand typically costs between $6.50 and $13, about the price of a regular dessert.

“It sells pretty well, because customers do not feel as bad as when they order a nice slice of tarte Tatin with cream,” said Micaël Memmi, owner of Zo, a Franco-Japanese restaurant in Paris with a café gourmand for about $12. “Plus, it’s like wine: If someone orders one, then the whole table will follow.”

The café gourmand is tapping into a broader impulse in dessert eaters to go small. In the U.S.—where coffee has traditionally been served with dessert—Seasons 52, a chain of mid-to-upscale restaurants owned by Darden Restaurants Inc., specializes in lower-calorie portions and sells desserts in shot glasses. It calls its dessert offers “mini indulgences.” DineEquity Inc.’s Applebee’s restaurants also offer diminutive “dessert shooters,” a style of treat that’s featured at a growing number of U.S. chains, and has even inspired at least one fan website.

Beatriz Da Costa for The Wall Street Journal

Le Procope: This Parisian restaurant was founded in 1686

James Sinclair, principal at OnSite Consulting, a Los Angeles-based restaurant consultant, had trouble thinking of a U.S. restaurant that has tried the café gourmand tactic, but says many offer “dessert flights” as an option. “It’s the concept of being able to have a small taste of a few desserts,” instead of committing to just one, he says.

Twenty years ago, a typical lunch break in France lasted more than an hour and half, according to a 2008 study by Inpes, the national institute for health education. French people spent an average of 22 minutes at lunch in 2008.

The idea of a combo coffee-and-dessert dish was launched in 2003 at the Lyons branch by Pizza Pino, a chain of about a dozen Italian restaurants. It not only allowed the restaurant to serve customers in a hurry, it also allowed it to serve more customers, says chief executive José Paulino. They called it “café plaisir”, or “pleasure coffee,” and it consisted of mini homemade tiramisu, flan and vanilla ice cream. The concept was so successful that within six months they rolled it out across the chain.

It caught on fast. According to a study by food-service consultancy CHD Expert, around 26% of independent restaurants had café gourmand on their menu in 2007. By 2010, it had jumped to almost 38%.

The margins can be richer than for other dishes. On average, a café gourmand costs a restaurant about $2.30, excluding labor, says CHD Expert managing director Nicolas Nouchi. They sold, meanwhile, for about $6.80, on average, according to the 2010 survey of 4,089 restaurants.

Part of the dessert’s success is the notion that a selection of mini desserts isn’t as sinful as a full dessert. But that is an illusion. A mini-size pastry generally weighs 30 to 40 grams whereas a regular dessert is around 100 grams. “As café gourmand generally comes with three items, it is more or less the equivalent of a typical dessert,” says Mr. Casanova.

The dish has found its way on to the menus of high-end and mass-market restaurants. Groupe Frères Blanc, which owns places ranging from the historic café Le Procope, to brasserie chain Chez Clément, has introduced café gourmand at nearly all 27 of its restaurants. Each has customized it to the restaurant’s particular style: La Fermette Marbeuf, an Art Nouveau brasserie, features traditional French pastries like cream puffs.

For Groupe Bertrand, which runs a fast-food sandwich chain as well as upscale eateries, offering café gourmand is essential at its trendiest addresses, says spokeswoman Raphaële Marchal. Les Grandes Marches, a contemporary brasserie located on Paris’s Place de la Bastille, offers a raspberry macaroon, hazelnut-chocolate tart, crème brûlée, apricot tart and a chocolate on one plate.

Café gourmand has started to spread to home kitchens. In the past couple of years, about a dozen dedicated cookbooks have been published. Some come with little pots, plates or molds. In October, the cooking school L’atelier des Chefs offered a dedicated café gourmand course.

In April, coffee maker Nespresso set up a café gourmand contest in France. Chefs, trainees and amateur gourmets have until mid-May to send pictures of their own versions, with a maximum of three sweet bites.

The two-in-one concept could soon spread to other dishes. Groupe Frères Blanc is planning to introduce “fromage gourmand”: a couple of cheese bites with a half glass of wine.

—Katy McLaughlin contributed to this article

A version of this article appeared May 9, 2012, on page D1 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Dessert in Just Three Bites.

During the last decade the march to democratize the markets has charged forward, with each new innovation or revamp heralded as evening the playing field and giving smaller investors a sense of fairness and trust.

These efforts have yielded two tangible results: lightning-fast execution and slashed trading costs. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange is witness to this shift. The number of floor brokers has shrunk by half, to 1,500, in just five years. Actual trading on the floor is less than 10% of volume.

MarketWatch columnist David Weidner visits Mean Street and spotlights the sentiment many have that the markets are unfairly tilted against them, and it is increasingly difficult to buy low and sell high. Photo: AP.

Taking the place of humans are those coldly efficient and incorruptible machines.

And yet despite these efficiencies, most investors find themselves questioning tried-and-true principles and strategies: value investing, technical analysis, momentum plays and even the simplest maxim, “buy low and sell high.”

Poll after poll shows that investors feel the markets are tilted unfairly against them. What’s worse is that investor skepticism is higher than it was before market “reforms” allegedly improved the system.

In its latest poll, released in December, the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index found that only 16% of investors said they trust the stock market. That is roughly the same level of “trust” the survey found in the months after the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell to below 7,000.

To illustrate how far trust in the market has fallen, consider that in 2002 a USA Today poll found that fewer than 50% of respondents trusted the stock market, a trend blamed on the accounting and financial scandals at Enron Corp. and WorldCom.

Market confidence has historically ebbed and flowed with market performance. People feel ripped off in a correction. They feel they are getting their fair share in bull markets. Today the Dow is in the midst of a six-month rally, flirting with the 13000 level—so why is confidence still in the tank?

There are multiple reasons. Regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are forever a step behind. Alternative trading platforms, or “dark pools” are anonymous, menacing and have been susceptible to market manipulators, critics say.

Also, there are the high-profile wreckages: the botched BATS initial public offering, for one, which came on the same day Apple Inc.

shares went through a trading glitch that slashed value.

Those factors are enough to make investors nervous. But it is the bigger trends that are really at play here, not the momentary glitches. They make those of us old enough to remember long for the good old days when trades were handled by fallible, corruptible humans. In a nutshell there are three new trends that have made many investors spectators in a game they are supposed to be playing, not watching.

•High-frequency trading. Now an estimated 70% of the volume pie, computerized-trading platforms seem to have their own will. Most investors, while benefiting from the liquidity these machines provide, are reasonably skeptical of HFT’s influence on price, especially in periods when the markets have low volumes made up mostly of mechanized transactions. Witness shares of General Motors

that traded at more than $1 even after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2009, a mystery that was blamed on HFTs propping up the stock so they would continue to collect rebates for filling orders.

•Derivatives. Today’s markets are often the tail wagging the dog. Futures and exchange-traded funds are a part of this, but a bigger menace is the credit-derivatives market—the vast network of agreements and contracts that bet on debt. Bond prices are now set in the derivatives market, a trend that has extended to the equity market as well. A study by Greenwich Associates in 2007 concluded, “In many ways, hedge funds have become the market.”

•Absence of the big computer. Perhaps the biggest difference between today’s market and that of a decade ago is the disappearance of brain power. For as much as they were maligned, specialists and floor traders kept a measure of reason in stock trading. When a trade didn’t look right there weren’t big, inexplicable flash crashes. The trades were held by humans who used instinct and experience to avoid panic. For all electronic advances, the big computer—your brain—still is the most powerful of all. That is why much of the business during the May 6, 2010, “flash crash” ended up in the hands of humans—not that they were any match for the machines.

Ultimately, these factors have combined to make the best intentions of regulators and exchange companies ineffective. Investors used to worry that a specialist might front-run a trade or play favorites. And certainly, as SEC investigations of the early 2000s showed, those fears were real.

But when compared with an entire landscape so completely skewed by outside forces beyond simple supply and demand economics for a stock, the days of front-running almost seem quaint and innocent.

Buy low and sell high? What’s low? What’s high? Is there anybody out there?

Write to David Weidner at david.weidner@dowjones.com

Por VICTORIA MCGRANE

WASHINGTON—Cuando la próxima crisis ponga de rodillas a las principales firmas financieras, los reguladores estadounidenses tomarán control de sus casas matrices, pero permitirán que sus unidades alrededor del mundo sigan operando hasta tanto el desastre haya resuelto, según un anuncio hecho el jueves por la Corporación Federal de Seguro de Depósitos (FDIC, por sus siglas en inglés).

Aquellos que posean acciones de un gran banco u otra firma financiera perderán sus valores, en tanto que los tenedores de bonos enfrentarán pérdidas cuando sus valores sean canjeados por acciones en una nueva entidad, como parte del plan de la FDIC.

Casi cuatro años después de los masivos rescates de la crisis financiera por parte del gobierno estadounidense, los reguladores buscan desvirtuar el entendimiento tácito de que el gobierno intervendrá para salvar a las principales instituciones financieras vistas como vitales para la economía o el sistema bancario.

Como parte de ese esfuerzo, el presidente interino de la FDIC, Martin Gruenberg, delineó el jueves la estrategia de la agencia en un discurso en Chicago, en su primera declaración pública sobre el plan de desmantelamiento de los bancos. En las últimas semanas, autoridades de la FDIC discutieron los planes con The Wall Street Journal. Si varias agencias federales y el Departamento del Tesoro acuerdan intervenir a una firma, la FDIC desmontará la compañía bancaria matriz de la empresa en dificultades, colocándola en situación de quiebra y revocando su estatuto. Las filiales de la firma en todo el mundo continuarían operando, con el apoyo de la liquidez de la empresa matriz controlada por la FDIC podrán pedir prestado al gobierno en el marco de la reforma financiera Dodd-Frank.

Posteriormente, la FDIC transferirá la mayor parte de los activos de la empresa y algunos de sus pasivos a lo que se conoce como “empresa puente”, según funcionarios de la FDIC. Allí, los reguladores se encargarían de supervisar un canje de deuda por acciones similar a lo que ocurre bajo la reestructuración bajo las leyes de quiebra: los tenedores de acciones serían eliminados, pero los acreedores recibirían acciones a cambio de los valores que mantenían. Eventualmente, la compañía resurgiría del proceso como una nueva entidad privada recapitalizada.

Sin lugar a dudas, los mercados se han mostrado escépticos sobre la voluntad de los reguladores y su capacidad para desmontar una importante empresa financiera en tiempo real. Las principales firmas financieras de EE.UU. siguen disfrutando de una ventaja de financiación frente a sus pares más pequeñas, en parte porque los inversionistas creen que su dinero está más seguro allí. Las firmas de calificación de crédito, como Moody’s Investors Service y Standard & Poor’s Corp., dicen que todavía creen que el gobierno rescataría a los bancos más grandes.

La FDIC, más conocida por garantizar los depósitos bancarios, está trabajando para convencer a los principales inversionistas, analistas, economistas y banqueros que están construyendo un aparato que podría guiar limpiamente a una gran firma financiera a través de un proceso de desmantelamiento, sin recurrir a un rescate de los contribuyentes.

La reforma financiera Dodd-Frank de 2010 dio a los reguladores nuevos poderes para intervenir a los gigantes financieros en problemas y reducirlos de una manera que no lleve a los mercados a una situación de pánico.

El mecanismo, llamado “orderly liquidation authority”, fue diseñado para dar a los reguladores otras opciones diferentes a la dura decisión que enfrentaron en 2008, ya sea de comprometer miles de millones de dólares de los contribuyentes para evitar un colapso, como fue el caso de American International Group (AIG), o dejar que su desmoronamiento trastorne a los mercados financieros, como ocurrió con Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.

Funcionarios de la FDIC dicen que su estrategia podría evitar algunos de los trastornos que se produjeron cuando múltiples subsidiarias de Lehman Brothers ingresaron a diferentes procedimientos de insolvencia en EE.UU. y el extranjero luego de que la empresa matriz se declaró en quiebra en septiembre de 2008.

Cerca de 88% de los activos internacionales y derivados de los principales bancos de EE.UU. se encuentran en el Reino Unido, donde funcionarios de la FDIC dicen que buscan la cooperación de las autoridades. El expresidente de la Reserva Federal (Fed), Paul Volcker, que ayuda a asesorar a la FDIC, dijo que está “impresionado” con el trabajo de la agencia con sus pares del Reino Unido.

Los críticos argumentan que la FDIC no tiene experiencia para desmontar una firma financiera de la dimensión de Lehman, por ejemplo, o dicen que las complejidades internacionales dejarían sin sentido los poderes de la agencia.

El exgobernador de la Fed Kevin Warsh dijo en abril que la nueva autoridad de la FDIC “es poco probable… que esté a la altura de la tarea” de mitigar el daño en la próxima crisis financiera.

Un grupo de administradores institucionales de renta fija llamado Credit Roundtable, que incluye al Sistema de Pensiones de los Empleados Públicos de California (Calpers) y a Vanguard Group, con sede en Pennsylvania, expresó su preocupación de que la FDIC pudiera sacar adelante una empresa tan compleja, de acuerdo con una persona que asistió a una reunión en Washington.

Los nuevos poderes de la FDIC son importantes, pero el desmantelamiento de un banco “tiene que ser hecho de la forma correcta”, dice Anne Simpson, administradora de fondos y directora corporativa de Calpers.

Por ahora, los reguladores pueden seguir sembrando dudas sobre la probabilidad de los futuros rescates en las mentes de los participantes del mercado e instituciones financieras, dice Gruenberg el presidente interiono de la FDIC. “Bueno, hasta que no lo hagan, no estoy seguro de que realmente estén convenciendo al mercado de manera concluyente”, dijo en una entrevista.

Algunos detractores están dando un segundo vistazo. David Skeel, experto en bancarrota corporativa de la Universidad de Pennsylvania y que ha sido crítico de la autoridad de resolución, considera “una propuesta muy interesante” la propuesta de la FDIC que consigue lo mejor de una serie de lo que él considera una mala serie de reglas en la reforma Dodd-Frank.