The Swiss Ueli Prager was the first to bring luxury to the plates of ordinary people. Within four and a half decades, Mövenpick has become a global group with over 106 restaurants, 33 hotels, ice cream and wine trading. And a very strong brand name.

It is an almost fateful lunch break that the 30-year-old officer Ueli Prager, known as UP, spends in the Aargau barracks in the summer of 1946. In the noon edition of the "Neue Zürcher Zeitung" he reads the construction announcement of the Claridenhof office building behind the Zurich Kongresshaus. "2,500 people in one block," he reflects, "they'll be hungry." Wouldn't that be an ideal location for a new restaurant - targeting the hurried city dweller who wants to eat well in passing, so to speak?

UP first convinces the building owner Ernst Göhner with this idea. Then he borrows 125,000 Swiss francs from two friends. Now only a name is missing. During a walk across Zurich's Quaibrücke bridge, he sees seagulls picking up bread crumbs in flight. The fact that he spells his Mövenpick with a "v" is a trick to attract the attention of the media. At first, however, he hails criticism. "My mother said I couldn't do a restaurant with that stupid name to her." Friends rhyme decent and not so decent verses. But the more people talked about "Mövenpick," he says, the more sure he was of his cause. "Then I did it." The restaurant opened on July 19, 1948.

His credo is "the expensive stuff cheaper, the cheap stuff more expensive." First-class wines are served by the glass, lobster, salmon or seafood in small, affordable portions. In doing so, he's hitting the zeitgeist. "I think I had a sixth sense for what was simply in the air," he later tells his good friend Kasimir Magyar, who is releasing a tribute to mark UP's 100th birthday.

Mövenpick is now expanding rapidly within Switzerland. He has already paid back the private loan with his friends with a markup of 20 percent. During a trip to America, the fast-food concept convinced him. In 1962, he promptly opened the Silberkugel restaurant chain based on the U.S. model. In 1966, the first Mövenpick hotels were opened, followed in 1968 by freeway service stations such as the famous "Fressbalken" above the A1 in Würenlos. Then come the self-service restaurants Marché, Caveau wine bars and, from 1969, Mövenpick Ice Cream. Within a few years, UP is responsible for 106 restaurants and 33 hotels.

"Mövenpick had my love, my loyalty, my attention," he once says. There was probably little room for his marriage to his second wife, Leonie. It fell apart, and the three girls also rarely saw their father. When Jutta Begus, who was more than 20 years younger, applied for a job as Prager's secretary, they had a spark. They married in 1970 and also had three children.

When Prager retires to the post of director in 1989 at the age of 73, Jutta Prager takes over the reins. She wants to buy time for the younger children to possibly later join the listed family business with 110 restaurants, 21 hotels and a billion marks in sales. But their interest remains low. And Jutta Prager finds herself increasingly exposed to criticism from within her own ranks. In 1989, "Der Spiegel" reported almost spitefully that a close associate characterized her as a 'mixture of hostel mother and dominatrix'."

At the end of 1991, the Pragers decide to sell their family company Carlton Holding, which owns 25 percent of the shares and the majority of the votes. For 135 million Swiss francs, they say unofficially. The new owner is Munich investor Baron August von Finck. For the family, this was not a bad deal. For at that time, the stock market value of the entire company was around 400 million Swiss francs. In 2003, the successful ice cream division is sold to Nestlé. In 2007, Carlton Holding buys up the remaining Mövenpick shares and takes the company off the stock exchange. "Selling Mövenpick was already an amputation," admits Ueli Prager shortly before his death on October 15, 2011. How successful his life's work had been, he has had in black and white since the end of the 1980s. In a test, 86 percent of Swiss children had spelled Möwe with a "v". ®

Author: Jennifer Holleis