"Have you ever eaten a wrap before? No? OK, let me show you how it's done," says the waitress. "Hold the wrap by the cigar band. Then remove the foil. As you eat, continue to peel back the foil until you reach the end. Then remove the cigar band and peel the foil away from the wrap like you are eating a banana. Enjoy."

At Washington DC's Wrap Works, a spinoff of the PepsiCo Inc.-owned Chevy's Mexican Restaurant chain, this is the novice's rite of passage into the restaurant industry's latest trend — wraps.

This globe-trotting cousin of the burrito — a tortilla or flatbread filled with gourmet international ingredients, from honey-lime jerk shrimp and scallops to roasted citrus chicken with Thai peanut sauce — is now appearing on menus around the country. Even the big-name national chains have rolled out wraps. KFC Corp. has launched flatbread-wrapped sandwiches called "Chicken Twisters." TGI Friday's has added rolled sandwiches called "Wrappers" to its menu, and pita-bread-wrapped sandwiches called "Wraps" have appeared on Au Bon Pain menus.

Those chains are adding fuel to the trend of bundling traditional foods and new fusion fillings into generous, hand-holdable meals that are sold at modest prices. A new look requires a new name — so the companies are calling their inventions wrapps, wraps and wrappers, and the wrap innovators expect to create an identity distinct from the still-popular burrito and sandwich segments. Marketing wordsmithing aside, to the uninitiated, wraps look like burritos. To the believers, the only similarity is the tortilla.

Wrap roots

Will Weisman is a believer. His company, World Wrapps, takes credit for having started the trend. World Wrapps opened the first of its 10 eateries in February 1995 on San Francisco's trendy Chestnut Street. Now, just two years later, wrap concepts with names like Todo Wraps, California Wrap, Rocket Wraps, Daily Wrap and Big City Wraps (Wrap Works' California counterpart) have popped up. In the Southeast, there is Great Wraps, an Atlanta-based chain that uses flatbread for its wrapper, and the casual-dining chains are introducing their own versions of wraps all over the country.

No one disputes that wraps are the hot new food trend, but where did they come from? Geographically, wraps sprang up on the West Coast in a culinary climate receptive to tandoori-chicken-topped pizza. The concept's culinary roots may be the burrito, but wrap specialists have made deliberate efforts to distance wraps from the family tree to create unique personalities for their products.

Wrap makers say they try to position their products as fusion-flavored, internationally inspired multicultural eating experiences that put the humdrum sandwich out to pasture. That's why World Wrapps and New York City's The Emerald Planet have brought in the culinary big guns to develop gourmet global cuisine suitable for wrapping.

Early on, World Wrapps joined forces with four-star chef Aaron Noveshen. "Our charter to Aaron was to take his fine-dining background and package it in a quickservice environment," says Weisman, one of the four under-30 founders of World Wrapps. Noveshen quickly grasped the concept and took it to the next level, creating "Mango Snapper," "Samurai Salmon" and "Caribbean Jerk Pork" wraps along the way.

The Emerald Planet recruited Tim Cushman, former corporate chef for Chicago's Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Inc., to design an international menu that would appeal to a hip, health-conscious and hurried customer. Cushman created wraps named after world cities and islands to suit every taste. There's the "Berkeley" wrap featuring sauteed tofu, the steak-stuffed "Cabo San Lucas" and the Moroccan-infused "Casablanca." And at about $7 per person, the wrap is affordable as well as portable.

Multicultural stuffings

Weisman and his partners took a year fine-tuning the World Wrapps concept. They researched trends in Mexican food, fat-free food, healthy food, multicultural food, beverages and home meal replacement. "We wanted to design a concept that was going to be at the intersection of what we felt were going to be some very long-term trends," says Weisman. "We thought we had a neat concept, but we didn't know exactly what we had on our hands."

What they had was a success. From day one, curious customers lined up outside of the closet-sized 650-square-foot World Wrapps. Within two months, the eight original employees were joined by 32 more.

Mark Kaplan, CEO and chairman of the 45-unit Great Wraps, says Weisman should have known what to expect. "Americans are tired of eating food served on a bun, on a hoagie roll or on a pizza crust. How many different ways can you dress up a chicken sandwich?" he asks. "I think just filling our bellies is a thing of the past. Americans are looking for more enjoyment from their food — and they are also looking for healthier, higher-quality food that is fast but not fast food."

Entrepreneurial twentysomething Clay Walker, co-owner of The Emerald Planet with Scott Fletcher, agrees. "I think there is a huge void in the lunch segment between fast food and fine dining," he says. "That's the void we're trying to fill, because people are looking for value, healthfulness and portability. Now people can get quality food for just a dollar or two more than they'd pay for fast food — I think that's what people are really excited about."

Wrap purveyors are banking on taste-bud tedium, heightened healthfulness and the relentless rat race to help them carve out a new niche. The way they see it, wraps-designed for ultimate eye appeal with their colorful green-spinach and red-roma-tomato tortillas and their exotic, flavorful fillings-will banish the mealtime blahs. "We offer our customers the possibility of finding something different day after day," says Fletcher. "They can eat Thai food one day, Chinese the next and Jamaican the day after that, and the only thing that binds these meals together in any way is that they are all wrapped in a tortilla."

David deVarona, president and CEO of the 19-unit Todo Wraps in Seattle, prefers to think of what he does as sending his customers on a 20-minute vacation for $4 to $6. "This is not middle-of-the-road stuff," he says. "This is exotic, bold-flavored food."

Wrapping up a large customer base

The restaurant industry defines wrap concepts as "fast casual." Culinary thrill-seekers — short on time, long on cash and eager to find the new hot trend — are helping to create this new restaurant category. Aimed at adults, the restaurants emphasize healthful, fresh products, typically made on the premises, often in front of the customer. Customers can control the portion size and contents of their meals.

"Very early on we decided that World Wrapps was . . . [going] to focus on high-quality ingredients and healthy cooking methods. Essentially everything the customer orders is made right then and there," says Weisman. "We wanted to deliver delicious food that is going to blow people away flavorwise — and serve it as quickly as we could."

The Arch Deluxe demographic — baby-boomer soccer moms shepherding kids from home to practices and games and then back again, and business professionals toting cellular phones in one hand and laptop computers in the other — is attracted to wraps because they can be eaten on the run and they're different, flavorful and won't wreck a diet. Wraps also appeal to the roller-blading, nose-piercing, arm-tattooing Generation Xers who are hip, young, bored and hungry. "Some of the reviews we've gotten talked about our clientele almost as much as they talked about our food, because we have such an eclectic mix of hair colors and vintage clothing," says Fletcher of his Emerald Planet customers.

Wrap makers are delighted that the trend transcends demographic boundaries. "Wraps have been accepted across a very broad demographic," says Weisman. "Our customers are Generation Xers, families, senior citizens, business professionals. We think it shows that there are a lot of legs to the concept."

Customer surveys conducted by deVarona have shown similar results. "Our core customer group is between the ages of 25 and 40, and is about 50 percent male and 50 percent female," says deVarona. And deVarona also knows this about his demographic: They are highly educated and have an abundance of disposable income, but they are time-poor. He also acknowledges that customers have scores of eating options. "They can be very fickle unless you meet or exceed their expectations," says deVarona. "They want an attitude of service even though it's not a tableservice concept, they want take-it-home-and-feed-the-family convenience, but they also want high design in case they want to stop and eat in."

A lot of money has been spent by wrap operators to meet consumers' expectations for high-concept design and to stand out from the growing competition. Todo Wraps, for example, is painted eye-popping blue, green and purple. At Wrap Works, comfy armchairs belie the operation's minimalist, industrial-feeling, earthtoned decor. Encompassing 1,800-square-feet, The Emerald Planet has a global theme, reinforced by arched zinc strips in the floor signifying latitude and longitude, extensive use of earthtone finishes, abstract maps, and world music and acid jazz playing in the background.

"It's a competitive marketplace, and there is only so much room for people who sell wraps," says Fletcher. "We're very aware that there is going to be crowding of the marketplace, so we've invested a good amount of our budget into creating a product, an image and an environment that we feel differentiates us from the pack."

Wrap wars

That differentiation is going to become even more critical as the wrap segment opens up and more operators join the wrap race — a development some industry observers believe spells the potential for consumer confusion down the road. According to deVarona, a lot of diners do not know what a wrap is. "People are used to seeing black beans and rice served in a burrito," he says. "This is a new product, so you have to explain what a wrap is."

Howard Solganik is welcoming the wrap wave with open arms. His retail foodservice consulting company, Solganik & Associates, expects to open a freestanding version of its wrap concept — Wrapsody — in March. If it's successful, the company wants to expand into supermarkets and other nontraditional sites. "I think having wraps on a broad range of menus will just make people more familiar with them," says the Dayton, Ohio-based consultant.

In fact, Solganik says, "one of the benefits and the drawbacks with wraps is it's so easy to get into that we're already seeing a proliferation. Nearly all the fast-feeders have wraps. But I think there is even more room for wrap specialists. Just because there is a pizza on every restaurant menu has not reduced the opportunity for a restaurant to specialize in really good pizza. I think the wrap specialists are going to be the ones that break away from the others and do really well."

The three-year-old Todo Wraps and the two-year-old World Wrapps are ready to do just that. Backed by some well-heeled investors, including Howard Schultz, founder of Starbucks Coffee, and Jeff Brotman, founder of Price Costco, Todo Wraps is set to grow from its current 19 units to more than 30 locations by the end of 1997. Much of the expansion will be in Southern California. The company has seen sales grow from $1.6 million in 1994 to $6 million in 1996.

"Managing growth is always a challenge — if you go too slow, you get run over; if you go too fast, your wheels come off," says deVarona. "But we're building an infrastructure, because we want to open a lot of stores this year, and each opportunity well done will present another one to evolve and deliver on our promise to our customer."

World Wrapps is in an equally advantageous position. Bolstered by Trinity Ventures Ltd., the venture-capital firm that helped to launch Starbucks, World Wrapps is poised to expand quickly. The chain has grown to 10 stores — located in California and Washington — in nearly two years. "While we've grown quickly, we've spent a lot of time putting the right team together," says Weisman. "We've tried to create the right systems and infrastructure that's going to allow us to be the ones to roll this out nationally and do it in a way that is going to allow us to have high-quality food and service."

But single-unit operations like The Emerald Planet and Capital Wrapps in Bethesda, Maryland, also have aggressive expansion plans mapped out. "We are looking at some pretty substantial expansion in the next year or two," says The Emerald Planet's Walker. "We didn't transplant ourselves from the West Coast to open just one restaurant."

"I think it would be very narrow-minded of me to think that Washington DC is the only place Capital Wrapps is going to be," says Ed D'Alessandro, co-owner of the operation. "The country is hungry for new trends."

Unending wrapture?

But is America's hunger for wraps bottomless? These operators are willing to bet their tortillas on it. "This is going to be successful because the burrito is successful, but it's going to be so much more successful because you don't have the limitations of the burrito," says Weisman. "As new foods become popular, it's very easy to incorporate them into the menu."

D'Alessandro agrees. "I think this is one trend that's going to stick around, because the possibilities are endless. Wraps are not going to get stale," he says. Besides, he adds, wraps are healthy, fast and portable — a perfect food for today's revved-up pace. "Eventually, I think wraps are going to replace the traditional sandwich."

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