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Paris without us — well, that would be rather a different story," says Jean-Louis Costes with just a hint of a smile, and if you don't know the man you might think he's an amiable megalomaniac. After all, most Parisians have never heard of Costes or his brother Gilbert; they rarely speak to the press. But if you've spent even a weekend in Paris, it's a good bet they have taken your money and shown you a good time. The Costes brothers are limonadiers, French slang for café owners, but theirs is a lemonade empire: a good 40 hotels, cafés and restaurants belong either directly to them or to members of their extended family and employees they have staked. In a city where much of life unfurls at little round tables, the Costes own the best ones in town.

Now the Costes are making clear they intend to go well beyond limonade. A massive work in progress will expand their recently purchased luxurious K Palace hotel into the adjacent buildings on the swank Avenue Kléber. The remodeled K Palace, designed by architect Ricardo Bofill, should put the Costes in the front ranks of the city's hoteliers. "From the Bastille to Trocadéro, from Montparnasse to the Grands Boulevards — that's our fief, our little village," says Jean-Louis, 53, with a proprietary air. "It's a very good village."

They've got the Café Marly in the Louvre museum, which overlooks I.M. Pei's glass pyramid, and the restaurant Georges atop the Pompidou Center, where diners survey the city through giant windows. L'Esplanade is theirs too, the only café on the magnificent Esplanade des Invalides. If you're in the fashion business, you eat lunch at l'Avenue, which holds down what may be the most chic intersection in the world: the corner of Avenue Montaigne and Rue François I. The restaurant that sprawls over most of the Hôtel Costes' lobby on Rue St.-Honoré is where you eat if you're French and you're famous, period. Yves Saint Laurent dines in the atrium twice a week. Isabelle Adjani, Catherine Deneuve and Johnny Hallyday are regulars. So are John Malkovich and Johnny Depp. The Costes know them all and feed them steamed vegetables (€20), carrot juice (€8) and roast shrimp with Thai herbs (€28). The food is always dependable, never risky or flashy or attention-getting. The brothers aren't looking to win awards for creative gastronomy. "Every meal starts when a man asks a woman, 'Chérie, where do you want to eat tonight?'" says Jean-Louis. "Our cuisine is designed for women." Which means portions that are small bordering on skimpy; no sauces — too fattening; no "plat du jour" — too complicated; and never, ever two garnishes — an inexplicable personal obsession of Jean-Louis'.

It doesn't hurt the bottom line either that the Costes own 80% of the operation that makes the 1,800 little rolls and 1,500 pastries the Costes restaurants serve daily, 33% of the company that supplies the smoked salmon and other prepared foods, and 50% of the condiment supplier. All the Costes establishments are obliged to buy from these suppliers, no matter which member of the extended family is the majority shareholder. That's a nice bump to the bottom line when the €10 slice of chocolate cake at Georges costs a little more than €2 to make. A string of restaurants where the food isn't the point, where the marketing plan and the look and feel of the room matter more than what's on the plate? That really is putting a fresh stamp on Paris. The idea has taken root. Goodbye wicker, hello chintz. Café owners across Paris have been imitating the Costes' haute-design blueprint to the point where it risks turning into a new café cliché.

How much does the Costes formula bring in? As a patchwork of private companies — or "an informal network whose members have been tied to one another since birth," as Gilbert, 54, puts it — they're not required to say. Pressed, Gilbert figures the whole collection throws off some j100 million a year, although that's probably low. Profits? Up to 20% on the restaurants, perhaps 35% on the hotel rooms. Pas mal.

Like generations of Paris limonadiers before them, the Costes brothers made their way up from the Auvergne, a poor region some 700 km south of Paris. Since the 1830s, Auvergnats have dominated the café trade: they made their living hauling coal up apartment stairs while their wives served drinks to the clients. The drink-serving part stuck. Jean-Louis and Gilbert Costes grew up in the business; their mother Marie-Josèphe Costes turned the family farm at Saint-Amans-des-Cots into an inn, which filled up with returning Auvergnats every summer. They told tales of the money they raked in over the zinc-topped bars of Paris, and the Costes boys listened and dreamed.

"For us, Paris was the universe," recalls Gilbert, who moved there in 1968. "When we first arrived, we felt Lilliputian. We felt lost." But like others before them, they fell into a café welfare system. The Auvergnats of Paris take care of their own. The boys learned their métier at cafés around town and impressed their elders with their shrewdness and industry.

Among the impressed was Michel Vidalenc, whose employer, Groupe Bertrand, is one of a few family firms that dominates beverage distribution in France. (Bertrand is now a subsidiary of Dutch brewer Heineken.) These brasseurs — many of whom just happen to come from the Auvergne — serve as informal bankers to the café trade. They sniff out Auvergnats most likely to keep their beer flowing freely and advance them cash to buy a place of their own. "Interest" comes in the form of slightly higher prices on the beverages they sell the new café owner under exclusive contracts. Everybody comes out ahead.

So it was that in 1983, Jean-Louis and Gilbert got the money to buy the café in Les Halles that would make them limonade legends, called, not surprisingly, Café Costes. "We realized that all the existing cafés were a bit banal, and that if you put together good design, good marketing, a good location and some hard work, you would have a 'cocktail explosif,'" says Jean-Louis. The detonator was an unknown designer named Philippe Starck, who modeled the interior after the railroad station in Budapest. Kaboom! Before long, Starck was a star and Café Costes was taking in five times as much money as it had before his makeover. The brothers have been cloning versions of Café Costes ever since. The formula that the Costes have applied is hands-off, within limits. Jean-Louis is a detail freak who leaves nothing to chance. "I'm not much on management, but I'm a positive nut about marketing," he says. "I'll happily leave management to the individuals who run each place, but marketing is something else again."

The Costes empire's crown jewel is the Hôtel Costes, which the brothers bought in the early 1990s from Hilton Group for a reported $25 million, but by the time it opened in 1995, decorator Jacques Garcia had spent so much on leopard-skin prints and ferns that the Costes were rumored to be in serious trouble. Yet the hotel became a profit machine, churning out about €3.8 million on revenue of about €18.4 million in 1999, the last year it reported figures.

The ultimate secret ingredient is stardust, which is why Jean-Louis hired Claude "Coco" Bakonyi as schmoozer in chief. Bakonyi handled meet-and-greet chores for TV station Canal Plus, and made sure every guest who appeared on the station's popular Nulle Part Ailleurs broadcast ended up at Costes afterward. "We're not a palace, and we don't have the biggest rooms, so it's important that when they come here, they're among friends," says the man Johnny Depp calls Papa. So when Dustin Hoffman comes through town and shows up at the Costes, Coco puts on Harry Nilsson's Everybody's Talkin' (the theme to Hoffman's Midnight Cowboy), sneaks up behind Hoffman and whispers breathily, "Zees eez for yoo." It's their running joke.

That's not to say there haven't been setbacks. In the late 1990s, the Costes bought a mansion in the Marais district that they were planning to turn into a five-star hotel with over 100 rooms; instead, they recently sold it to residential real-estate developer Cogedim, and won't say why the plan fizzled. But the exception just proves the rule. As Jean-Louis Costes puts it: "A famous politician told me, 'You're just a tiny bit better than all the other places, and that's why we come.' Chez nous, you won't find much that pisses you off."

It's unlikely the two brothers will slow down anytime soon. Gilbert steps down from the commerce tribunal, France's court for commercial litigation, next year after serving for 13 years, which will free him for more business without worrying about conflicts of interest. Not for nothing are the two boys descended from people who lugged coal up and down stairs. "We were born working hard and we'll finish working hard," says Gilbert, who doesn't go in much for smiling. "It's our nature."

• JOSHUA LEVINE | Paris
• A rare interview with the elusive pair whose cafés have taken over Paris