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All over
Paris - all over France - restaurant tables are standing empty. The
takings of French restaurants and cafés have plunged by 20 per
cent this year. Nearly 3,000 restaurants and cafés have gone
bust in the first half of 2008 - a 30 per cent increase on the same
period last year.
Alarm bells
are ringing in the French restaurant industry, but also in the French
government. If the French have stopped indulging in their favourite
sport - eating out - there must be something profoundly disturbed in
the state of France.
"Younger
French people today don't understand or care about food. They are
happy to gobble a sandwich or chips, rather than go to a restaurant.
They will spend a lot of money going to a nightclub but not to eat a
good meal. They have the most sophisticated kinds of mobile telephone
but they have no idea what a courgette is. They know all about the
internet but they don't know where to start to eat a fish."
According to
a report yesterday by the French financial insurance company Euler
Hermes SFAC, no fewer than 1,782 "traditional" French
restaurants went bankrupt in the first six months of this year - a 25
per cent increase on 2007. The victims are mostly low or middle-range
neighbourhood restaurants, rather than the gastronomically ambitious
and high-priced. The destruction among cafés - a 56 per cent
increase in bankruptcies - was even worse, largely because of the
smoking ban. Even fast-food restaurants (bankruptcies up 19 per cent)
are feeling the pinch. |
