From bon appetit to Uber Eats: why France’s beloved restaurants are in crisis | Paul Taylor

4 hours ago 4

Spare a thought for the poor French restaurateur. Once the iconic image of a sybaritic nation that loved nothing more than a boozy meal out with friends or colleagues, the French restaurant is in deep crisis. Traditional restaurants are closing faster than you can shout “garçon!”, as eating habits change and the cost of living pinches.

“It’s a catastrophe for our profession,” Franck Chaumès, president of the restaurant branch of the Union of Hospitality Trades and Industries (UMIH) said in a television interview recently. “Some 25 restaurants are going out of business every day.” The UMIH has demanded – so far in vain – that the government ration the opening of new restaurants, in proportion to the local population, and license only professionals who are qualified in cooking and accounting.

The only businesses that seem immune to the hollowing out of France’s hospitality sector are those providing haute cuisine at eye-watering prices to the super-rich and fast-food chains such as the ubiquitous McDonald’s, which does a roaring trade.

The days when business, politics and diplomacy were transacted over lengthy wine-fuelled lunches are mostly gone. When I started as a reporter in Paris in 1978, there was no point calling a ministry or corporate press office between 1pm and 3pm, even in a crisis. Everyone was à table. Nowadays, only parliamentarians perpetuate the gluttonous tradition.

Changing lifestyles, rising wholesale food prices and perverse tax rules are driving ever-more restaurant owners to the wall, as ordinary French people struggle to make ends meet. Gen Z and millennials eat less, drink less alcohol and spend less time at the dining table. Add to that the inroads of home-delivery services such as Deliveroo and Uber Eats – often ferrying food prepared in “dark kitchens”, without a dining room attached – and it’s easy to see how old-fashioned restaurants are struggling to survive.

“I used to serve 75 covers every lunchtime, and we had at least two home-cooked dishes of the day, with meat or fish and fresh vegetables,” says Alex Diril, who used to run a bar-restaurant in Paris’s fifth arrondissement, frequented by office workers, craftsmen and young people from nearby universities. “Things changed after the pandemic. Customers who used to eat out every day came maybe once or twice at the beginning of the week. You would offer people a fresh, healthy plat du jour, and mostly they wanted burgers and fries. As the wholesale cost of food rose, we couldn’t increase prices because of the competition from fast-food joints and sandwich places.”

Despite the hard work put into serving freshly cooked food, the restaurant was losing money. Diril cut his losses and stopped serving food at the end of 2024. His bar-tobacco shop is just one of thousands of victims of a crisis that is changing the face of France.

The Covid pandemic was a turning point in many ways. When restrictions eased, fewer than two-thirds of middle-class workers returned to the office full-time. Many continue to work from home at least part of the week, and some take a lunchbox or grab a sandwich on the fly when they do go to the office.

Tax and employment rules have compounded restaurateurs’ woes. VAT is charged at 5.5% on takeaway meals, but 10% on eat-in dining. Moreover, since Covid the luncheon vouchers that many French workers receive as part of their pay can be spent on food in supermarkets, not just in restaurants. That has dealt a body blow to lunchtime dining.

The advent of online shopping, coupled with restrictions on driving and parking in urban centres has also hit the restaurant business hard.

Statistically, the French have long spent more time eating and drinking than other comparable countries: two hours and 13 minutes on average per day, according to a 2015 study, compared to one hour and 18 minutes in the UK, and barely an hour in the US. But habits have changed since then, influenced by US fast-food culture as well as healthier eating. Young people are as likely to go to the gym as to a restaurant during their lunch break.

The 35-hour working week, introduced in France in 1998, forced many small restaurants with kitchen staff to reduce their opening hours. Try getting served in a provincial restaurant after 1.30pm and you are likely to encounter a Gallic shrug and a curt “la cuisine est fermée” (the kitchen’s closed), if not a surly “non, mais vous avez vu l’heure?” (haven’t you seen the time?). Serving staff are also increasingly hard to find. Since the pandemic, fewer French people want to work the unsocial evening and weekend hours on which restaurants depend.

Ironically, while the British government subsidised its citizens to “eat out to help out” – at the risk of spreading contagion – the French government showered restaurateurs with money to stay shut during the Covid lockdowns. While other businesses received interest-free loans to ease their cashflow, restaurants got outright grants. “I’d never seen so much money. We couldn’t believe our eyes,” says Martine David, who ran a family restaurant in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in southern France. There was a six-month boom when lockdown was lifted. French people regained their freedom and splurged pent-up savings on a meal out. But business never really returned to normal after the pandemic.

Restaurateurs now face a choice between reheating mass-produced pre-cooked frozen food from wholesalers to cut costs, or trying to attract customers who care about healthy eating with a short menu of locally sourced produce cooked to order, which has a higher labour cost. Sadly, the former are faring better than the latter.

Bon appetit!