C (3:24)

No, actually we just ate already at a sandwich place. I eat sandwiches even in winter. It's a boulangerie where you eat inside at a table. I never go to proper restaurants. It's a question of time, but also money. At the boulangerie, my lunch cost me $10. You can't eat for that in a restaurant. For special occasions, like celebrating getting my internship, I go to restaurants, but otherwise no. This lunchtime, for example, we went to McDonald's. Usually I eat at home because it's cheaper and healthier.

B (4:05)

At the sort of place those passersby never or very rarely go to. A proper, though quite cheap restaurant called the. In an industrial park on the outskirts of town, a waitress takes the orders of four men who work at a factory around the corner making home ventilation systems. The menu she announces is for starters smoked salmon salad or a salad with boudin blood sausage. Very delicious if you don't know it. The mains are spaghetti carbonara or skate wings with pureed vegetables. Quite a refined fish dish, that one. Fruit crumble for dessert. It's half past 12 and the restaurant is still pretty empty. The customers there are have been sat in the same area in the hope of working up a bit of a convivial atmosphere. The owner, Michael Moreau, is disappointed about lunchtimes like these and is anxious about the future.

E (5:09)

We should be 3/4 full at this time, but we more than 3/4 empty. It's been like this for about a year. People are not going out. They are not coming here in any case. Although the cooking smells good, people seem to like what we do. We get good comments on the Internet, but they are not coming like they used to. The last year's been really bad because of the rising cost of our raw materials. First of all, I've been doing this job for 20 years and purchasing has never been so stressful. Prices have risen between 10 and 30% over the past year. Some things have gone up more than others, of course, but everything is more expensive. A basic like minced beef, for example, was about $10 a kilo a year ago. Now it's about 15.

B (5:54)

Have you put your prices up a lot too?

E (5:58)

Not much. Not as much as we should have. Our philosophy has been to squeeze our profit margin and keep prices. Our lunch menu, for example, is just over $19 for starter, main course and desserts.

B (6:12)

That is very reasonable.

E (6:14)

You have to be if you want to keep your customers, because many of them are trying to cut their spending. And cutting out restaurants is an easy way to do that. People who used to come three times a week now only come once or twice. Companies that would treat their employees to an end of year meal decided not to this year. We lost about 10% of our clientele in 2025. And if we'd raised our prices in line with our cost, we would have lost many more.

B (6:42)

Are the French also changing their eating habits?

E (6:48)

Yes, people are taking more home deliveries since COVID for example. There are also the bakeries that are increasingly moving into our sector of activity. Many are even starting calling themselves restaurants and putting out tables so people can sit down to e.

B (7:06)

Wine sales are down as well, aren't they?

E (7:10)

That's a big problem. Today. Company policy is usually zero alcohol. So when a CEO or commercial director invites his clients out to lunch, it's important for alcohol not to appear on the bill. So what do they do? Not order any alcohol. So yes, we are selling less wine.

B (7:29)

Statistics for France as a whole show average net profits in the restaurant sector that were between 5 and 10% pre Covid have now fallen to under 3%. For Michael, things are a bit worse than that.

E (7:46)

Nowadays, I feel like I'm working for nothing. Once I've managed to pay my staff, pay my suppliers and pay all the obligatory charges, taxes and contributions, it's almost a relief if I manage to break even at the end of the year. But this isn't a charity, it's a business. We're here to make money, to invest and help the wheels of the economy move around.

B (8:10)

When you say break even, do you manage to pay yourself a salary?

E (8:15)

Not every month, no.

B (8:17)

What do you live on then?

E (8:20)

I'm lucky enough to have a wife who works and who makes a good salary. And we've already paid back the mortgage on our house and I have some savings, but it's so frustrating. I love what I do. I have a restaurant that people like. We've got 4.5 stars out of 5 from customers on the Internet, but we are barely getting by. It's really stressful.

B (8:43)

Actually, you do seem to be under quite a lot of stress. Are you suffering from the situation?

E (8:52)

Yes. It's like Everything's falling apart. It is possible that I lose everything after 20 years of work. 20 years with nothing to show for it. Obviously it's not a happy prospect. And it's worse because it's not as if we haven't done a good job. In fact, I think I've done everything in my power to make this business work. But if we lose everything, if people like us have nothing left to lose, the result could be dramatic.

B (9:20)

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B (10:28)

I'm John Laurenson and today I'm looking at how the restaurant business is in trouble in France. I leave Mikhail to look after his insufficiently numerous customers and drive into the centre of town. It was a sobering experience talking to him. It's been a while since I've interviewed someone who's trying not to cry. Sobering as well to think that across this country, known the world over for its excellent cuisine and its solid, well rooted food culture, there are thousands in situations like his or worse. In Angers, even restaurants in prime locations are struggling. In the kitchens of the Ernest Inne, a pleasantly Frenchified burger restaurant just off the main square, I meet up with Celine Viale. She runs three eateries including this one, and is departmentement or county level, president of the Hotel and Restaurant owners union.

C (11:34)

Between June 2024 and June 2025, the number of restaurants that closed in France increased by 10%. About 9,800 closed for good in that period. Sales figures were really bad too. Average restaurant turnover fell by 22% due to narrower profit margins and falling numbers of customers. Here in Nanjay, there have been plenty of closures in the past few years. A traditional restaurant will go bankrupt and immediately be replaced by a Quebec place or a burger chain or some other fast food restaurant, or the Columbus Cafe, just across the street from where we are now. And many of our members tell us they're in difficulty, but haven't closed yet.

B (12:25)

In 2010, the gastronomic meal of the French, as it was phrased, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity list, recognising not so much the specific cuisine, but the social practice of the French meal. People gathering around a properly laid table to use tableware to eat, a structured sequence of dishes with a pairing of food and wine, a traditional way of eating that many are abandoning, says Celine Vial.

C (12:59)

The new generation, the sacrifice generation, I call them, hasn't been brought up eating in a traditional French way. The Americanization of our eating habits has been huge here and very sudden. We went from a very traditional to a very street food, fast food way of eating very quickly. Many young people who today are 15, 20 years old have not been educated to have three meals a day. The Sunday meal, too, where everyone gathered around the table at lunchtime, has almost disappeared. The government talks about educating children to tell them what a meal used to be, because people have got so used to eating quickly a bag of nuggets that gets delivered and that they eat on the corner of a kitchen table. If you were brought up to eat like that, it's very likely your children will eat like that too.

B (13:56)

The other thing is the lure of the exotic.

C (14:01)

Young people travel a lot today. They go to China, Australia, Thailand and so on. And they love everything that is street food, everything that is foreign, everything that is spicy, everything out of the ordinary. So just as UNESCO celebrates the traditional French meal, many French people are giving it up.

B (14:22)

Celine tells me that she, like Michael Moreau, has not raised her prices in line with the rise in her costs. But the recent slump in the restaurant business has hit her even harder than him. How much business have you lost this past year?

C (14:40)

I lost 25%. It's huge. This restaurant does a million dollars of sales a year, so it's a big loss.

B (14:49)

Have you had to lay off staff?

C (14:52)

Yes, absolutely. I had 14 or 15 employees, including 11 or 12 full time. Now I've got nine or 10. This is the first lever we have for saving our businesses.

B (15:04)

She says it's misleading to think that if you keep prices low, you'll fill your restaurant and everything will be fine.

C (15:14)

You have to listen to people's concerns about prices. But it's important to remember that eating well has a cost. People say it's scandalous that a restaurant charges $30 for a steak that costs 12 at the butcher's. But in a restaurant, you have a table laid for you where people come to serve you. You have your fries and salad and bread that all needs buying and preparing. Your steak is cooked by a trained chef. You have homemade sauces. It's not at all the same as when you eat at home or at a fast food place.

B (15:50)

As regards the prices charged by restaurants in France as a whole, Celine tells me they increased less than costs from mid 2024 to mid 2025. But this was not the case just prior to that. According to a survey carried out by Girard, a consultancy that advises owners, suppliers and investors in the restaurant sector. Its founder and CEO is Bernard Boutboule.

D (16:20)

Between the end of 2022, when inflation really jumped, and mid 2024, when it stopped rising, but remained at a very high level, raw material cost for restaurant owners rose 16% on average. That's enormous. Some restaurant owners were reasonable and put prices up by 9 or 10%. Some didn't put their prices up at all. And that's a bit dangerous because that can wipe out your profit margin. But many put their prices up by more than 20%. The national average restaurant price increase for that period was 23%. So at a moment when the French had a big problem with purchasing power, with the prices they were paying for groceries and energy increasing a lot, the cost of this particularly French pleasure of eating in a restaurant suddenly became prohibitive for many.

B (17:11)

I think many French people, when they're confronted with a main course at €27, about $30, which is common now in a brasserie or some other slightly chic but not gastronomic restaurant, when they see that kind of price, they think they're being taken for a ride and won't be coming back in a hurry.

D (17:29)

It's true. We do a lot of customer surveys and people often complain they can no longer find a restaurant where the dessert is under $10, or that they are charged $11 for a half bottle of mineral water is just much too much. France now has, in my opinion, restaurants that are much too expensive for French people.

B (17:52)

Has what people want from restaurants change as well.

D (17:56)

We have, in France and all over the world, a new generation of consumers that we call the enlarged Gen Z. In other words, those under 30 to 35 years old who eat out a lot. They love restaurants, in fact, but they don't go to the same places as their parents, let alone their grandparents. They don't want to eat the same things. They don't want to structure their meals in the same way. They don't have the same notion of value for money as their parents. They are more interested in buying an experience than the food as such. The place, the staff, the dishes, it all needs to be Instagrammable. So we are at a turning point.

B (18:34)

Some have managed to negotiate the turning brilliantly. Bernard Boutboule cites a couple of examples. A restaurant startup called La Nouvelle Garde, a cheaper and healthier version of the traditional brasserie that has quickly become quite a big chain, and the Bouillon, a revival of the old massive working class eateries of the 19th century, which are traditional, look it and are seriously cheap. But the huge dense network of little restaurants that used to define this country at meal times is disappearing fast. If things keep going the way they have, the future, says Celine Vial, is bleak.

C (19:16)

It would be a shame if the same thing happens to the restaurant business as happened to fashion retailing, where the independents disappear and all that's left in the city centers are the big brands, the big chain stores. I'm afraid we'll end up with a two tier system with some eating in a few very expensive gastronomic restaurants, while the rest will eat badly or at home.

B (19:43)

You've been listening to Business Daily from me, John Laurenson on the BBC World Service. Goodbye.

C (20:01)

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