Sam Bagnall

Some restaurants in France are seeing -50% revenue this year. Since we arrived in France one month ago we've eaten in many restaurants and I have to say I'm shocked at how bad the value proposition has become: the food is often mediocre (with some exceptions), insanely overpriced (average 110 euro a meal for a family of 4, for 2 courses each, if you don't go anywhere fancy), the portion sizes typically very small and the service often excruciatingly slow. The best meals we've had, by far, is when we bought quality pieces of meat or fish directly at the local shops and cooked them ourselves. For instance an excellent French "côte de bœuf" (prime rib) costs 26 euros a kg at a good butcher. 1.2kg is way enough (even too much) for us 4 and it's super easy to cook. You end up eating a far better meal - almost a feast - than what you'd get at the restaurant for 1/4th of the price. Even some of my favorite places from when I was a kid have gotten way worse. For instance we went to Georges, a mythical brasserie in Lyon established in 1836. The food has gotten almost inedibly bad, it tasted even worse than those ready-made frozen dishes you buy at the supermarket. Not sure why that is, probably cost: with salaries, food costs and rent prices, I guess it must be hard to maintain an attractively-priced French restaurant experience. On top of the fact that customers too have less money to spend. As a result many restaurants compromise a bit on everything, ending up with the current mediocrity. Last night we had kebab at a Turkish hole-in-the-wall in Paris, rated 4.8 out of 5 on Google with one comment saying "best food I've had in my 10 days in Paris" (goo.gl/maps/vB7P2aDAF…), which says everything you need to know about the state of French dining. The experience is especially painful when you live in Asia. In China I almost always enjoy going to the restaurant: since the concept is to share, you always end up tasting many different dishes, the prices are much more affordable (even by local standards) and, frankly, the quality is better nowadays. For one thing they almost always cook from fresh produce in the restaurant's kitchen (heck you often even order your food still alive, in the case of fish), when it's sadly very much not the case in France anymore. French restaurants need to reinvent themselves, I really can't see how the current situation is sustainable. You get a dining culture that's destroying its own reputation - France risks losing one of its greatest cultural exports because the economics no longer support the experience.