‘Paris is empty’: Restaurant owners lament the Olympic party that never came

Alain Fontaine is, by nature, an optimistic man. When you have worked in restaurants for nearly 50 years and owned them for most of your adult life, there is no sense lamenting the trials and cancelled reservations that come with the trade.

But when you can walk at 1.30pm on a bright Sunday afternoon into Fontaine’s Le Mesturet Bistro, a charming, traditional French restaurant with a well-appointed menu and wine list in the heart of Paris’ old financial district and take your pick of tables, it is clear that something is not right. The street outside is quieter than a bibliotheque, and inside, wait staff are trying, without success, to look busy while the stove top idles.

In one corner stands a deeply hued, gilt-handled armoire that looks as though if you stepped inside, you could walk through to Narnia. If only Paris had a portal to connect the tens of thousands of people who are packing out the stands at beach volleyball, swimming and fencing with a city that has been waiting for years to serve them great food, fine wine and a good time.

Alain Fontaine says tourists have come to Paris, but not for its restaurants.Credit: The Age

Fontaine takes a seat at our table and explains the problem. In the months leading into these Games, hospitality and retail businesses were told to put on extra staff and open longer hours to accommodate the anticipated Olympic rush. “They told us we should be excited like children on Christmas Day,” he says. At the same time, Parisians were told to work from home or, better yet, get out of town to make way for the hordes of visitors. Les aoûtiens, the word given to French who pencil in August every year for a month of vacation, didn’t need to be asked twice, but the cashed-up tourists who normally fly in from places like China and the UAE have decided to give Paris a miss

Paris is ready for a party but, at the midway point of the Games, is watching the ice melt in the Esky, and the chips grow stale. There are plenty of people here for the Games, but they are not stopping at Mesturet for a beef tartare.

“Olympic tourists are not the same as normal tourists,” Fontaine says. “Paris is a must-see destination for tourists and, I say this without arrogance, 43 per cent of tourists come to Paris for the restaurants. Right now, tourists are not coming for the restaurants, they are coming for the Olympic Games. They are coming for between one and three days, they have paid a lot for their accommodation and tickets. They don’t have the budget for restaurants, they are being fed inside fan zones and stadiums.

“I think the Olympic Games will put France at the top, and we will reap the benefits in years to come, but a lot of restaurants in Paris and throughout France feel like we are not participating in the party. As citizens, we are proud; as restaurateurs, we are disappointed.”

It is the same story across this Olympic city, save for the parks and public places that have been commandeered as Games venues or nightlife districts like Châtelet, where sports bars and street vendors cater for backpackers and young people from other parts of France. Streets normally jammed with people are eerily quiet and businesses that took on more staff are having to send them home on paid leave.

It’s oh so quiet: With the Games a distraction, visitors can take their pick of Paris’ eateries. Credit: The Age

“Paris is empty,” declares Charles Compagnon, who owns three restaurants in the city but will shutter two of them on Sunday, the hump day of the Olympics. “We’re doing half the business we used to. You can walk like you’ve never walked before.”

The issue is so serious that France’s caretaker prime minister, Gabriel Attal, has announced that a compensation commission will be established to recompense businesses heavily impacted by the Olympic downturn. The City of Paris has exempted all restaurants located in the city’s security “red zone” close to the Seine from the terrace tax, a duty paid to the local council for the privilege of putting tables out on the street. When the police prefecture erected, without warning, additional barriers outside businesses along the route of the opening ceremony, restaurant owners understood the need to prioritise security but hated what it did to the amenities of their terraces. “It was like a monkey taking a coffee behind a zoo fence,” laments Fontaine.

Tom Clark, a Canberra-born Parisian who owns a chain of cafes, was reminded of the “confinement”, the French term for COVID lockdowns, by the sight of empty Paris streets in the days before the opening ceremony. Clark has since decamped to the mountains to escape the hottest part of the summer.

Before the Olympic cauldron was lit, this was already a difficult year for French hospitality. The political uncertainties from President Emmanuel Macron’s snap election ran into an unusually cold, rainy start to summer, and hotel arrivals were down about five per cent on the previous year. Figures from the Paris tourist office show that forecast international air arrivals for the summer are down by a similar percentage.

Delta chief executive Ed Basian, whose airline provides transatlantic flights to Paris from major American cities, told CNBC the slower-than-expected Olympic trade would cost his carrier about $US100 million ($154 million). Gail Boisclair, the owner of Perfectly Paris, a company that provides furnished rentals, says this is the quietest summer she can remember in the city outside the pandemic. She says that many Parisians who left hoping to rent out their homes for a motza were unable to find tenants. Short-term rental prices spiked at first, but once June arrived, they fell back to normal rates and in some cases, below.

Unseasonal weather has cast a dampener on the Olympic party.Credit: Getty Images

According to figures compiled by the French Association of Master Restaurateurs, which Fontaine serves as president, July table bookings were 20 per cent below what they normally are. For restaurants in the ancient Ile de la Cite in the middle of the Seine and Trocadero area near the Eiffel Tower, business has slumped by up to 80 per cent. About one in every three restaurants across Paris has been hit hard, and in regional gastronomic centres like Bordeaux and Lyon, where the usual tourist numbers are also down, the pain is being shared.

Catherine Querand, the president of the restaurant and hoteliers association of France, owns restaurants in Paris and Nantes, a small city that straddles the Loire in western France. She says things have started to pick up since the opening ceremony, but before that, there was a “bizarre” dearth of hungry customers across the country. “It is important when people come to France for the first time to experience both popular gastronomy and the great gastronomy,” she says. “In France, it is really nice to eat for a good price and eat well. It is very, very important.

“Reservations are growing in September, which is a good sign. Tell Australians they should come.”

None of this should have come as a surprise. After London hosted the 2012 Olympics – a Games Paris also bid for – a research paper published by France’s National Institute of Statistics and Studies documented the “strong crowding out effect” of the Games, where Olympics soaked up tourist pounds that would have otherwise been spent on other things around London. One measure of this was a 24 per cent fall in visitor numbers to the British Museum. In Paris, where the Louvre is regularly sold out in summer, entry tickets have been available throughout the first week of the Olympics. The London study found that tourism revenue was patchy across the city, with notable increases concentrated in the city’s Olympic quarter.

Despite the Games not delivering to Paris what restaurant and other business owners had hoped for, frustration has not turned to despair. Romain Vidal, the owner of Le Sully, a century-old brasserie on the banks of the Seine in the fourth arrondissement, says while the Games are not a jackpot, they are good for the city. He went to the spectacular, rain-drenched opening ceremony and loved what he saw. “People were happy, and it was a fabulous time,” he says. “I can see that people in my restaurant are happy. It is a success.”

For Alain Fontaine, the short-term difficulties caused by the Games need to be seen in the context of what Paris has endured in the years leading up to them: catastrophic terror attacks, violent demonstrations against government policy, COVID, a war in Ukraine and surging inflation. “What eases this pain is that we are happy to have the Olympics,” he says. “What we are living through today, we are a bit disappointed, a bit lost, but we are going to keep going. Nothing will take away the pride of having the Olympic Games here.”

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