Three Challenges for France Gastronomy in 2018

Challenge 1: Eating outside is an experience.

Legend: Pink Mamma restaurant’s official opening, a best-in-class understanding of what clients experience means

Historically, and certainly based on this terroir-defined approach, France Gastronomy have been very “chef-centric”. Should you talk to some well-off Parisian foodistas, you might listen to the following sentence:

“ I’m having dinner @Plazza Athénée by Alain Ducasse (yes, the chef’s name is in the official restaurant’s name) and then I’ll have a dessert @Yann Couvreur Pâtisserie (yes, again in the official name)”

Note I could have used other places’ names, since the later are not exceptions:

• l’Etoile du Nord by Thierry Marx
• Restaurant Le Meurice Alain Ducasse
• La pâtisserie Cyril Lignac — Paul Bert
• Etc.

Such practice highlights how important French chefs are. It underlines they are seen by French population — but also foreigners — as artists. It might also reveal they worked hard on their personal brand and want to capitalise on it. Last, it also emphasises that dishes and their “Master of Creation” are understood, in France, as the the main reasons for clients to come to a restaurant.

However, if having diner with first-quality products and tasty transformations is great, eating outside is much more than eating good food. It is an experience.

This experience starts from the planning step, when clients look for the best restaurants to go out. Then, it goes through all the steps related to being welcomed, being served, being listened to, eating and sharing this moment with friends. Last, the experience ends when clients pay and, optionally, leave a review online.

My feeling, sometimes echoed by some feedbacks mostly from foreigners, is that French restaurant owners choose to put a lot of weight on the “eating part” of the experience and, often, neglect the other parts.

Challenge 2: Food doesn’t come first.

During the whole experience of eating outside, I believe some bad moments can be forgiven, whereas others cannot. For clients to value, remember and refer restaurants the following seems to apply:

• Food can be excellent… and must at least be ok.
• Place can be extraordinary… and must at least be clean.
• Service can be awesome and… must be awesome.

What do I mean?

Regarding food, clients know chefs and cooking staffs are working “live”. It’s all in real time and it’s tough. So, when a too salty burnt piece of meat comes into their plates, clients will likely complain and give the cooking staff a second chance.

Regarding places and their decoration, clients just want to enter into another world. Is your restaurant about Italian food? Take them to Italy. Is your cooking respectful of Mother Earth? Let your clients feel this inner peace. But in any case, respect this one-and-only basic: lack of hygiene is unacceptable. In 2017, in France, only 36% of the 10,000+ restaurants where sanitary inspections were conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture received the highest grade of “very satisfactory”. All the others received at least an official letter recalling hygiene legal standards or, worst, 7% of them had to implement corrective measures or shut down.

Last, regarding service quality, clients expect an awesome service and there are almost no reasons not to provide it. Being polite, smiling, taking time to answer a client’s question is a substantial part of the job in restaurant. Besides, asking what aspects can be improved is a minimum that most France waiters do not respect. Not mentioning that chefs almost never come talk with clients. France gastronomy still underestimates how service quality can completely make or ruin an experience.

To sum up, place owners need to get this :

• If you had a food accident and apologise, clients understand.
• If you go to the moon and always try satisfy your clients needs, they will do their best for you.
• You can’t expect referral from your clients if you keep thinking about what you like and not what they like.

Challenge 3: Benefiting from the delivery boom

In France, and most specifically in Paris, delivery services have boomed since 2016, with an open war between the main actors Foodora, Take Eat Easy (who died a few months ago), Deliveroo, Allo Resto and Uber Eats just to name the biggest ones. Indeed, Paris’ dense population and high concentration of quality restaurants makes it an ideal place for delivery services to grow. Both restaurant owners and clients could not miss this shift in food consumption.

Apparently food delivery is not such a substitute to eating outside. Instead food delivery seems to be a better substitute to cooking at home and, in a lesser proportion, to grabbing a sandwich at the office. Indeed, people cook less everyday, as mentioned in a 2017 European study by Foodora (65% of surveyed people said they do not have time to cook at home and 83% say they do not want to cook after a day at work).

As a consequence, restaurants still have two opportunities derived from the delivery boom: first they can reinforce their difference with delivery and clearly stand that they offer a broader and richer experience that simply eating food. Second, they can increase their sales by making their dishes available to delivery services, entering clients’ homes and offices.

Things are, until now, France gastronomy has not find the best dishes to fight its way through the delivery standards. Indeed, most delivered meals are still:

• Pizza
• Sushis
• Burgers

Those meals meet several conditions : they are fast to cook, easy to pack, simple to transport and convenient to eat without proper cutlery.

To fully benefit from this boom, French chefs should work on defining new products meeting these standards or bet on new ways to pack meals.

4. Challenge 4: What do you think?

🤔 And you, do you think there are other important challenges that France gastronomy has to face? Glad to hear your thoughts!