TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122892/1228270.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.5 KB | 120 lines

                                                                                TRAVEL, Page 62

Bistro Blues


The traditional French cafe is slowly dying out, a victim of
le cocooning, le stress and le fast food

By MARGOT HORNBLOWER/PARIS


    The last time I saw Paris
    Her heart was warm and gay
    I heard the laughter of her heart in
    Ev'ry street cafe.

    -- OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II


    Will the time come when an American songwriter, seeking to
capture the essence of France, pens a lyrical ode to Le Burger
King or McDonald's? Will the Hemingways, the Sartres and the
Picassos of the next century debate ideas while dining out on
le hamburger and le Coca-Cola? The scenario is hardly
farfetched. For on the street corners of Paris, and in
provincial cities from Lille to Lourdes, le fast food is
muscling out bistros at a dizzying rate.

    Early in the century, France counted roughly 300,000 cafes
for 38 million inhabitants, according to Robert Henry, head of
the cafe section of the restaurateurs union. Today, he laments,
the number has dropped to 62,000 for a population of 58
million. Over the past decade, bistros have gone out of business
at the rate of 3,500 a year. "Each time a cafe closes, a little
bit of liberty and democracy disappears," says Henry, a
71-year-old who was suckled in his parents' Val-d'Oise cafe,
north of Paris. From his bistro, Le Petit Poucet, Henry sees
people pouring into Le Quick, a nearby fast-food outlet. "Their
food is cheaper than ours," he admits. "But we have a role in
society: to listen to people, to lift their spirits, to provide
a place where all social classes mix and converse."

    For many French, no other institution so embodies their
civilization as le zinc. Today the counter of the typical
cafe-bistro is rarely made of zinc -- metal alloys and Formica
are easier to clean -- but the rituals remain. The owner who
shakes hands with the regulars. The blue-uniformed laborer
downing his half-liter of beer. The war veteran nursing his
Calvados-laced coffee. In villages, farmers gather after a day's
harvest for a shot of pastis and a dice game. In cities,
shopgirls pause for orange juice and a croque monsieur, the
grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich that is one of the mainstays of
cafe fare. "Parisian zincs are the ideal theater of the comedy
of man," observes the weekly L'Express.

    The great Left Bank establishments, such as Les Deux
Magots and Le Flore, thrive by serving up literary nostalgia to
tourists; even off the beaten track, visitors still find the
city bristling with humble neighborhood cafes and their newer
manifestation, the wine bar. But among the natives, the
statistics of decline have prompted a cry of alarm, with
newspaper articles and even a television special deploring the
slow extinction of le zinc. A government poll showed that 62%
of the French feel cafes are an "indispensable" part of life.
A festival at the Paris Videotheque inventoried 110 films
centered on cafes.

    The closing of cafes reflects a revolution in the French
way of life. Postwar prosperity brought refrigerators, so
bistros no longer had a monopoly on cold drinks. Television now
entertains people who once dropped by the local cafe to pass the
time. Moreover, alcohol consumption has dropped a third in the
past decade, and cheaper supermarket prices encourage people to
do their tippling at home. Another sign of the times: le
cocooning, the preference of a stressed-out generation to stay
home to relax. "People used to come and tell us their little
problems," says Pierre Domingue, owner of the Cafe de l'Arrivee
on the Boulevard de l'Hopital. "But those glory days are over."

    Cafes are hard put to compete with the television
advertising blitzes that promote fast-food chains and with the
price advantages of their mass-produced products. After Shannon
Biondi, a headstrong three-year-old and a member of what some
French sociologists call La Generation MacDo, saw a commercial
for "McCopters," she dragged her mother to the McDonald's across
from the Austerlitz train station. Until 1989, the spot was
occupied by a vast cafe, the Arc-en-Ciel. But Marie Biondi,
Shannon's mother, does not mourn the disappearance of the
bistro. "We feel safe here," she says. "We avoid the
neighborhood drunk, and the toilets are clean." Nearby, medical
student Christophe Icard, 21, converses with a companion over
chocolate ice cream. Cafes are "expensive and old-fashioned,"
he says.

    Demographics is another factor. In Paris rising rents are
driving the working class to the suburbs -- and long commutes
discourage after-work aperitifs. As a result, many cafes have
beefed up their menus and make up the lost zinc trade from
office workers who no longer go home for lunch. In the country,
mechanized farming has shrunk village populations, leading to
the closing of the cafes that served them. Still, most towns
have a place where tradition survives. In Houlgate, a small town
on the Normandy coast, six men and a woman chatted around the
Formica counter on a recent Saturday. "We come for the
conviviality, not for the alcohol," said Sylvain Lecuyer, a
40-year-old seasonal worker. "If someone does not show up for
two days, we phone to see if he is sick." Musing on the closing
of several local cafes, his drinking companion, James Jamet, 70,
reflected morosely, "It is France that is dying." But in the
next breath, he ordered a round for everyone, and one could only
drink to the fact that so much of that zinc-plated Gallic spirit
yet survives.