Ballad of the Sad Cafe
by Sara Tucker
Everywhere you turn, it's the same story: the French bistro, the Irish pub, even the Italian trattoria, icons of national culture, all in trouble from rising costs and changing mores. And yet, and yet, there are places in the world where antediluvian fans of real bars and cafés are obstinately resisting the trend.
"The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons." That's Bernard Picolet, owner of Aux Amis du Beaujolais, explaining to New York Times correspondent Steven Erlanger why more than 3,000 independent French restaurants filed for bankruptcy in the first half of 2008. "The way of life has changed," said Picolet. To be perfectly frank, the French are gulping their food.
The traditional French café/bistro has been in trouble for some time, but the numbers registering its decline have spiked with the plunging economy. The latest bankruptcy toll represents a 56 percent increase over the same period last year.
A similar affliction across the Channel elicited this lament from the Associated Press: "The iconic British pint is fast losing ground as the national drink," with beer sales at British pubs "slumping to their lowest level since the Great Depression." The Campaign for Real Ale, a brewers association, reached even farther into the historic past to come up with a suitably bleak comparison, reporting that "more than half of Britain's villages are 'dry' for the first time since the Norman Conquest of 1066."
Smoking bans and rising costs (rents, fuel, taxes) are partly to blame, as well as stricter drunk-driving laws, which is why supermarket beer sales are going up as pub sales are going down. In Ireland, which has lost more than a thousand rural pubs in the past three years, the closings are blamed less on rising costs and more on "the profound lifestyle changes that have accompanied the country's dizzying rise to affluence." The loss, here as in France, has been particularly devastating in the countryside, where pubs and cafés are a central part of village life. "What is a village," a Frenchman asked Erlanger, "but a café, a school, a pharmacy, a bakery and a city hall?" The closing of the only pub in Connolly, a town 50 miles south of Galway in County Clare "cut the heart out of the village" said one resident; another, a bricklayer who was working when he heard the news, had to lay aside his trowel and "sit down for an hour."
A multitude of factors are cited for the decline, not the least of which is le stress, "that plague of the new urban generation, which keeps busy schedules and leaves little time for idling over drinks, let alone for writing or playing cards." The malaise has spread far and wide since 1994, when that observation was made in the New York Times in reference to the French bistro crisis (yes, the newspaper has been predicting the end for at least 14 years now). "Everything has changed in Ireland," a farmer informed the Washington Post earlier this year. "It's as fast as New York around here."
So where does one go for an old-fashioned pint or cup of joe, served by a crusty old guy in a blue apron?
For hope and inspiration, the Irish might look to Italy, where, like the rest of us, the Italians "are struggling to deal with a faster pace of life, under pressure to do more, earn more and not waste time." That, says the Guardian, explains the invasion of coffee machines that is threatening the livelihood of the nation's baristas: "An analysis of the crisis in the newspaper La Repubblica points out that it takes four minutes to get a coffee from a machine as opposed to eight minutes to get one in a bar." Add to this the soaring price of a cup of espresso (40 percent higher since the euro was introduced in 2001), and it's no wonder that as Irish barmen serve lattes in a valiant effort to keep up with the times, the Italians are noticing a distressing decline in public coffee drinking.
But the Italians are fighting back. One tactic: coffee-sharing. "The trend, which started in the tiny Sicilian town of Partinico, involves two or even three people taking a sip each from the tiny cup of espresso," reports the London Telegraph. "Etiquette demands that the first drinker uses one side of the cup, the second person uses the other, and that the third person may drink from the middle."
For further solace, one may look to Spain, where "the bar" is still a daily ritual for many, thanks in part to the continuing vitality of another institution, the daily paper. Writing for MediaShift, a Web site that tracks media trends in the digital age, Jennifer Woodard Maderazo tells us that in Barcelona, where she lives, there are café-bars "on almost every street. The bar is a place where you meet up with other regulars, have a coffee, read the paper or--even better--talk news." In an age when face-to-face contact is giving way to Facebook, Maderazo assures the world's fogies that "there are still people here who like to chat in person with people they know about important topics. Imagine that."
Further reading:
* Starbucks in Italy? No, grazie (Fox News)
* McDonald's Overseas Sales Are Surging (Chicago Tribune)
* French Bistros File Record Bankruptcies as Le Big Mac Reigns (Bloomberg.com)
* In Affluent New Ireland, Rural Pubs Are So Yesterday (Washington Post)
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