Les vrais états généraux de la restauration

What Les vrais états genéraux de la restauration en France is and what it means to you.

It’s an important part of our history, where there is a tradition of cuisine (even if it’s bad!). Paradoxically the desire to eat out seems to have been weakened in recent times.*

There are lots of us expatriates in France at the moment. There ought to be well over 50,000 of us in this country, and that’s just the anglophones. We love, for the most part, the French and the French language, and again for the most part, their defiantly anti-authoritarian ways which can seem to be a refreshing reversal of what we’re used to at home. Living here introduces us to the hour or two long coffee, booksellers who, seemingly without exception, will openly chain-smoke in their shops, the boulangerie and other small institutions, the Haussmanian boulevard and the bank holiday five-day weekend. They’ve got one of the toughest and most elaborate bureaucratic systems in the world and produced a dazzling array of the continent’s most influential writers and thinkers. But all this time us expats have played an important role in French society. We’re part of a small secret society existing through the ages, recognising each other through slight linguistic tropes, the cover of a book bought from one of the excellent English language bookshops. And the ex-patriates are only the ones who finally made it back or ended up staying, after all, France attracted just over 74.2 million tourists in 2009 and Paris is widely accepted as being the most-visited city in the world.

But there is now a major crisis in French cuisine that has been going on for some time. For the unwary customer frozen factory produced foods are increasingly being served in restaurants throughout the country. Waiters, barmen and kitchen staff, instead of being trained professionals in their chosen fields, are being progressively replaced with wage-slave automatons. The list of abuse is endless; social and fiscal fraud, complete lack of food traceability. It’s a dispiriting state of affairs.

The trouble is that getting to information couched in bureau-political doublespeak is not only disconcerting but deliberately intended to lead us down the garden path. This is where vegr.fr comes in.

The articles on this website are intended to keep you informed of what is happening in the world of restauranteering in France and of what the catering sector in France really thinks as it happens. We intend to support and encourage to the fullest extent possible an openly democratic debate of what ends up on our plates, to simply lay out for the restaurant-loving public exactly what decisions are taken behind closed doors to determine the future of our favourite eateries.

This is how you can get involved:

• Sign up to vegr.fr and get others to so as well
• Help us to expand our English language section by offering to translate or contribute an article
• Tell others about us on your blog, your website or your facebook page
• Help us maintain our independence by making a donation and becoming a subscriber

It is all the more important that we as expatriates and visitors to this country we love directly protect the culture and continue to maintain the core values of French cuisine that has so much contributed to the bettering of our own quality of life.

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‘La table fait partie de notre histoire, en France, … où la cuisine et une tradition (même la mauvaise!) … Mais paradoxalement, l’envie d’aller au restaurant semble avoir failbli depuis quelque temps.’ Macha Meril, Souvenirs Gratinés d’une Restauratrice. Les Petites Vagues Editions.