France: Higher & Higher Cuisine

Eating out in France has become a financial torment as well as an Epicurean pleasure. Restaurants tack on extra charges for everything from napkins to green vegetables, and les additions have risen higher than souffles. Disturbed by the 9% rise in restaurant prices in the last year compared with a hike in overall living costs of 2.5%, Finance Minister Valery Giscard d'Estaing has decided to broaden France's 14-month-old price-stabilization program to cover menus. Last week hard-eyed government inspectors set out all over France to make certain that the nation's 50,000 restaurants henceforth hold their prices to late-October levels.

Giscard's order is primarily aimed at the small bistros serving businessmen, Frenchmen dining en famille and centime-counting tourists. In Paris, bistro prices have risen as much as 50% in a year, while wholesale-food prices climbed only 2.8%. Such flagrant padding is noticeably adding to the growing disenchantment of many tourists with France. But bistro owners are nevertheless enraged at the new order. "French culinary art is being suffocated by government intervention," said a Parisian restaurateur. Another suggested that there are ways to get around the order: "You want to increase the price of tournedos? All you have to do is christen it 'Cote de Boeuf Henri IV' and the trick is done."

Nevertheless, the government firmly intends to maintain its ceilings, is adding a carrot to match its stick. If restaurateurs hold the line, their taxes—which of course they only pay sporadically anyway—maybe scaled down from the present 8.5% of gross turnover to the 4.25% enjoyed by less artistic businesses.