Shabby, friendly neighbourhood cafe in crisis . . . again

PARIS LETTER:Just as you settle into the timeless ritual of the Parisian bar, you read that the institution is under threat

IT REVEALS its charm in its own good time, this plain old cafe I know, but after my third or fourth visit it had wound me in without even trying. In fact, its effortlessness almost defines it, by which I mean, not that great effort has been skilfully concealed, but that its owner isn’t really all that bothered about the effort side of the business.

A small room with a zinc bar and about a dozen tables, the decor has barely been touched in decades and it has the intimate, lived-in feel of someone’s kitchen.

There’s a pinball machine by the door, and one of those devices where you sink a coin, twist a knob and watch a handful of peanuts fall on the floor.

It’s poorly lit, the chairs are uncomfortable and the staff have an endearing disregard for the bourgeois niceties of the client-customer relationship.

The other morning, a window- cleaner who was at work inside the cafe stood up on the chair next to me and leaned over to reach an awkward spot on the pane, flicking water all around us. His expression said: what do you expect when windows must be cleaned? Even in a country where shop-owners seem to be guided by the credo that the customer is always, incontrovertibly wrong, this was still quite something.

And yet the simple, unstudied charm of this corner cafe (not to mention the great coffee) has brought me back again and again. I’ve gone in to read the papers early in the morning and each time, the same six regulars have been there, having much the same conversation with the woman behind the bar that they had the day before.

The idea of the cafe as a community hub and a social leveller is deeply ingrained in France.

Although prices in central Paris are making the city more and more socially stratified, you can’t help noticing the mix of the clientele – the elegant elderly woman who comes in for her coffee and tartine, the students hunched over their laptops and, at about 8.30am, the street cleaners who join the row of men – in Parisian cafes it’s nearly always men standing at the counter – ordering an espresso shot each.

There are hundreds of similar places across the city and every one of them is on the endangered list. The slow decline of the traditional French cafe has been a talking point here for decades, but recently the conversation has taken on a new urgency.

Official figures show that a startling 2,000 cafes and bistros closed for good in the greater Paris region alone last year, and the trend is just as clear outside the capital.

In the 1960s there were some 200,000 cafes and bistros in France; today there are about 30,000. Overall incomes fell by 12 per cent in 2009.

So bleak is the outlook that the Senate recently held a seminar on the future of cafes and bars-tabacs, while academics, policy-makers and cafe-owners have been arguing over where to lay the blame.

Proprietors say they are being driven out of business by high taxes and campaigns against alcohol and tobacco.

The smoking ban caused a decline of about 6 per cent in business, the industry claims, while high-profile police crackdowns on drink-driving have made people think twice before going for a quick drink on the way home from work.

Prices have also played a part, with the €2.50 espresso among the first of the daily luxuries many people discarded when the recession set in. The government, for its part, says cafe owners have to take some of the blame themselves, having been too slow to adapt to customers’ changing needs.

It argues that service needs to improve, that menus should be expanded beyond the standard steak-fritesand jambon-fromagesandwiches and that lessons must be learned from the lounge-style cafes, offering comfortable couches and Wi-Fi internet, that have been gaining in popularity among young people.

I first read the statistics on cafe closures while sitting in that friendly, shabby place on the corner. I’d been there a few times before, and this morning the waiter – a north African who sings along to the radio news jingle and greets regulars by name – just brought me my order without waiting to ask.

The elderly woman was in situ, as were two students and a man in a suit on his way to work – all drawn, no doubt, by a fondness for the simple, unchanging rituals of the place.

There are no bow-tied garçons, no surcharges for a window-seat and no tourists taking pictures of the patch of leather that once played host to Sartre’s backside. Just the sense that today the rhythm of things will be the same as it has been every morning and will be again tomorrow.