The restaurant trade complains. It does so regularly, and not without reason. Since the hospitality laws in Switzerland were tightened, since smoking bans were introduced, alcohol regulations extended and requirements added year after year, the economic environment has changed. On top of that comes a competition that did not exist in this form before: the Migrolino and Coop Pronto convenience stores open early and close late. A kebab costs twelve francs and fills you up. A bratwurst on the corner needs no reservation. The market has fanned out, and many Swiss restaurants stand in it lost, like a buffet without labels.
So much for the complaint. It has its justification. And yet a certain unease creeps up on me when I hear it.
Because when I walk through towns and villages and look at the places that have gone under or soon will, I see something that cannot be explained by regulation. I see white tablecloths on tables where nobody wants to sit any more. I see vegetables that come out of the steamer looking as though they had given the matter no thought. I see menus meandering between cordon bleu, pasta and sushi as if completeness were a concept. And I see owners running as if speed could replace quality.
There is a restaurant I visited only recently. I shall not name it, because I find public verdicts abhorrent. It has been known for decades. Under its former Czech owner the restaurant had a note of its own: dumplings, pastries, Czech beer. The new owner is visibly trying to preserve that direction. At the same time, however, it is being watered down by Italian dishes that have nothing to do with it. The result is a kind of culinary split identity that serves neither side.
I ordered a veal escalope with salad. To make clear to the man opposite me what I meant, I had to point my finger at the menu. The owner looked and said: «Ah, the fitness plate.» It did not say that on the menu. And then, almost reproachfully: «But it's not breaded.» I did not want it breaded either. The meat, 150 grams, came with a meagre salad and hardly any sauce. The carrots and the cauliflower were hard, the courgettes and the broccoli distinctly too soft. The plate cost 40 francs and 80 centimes.
The menu, incidentally, also listed an «Amouse Bouche». One letter too many, presumably noticed by nobody. Strained nobility that is not really nobility at all.
I will not go there again. Not because of the price. Not because of the vegetables. But because the concept was missing. You sense that, subtly, somewhere between the nose and the diaphragm. An atmosphere in which a conversation with the next table would have seemed a breach of manners. Strained refinement that takes itself seriously but invites nobody.
That is not an isolated case. It is a symptom.
What is missing can be named. Aristotle distinguished between merely doing and doing well. A cook who cooks is not yet a good cook. It takes the attitude, the intention, the awareness of the other. The Greeks called this, in a slightly different context, phronesis: practical wisdom that knows what is right in a concrete situation. A restaurant without phronesis is a business. It is not a place.
The tablecloth is not a concept. It is a fabric. It signals ambition, but it does not replace a decision about whom you are cooking for and why. Many establishments confuse the one with the other. They rely on externals and forget that the guest has an instinct, even if he cannot name it. He senses whether someone is there for him or whether he is simply part of a turnover.
Simmel wrote over a hundred years ago about the sociology of the meal. Eating together, he said, is one of the most primal forms of human community, because it turns the most individual thing of all, hunger, into something shared. What the restaurant could achieve is exactly that: to translate the hunger of an individual into an experience of community. That only succeeds if someone consciously sees to it. If the landlord, the kitchen and the service are looking in the same direction.
What I frequently observe instead: a business that looks in all directions and lands nowhere. Dishes for every taste and therefore really for none. Prices that promise an elevated quality which then is not there. And an atmosphere that keeps the guest at a distance, although he actually wants to recover, to open up, to connect.
The competition from the snack bar is real. But the snack bar makes no false promises. It says: here is a sausage, quick and good. That is honest. That is a concept.
The deeper problem of the ailing restaurant trade is not regulation and not the kebab. It is the absence of self-knowledge. The missing awareness of what you are, whom you are it for, and why it is worth it. A restaurant that does not know this will sooner or later be empty. Not because the times do not want it. But because the times know very precisely what they want, and choose accordingly.
People today cook competently. Cookery programmes, recipe platforms and a grown awareness of ingredients have seen to that. If someone feels he does it better at home, that is not a misunderstanding. It is a verdict. And the verdict is: at home, someone is cooking for me. Here, someone is cooking who has forgotten me.
The rethinking the restaurant trade needs is not a commercial one. It is a human one. The question is not how to become cheaper or how to turn more tables. The question is what you owe the guest when he comes. The answer is simple and at the same time demanding: attention. Clarity. A place where he senses that he was expected.
The white tablecloth can help with that. Or stand in the way. The fabric does not decide.