France

On holiday in the Dordogne, I face an annual dilemma. My weekly Any Other Business column ruminates on the financial world with occasional restaurant tips to lighten the tone – and many readers tell me they frankly prefer the menus du jour to the boardroom dramas. My difficulty is that in a single page of The Spectator there’s never space to do justice to both. Last week, I ended up cramming seven restaurants into one short paragraph, a paltry snack where I’d like to have offered a banquet. So here’s my 2025 tour de France, as I called it, at somewhat fuller length, perhaps one of these days to be super-sized into an entire guidebook. This set of recommendations, I should explain, come mostly from British readers and friends in other parts of France.

It has been a disastrous summer for France’s restaurants. On average, visits have dropped by 20 per cent on previous years, but at many coastal resorts they’re down by 35 per cent. ‘Consumption is well below previous years,’ says Laurent Barthélémy, president of a hospitality union. ‘Restaurant owners see customers passing by, but they don't come in to eat.’ Various reasons have been propounded to account for this decline. Barthélémy points to the cost-of-living crisis as a leading factor, as does Thierry Marx, one of France’s top chefs and president of the restaurant owners’ association.

You will be familiar with the 1930s line, “Whenever I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for the nearest restaurant. Culture makes me hungry and there is no better place to post-mortemize the latest exhibition or concert than from a comfortable seat in a local joint. For 19th-century progressives, railway stations were the most in-your-face examples of a new and better world. “The railway station is the highest monumental and artistic expression of the industrial and commercial genius which so specially characterizes the era in which we live,” César Daly proclaimed in 1861.

In May of last year, at the Saturday corrida of the Feria de Pentecôte in Nîmes – “no hay billetes” – I had the traveler’s luck to find myself seated next to the son of one of the late, great French toreros of the 1970s. We were seated high in the Arènes de Nîmes, the city’s Roman amphitheater completed around 100 years after the Crucifixion – a structure far superior in function and beauty to Rome’s defunct and messily eviscerated Colosseum. In Nîmes, as in neighboring Arles, the French have triumphed over the Fall of Rome in restoring these structures to something of their original purpose: hosting feats of gladiatorial courage tamed by a strict protocol. But that inheritance has once more been threatened by legislation that contests its place in the Fifth Republic.