HEIKRUIS, Belgium — As the Friday night dinner service began earlier this month at the De Viering restaurant outside Brussels, it seemed the owners' decision to move the operation into the spacious village church to comply with coronavirus rules was paying off. The reservation book was full, and the kitchen was bustling.
And then Belgium’s prime minister ordered cafes, bars and restaurants to close for at least a month in the face of surging infections.
“It’s another shock, of course, because — yes, all the investments are made,” said chef Heidi Vanhasselt. She and her sommelier husband Christophe Claes had installed a kitchen and new toilets in the Saint Bernardus church in Heikruis, as well as committing to 10 months' rent and pouring energy into creative solutions.
Vanhasselt’s frustration is Europe’s as a resurgence of the virus is dealing a second blow to the continent’s restaurants, which already suffered under lockdowns in the spring. From Northern Ireland and Italy to the Netherlands and France, governments have shuttered eateries or severely curtailed how they operate.
More than just jobs and revenue are at stake — restaurants lie at the heart of European life. Their closures are threatening the social fabric by shutting the places where neighbors mix, extended families gather and the seeds of new families are sown.
A restaurant remains “a place where very special moments are celebrated,” said Griet Grassin of the Italian restaurant Tartufo on the outskirts of Brussels. “It’s not just the food, but it’s the well-being.”
The governments of Italy and Spain announced new measures Sunday that are aimed at curbing spiraling infections but also detrimental to dining out.
Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte announced that restaurants and bars will be required to shut at 6 p.m. daily for at least a month. Most restaurants in Italy usually don’t even start to serve dinner before 8 p.m. Milan has already seen protests over a local curfew that took effect Thursday.
In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez declared a national curfew from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. and said he would ask lawmakers to keep it in place until May. The curfew starting Sunday night means Spaniards will have to watch the clock if they want to indulge their love for a late, leisurely meal with friends. The measure could end chances for the recovery of the country’s large nightlight industry.
The reduced hours that businesses can stay open and people are allowed to be out is particularly painful because they might stretch into the Christmas season, nixing everything from pre-holiday office drinks to a special New Year’s meal.
When it comes to purely calories and vitamins, “of course we can live without restaurants,” said food historian professor Peter Scholliers.
But, he asked: “We can live without being social? No, we can’t.”
Successful restaurants have always had to adapt quickly — but never has there been a challenge like this.
The European Union said the hotel and restaurant industry suffered a jaw-dropping 79.3% decline in production between February and April.
Summer, with its drop in COVID-19 cases and a hesitant return to travel, brought some respite, especially in coastal resorts.
But then came fall. Any giddiness that the fallout from the pandemic could somehow be contained faced the sobering reality of relentlessly rising coronavirus cases and hospitalizations. Overall, COVID-19 has killed more than 250,000 across Europe, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University. Leaders are now warning that things will get worse before they get better.
But many restaurant owners have bristled at the new restrictions, and some are openly challenging them.
In London last week, the preeminent chef Yotam Ottolenghi banged pots on the street to protest restrictions that include earlier closing times.
“It’s really hard, we’ve got a great industry with lots of heart,” Ottolenghi said. “And there’s so many people who depend on it.”
If the mood of any nation is set by its stomach, surely France’s is. And it is turning as sour as a rhubarb tartlet. The streets of Paris, the culinary capital of Lyon and several other French cities were eerily empty at night during the first week of a 9 p.m. curfew scheduled to last for at least a month.
Xavier Denamur, who owns five Parisian cafes and bistros that employ about 70 workers, said the French government is unfairly punishing the industry.
“It’s a catastrophic measure,” he said, arguing any curfew should be pushed to at least 11 p.m. to allow for a proper dinner service.
Still, highlighting how the world is feeling its way in the near darkness, restaurant and food delivery business owner Matteo Lorenzon argued the opposite. “Having a curfew starting at 11 p.m., it’s too late.”
Already in September, more than 400,000 employees of restaurants and cafes in Italy, a nation of 60 million, were unemployed, according to an estimate by Fipe, the restaurant lobby group. Its prediction for the coming months was even more dire: “Hundreds of thousands of jobs risk being erased definitively.”
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