On a July morning last summer, Jean-François Pioc and Tanzi Ellison woke up from a makeshift night’s sleep in the back of a rental van, reports the Financial Times.
The French-English couple had parked themselves in Montreuil-sur-Mer in Normandy, where the eve-of-Bastille Day market is a trove of second-hand furniture, bric-a-brac and car-boot treasure. Like everywhere else, the best deals here are done early, so torchlights in hand at just gone 3am, Pioc and Ellison started to “walk through the dark”, searching for bargains.
Almost a year later, in Kentish Town, north London, their finds from vide-greniers and brocantes around France decorate Patron, their small new cave à manger: candelabras from the Dordogne, old clocks, posters, a street lamp from Deauville and a job lot of chairs.
“It was quite funny,” Pioc says of their restaurant-décor mission. “We met some brocanteurs who said they were selling stuff from a brasserie [that was closing down].”
Some 7,600 restaurants and hotels closed in France in 2013, 5.4 per cent more than in the previous year, according to Banque de France. And the success of French food has been dipping slightly in London as well, a little like a wobbly table. Gallic ideals may appear to be everywhere in the capital’s restaurant life, from grand Parisian-style brasseries such as Balthazar to the classical French cooking that every chef has some of under his fingernails, but the actual restaurants only represent about 3.5 per cent of London’s total.
Horizons, the restaurant analysts, counted 257 French food outlets within the M25 in 2014, seven fewer than in 2009. “French independents will have suffered in the past few years as the market is very tough. Chains like Côte will have increased their market share,” says Peter Backman, director of Horizons.
But along with Patron, those Parisian imports keep on coming, most recently Big Fernand burgers, bistro Le Chabanais and, this summer, wine bar Les 110 de Taillevent. French food may yet make some noise this year, showing off the reinventions of eating and drinking habits that have livened up the French capital.
Jean-François Pioc grew up on a farm in Brittany and came to London nine years ago. He met Ellison — then a trainee chef — at Westminster Kingsway College, where he was a kitchen porter. “In France our teachers used to tell us British food is really bad, it’ll be fish and chips,” Pioc says, adding that this lesson had been quickly corrected. Ellison, meanwhile, believes in French food’s power: “I’ve always thought that French people know how to cook and how to do it best.”