I had read an article this summer in the New York Times and finally found it-a sign of the times in Spain,very sad.
My Spanish Restaurant, Hit Hard by La Crisis (July 23, 2012)
An empty table outside a restaurant in downtown Madrid.
EUGENIO GARCIA, a third-generation restaurant owner, measures the intensity of Spain’s economic crisis in precise terms: sales of cold tubos of beer and tapas like quail eggs and chorizo, or pork loin in whiskey sauce.
People who once spent 14 euros on a meal, about $16, are now spending 10 at his popular Taberna Coloniales, he said. His regular customers are vanishing to chase construction and architecture jobs in Dubai. He counts a toll of 25 restaurant closings in this city’s quarter near the Church of San Pedro, where his oldest tavern has been for 14 years. He sold one of his two restaurants after watching the customers dwindle.
“Before, people would order a bottle of wine and now they don’t,” he said. “They drink less, eat less. The atmosphere for everyone is really pessimistic. We have passed through almost four years of crisis. Right now it’s like a ship in a tempest. You can only grab the mast and wait for what happens.”
Spain may be revered as the home of gastro chic (or cocina de vanguardia, as it is known here), yet its hospitality industry is reeling, in a country with the highest unemployment rate in Europe (24 percent), where the budgetary shortfall has recently forced the government to raise taxes, threatening to erode further consumption. Those forces are battering restaurants, from high-volume taverns like Mr. Garcia’s to upscale dining rooms that once catered to bankers and politicians.
Their chief rival is now a home-cooked meal; to compete with dinner parties, some owners are inviting diners to bring their own wine. Restaurants are changing menus and cutting prices and portions. Customers are noticing new charges for extra ice or tap water served in a pitcher.
Even some of the very best restaurants are giving up Michelin stars to offer lower-cost alternatives, from trattoria fare to standard hotel cuisine. This summer, trendy outposts are remodeling to create a casual look, fearing that if they don’t change, they will not last.
Long a country with an almost unmatched restaurant and bar culture, Spain is confronting a challenge in its kitchens that could threaten its role as a leader in global cuisine and its place on international lists of top restaurants.
In the last few months, David Muñoz, a prominent Madrid chef and the owner of DiverXO, which has two Michelin stars, has questioned whether Spain can maintain its creative momentum in the crisis.
Ferran Adrià, a celebrated chef who helped transform Spain from a culinary backwater, insists that the best restaurants are shielded from the downturn.
“Really good restaurants aren’t anywhere near closing, but the ones that do close are those probably run by businessmen who didn’t really know much about gastronomy,” Mr. Adrià said. “Crisis or not, you’ve never eaten as well as now in Spain.”
But even one of Mr. Adrià’s favorites, the Madrid mainstay Sula, is remodeling to keep its customers.
Perched in the trendy Salamanca neighborhood, the restaurant was known for its deluxe “Ham and Champ” tastings of artisanal ham, Joselito Gran Reserva, and Dom Pérignon Champagne. Recently, Sula started offering cava, Spain’s version of sparkling wine, as a cheaper alternative.
The owners are overhauling the restaurant at a cost of 400,000 euros to convert the ground floor into a tapas bar and to create space for private corporate diners. “Nobody can afford to take three hours to have a meal these days,” said José Gómez, an owner of Sula. “If you don’t invest money in making this kind of overhaul, you risk being on your way out of business.”
The worst year was 2009, when 5,000 restaurants and bars closed, according to an annual market report issued this year by the Nielsen Company in Spain. But the disappearance of restaurants has continued with the relentless force of La Crisis: 4,000 in 2010 and 3,000 in 2011, reducing the total to 220,000, the fewest since 1997.
In Madrid, some of the Spanish capital’s most emblematic restaurants have shut down. Two were longtime redoubts for financiers and celebrities, including the half-century-old Principe de Viana and Club 31, which opened in 1959 and belonged to an ex-politician who was unable to attract new financing. The casualty list includes well-known names like Nodo, O’Lif and Hakkasan, the Chinese restaurant with seven locations around the world.
A few days ago, the Michelin-starred restaurant Evo, in the Hotel Hesperia Tower in Barcelona, announced its closing, bemoaning the difficulties of maintaining a gastronomic restaurant in the crisis. NH Hotels, the owner of the hotel, is planning to transform the restaurant, started in 2006 by the Catalan chef Santi Santamaria (who died last year), into something “without pretensions.”
In Valencia, every type of restaurant is feeling the crunch. This month, the owners of the T.G.I. Friday’s chain shuttered the branch that had opened just last year. In May, the chef Raúl Aleixandre closed his 30-year-old Ca’ Sento, a Michelin-starred restaurant, laying the blame on economic difficulties.
“Old-school places, even if top notch, are pretty much disappearing,” said Jaime Ruiz-Morales, a Madrid entrepreneur and self-acknowledged fine-food fanatic. “I guess that’s normal when your customers suddenly start to pay 30 euros for their wine rather than 200.”
Here in Seville, the restaurant trade has been hit hard by a regional unemployment rate hovering at 30 percent and by foreign tourists arriving on discount flights who are spending less. From 2007 to 2010, more than 2,000 restaurants and bars closed, a decrease of more than 16 percent, according to an economic yearbook published by La Caixa, a Spanish savings bank.
This month, Seville’s city hall and the local hospitality industry announced a campaign, Saborea Sevilla (Savor Seville), to entice tourists with packages combining hotels and restaurant meals.
On some evenings, restaurant owners confide, they have no idea what to expect. During lunch hour, Manuel Blanco, who has been in business for 25 years, gazed at empty tables. At his counter, he had prepared a list of tapas dishes that he was developing, to attract customers with more typical Spanish cuisine than the Mexican-style tacos he serves.
Beyond that, he said, his strategy couldn’t be more basic: “I don’t take vacations. We don’t go anywhere.”
Some owners are shutting award-winning restaurants to offer cheaper alternatives.
Last fall, Victor Enrich and his wife, Maria Vega de Seoane, closed their restaurant El Atelier d’Enrich and sold their black velvet sofas, mirrors, lamps and Champagne glasses. The restaurant, in one of Madrid’s most exclusive neighborhoods, had attracted executives from major corporations like Telefónica, but suffered when business clients cut back.
Mr. Enrich then opened two new restaurants in the same neighborhood: a brasserie, El Pract & Co., and a diner, Taller de la Hamburguesa, where a hamburger with lettuce and onions sells for as little as 7 euros. The couple said both restaurants were thriving.
“The choice now is between adapting or dying,” Ms. Vega de Seoane said.
Late last week, Lucas López and his partner were the only diners at a Madrid restaurant, Mikacho. The couple used to eat out six nights a week, he said, but now they have cut back to two. “There is no longer anything spontaneous about how much is spent and how often we go to a restaurant,” said Mr. López, himself a manager of a restaurant, La Mordida. “There is a mortgage and other things that can’t be ignored.”
Alejandra Ansón, who runs Elite Gourmet, a company promoting Spanish delicacies like cured merina sheep’s cheese and smoked sturgeon, said that Spaniards were flocking to delicatessens so they could entertain at home.
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