…and if you don’t know this expression, it simply means: we’re going down. In the 1960s, France boasted with 200.000 cafés, bistros and café-tabacs, today there’s only 30.000 left. In 2009 alone, 2000 or so publicans went out of business. In Paris you can find the ruins of their run-down établissements at every corner, yet some of them are quite pretty, actually. Look at this:

A place you would like to sit down and eat, yet...

...it's no longer a bistro. Now, they sell insurances here.

There’s multiple reasons for this, amongst the most cited are: the prohibitive non-smoking-policy, the bad food quality, the changing lifestyles…and there’s some truth to that, of course. Yet the real problem is an economic one. Real estate prices have sky-rocketed in the last decades. So much so that it makes much more sense to sell designer clothes nowadays than just a cup of coffee, a glass of Sancerre, a Croque Monsieur. So the cafés and bistros remaining need our help. Go there! Enjoy life! Consume! And leave good tips, will you!?