Is Pasta Past-It ?

How do pasta restaurants go bust? How can 20p worth of pasta and a bit of sauce, say costing 50p, sold for £10 fail to be a licence to print money? How can a pasta base with some sausage, mushrooms and onions and a bit of tomato sauce, costing maybe a £1 for the ingredients and then sold for £11, not make the owners millionaires? OK – I know they have staff costs and other overheads but really – with a gross mark-up of something like 1000 per cent, I just don’t get it.

J and I went off to a pizza/pasta restaurant last Friday. We used to be regulars at this place but it suddenly shut a couple of years ago and remained closed for months until it re-opened 'under new ownership'. No decorative changes were made during the closure – it was just shut.

Once it reopened, we’d regularly drive past aiming to go in for a pizza but it was always closed but we tried it last Friday just on the off-chance that they’d decided to open and make some money.

As is usual in a lot of French restaurants, it’s a family affair and this place looked no different with mother and daughter doing the waiting, whilst no doubt, the men of the family were hard at it at the pizza oven.

A full thirty minutes after we’d ordered, our food still had not arrived. Normally, I would have walked out but I was in no particular hurry so we sat it out. I wanted to see just how long it took to get our food – J had ordered a pizza whilst I’d asked for Carpaccio of Beef. Again, as is usual in French restaurants, nothing is ever said to customers if there’s going to be a delay and so we sat there in blissful ignorance of what was happening in the kitchen.

The problem with pizza places is that even with the best organization in the world, you can only get 3 or 4 pizzas in the oven at any one time so if the restaurant is busy you are likely to face a bit of a delay. I suppose if we had ordered starters we could have filled in the time before our main courses had arrived but we hadn’t and so we waited and waited.

Eventually the food came. Was it worth the wait? Unfortunately not. J’s pizza wasn’t cooked in the centre whilst my frites were warm rather than crispy hot. We couldn’t be bothered arguing as the place was full and the two waitresses were almost having panic attacks.

We asked for the bill, paid and left. J reckons it might be ok when it’s quieter. I reckon she might be right but if other people felt like I did that night, they won’t go back and yet another pizza/pasta place will close- despite the 1000 per cent mark-up! Maybe if they'd hire more staff instead of just trying to make the place function with family members, things would be better but of course employment practices and law in France is a topic on which this blog could gorge for years and years and years!

And a quick PS – as if to prove my point, Vivienne, who is staying with us until 2011 (joke !) had a pasta meal with a friend Anna, the other night down in Juan les Pins on the coast. When Anna complained about undercooked pasta, the waiter said, ‘our pasta is alright madam’ in such a hostile manner that she didn’t dare complain that she couldn’t find any meat in the bolognaise sauce! I don’t think they’ll be going there again.