Garson! You're Slow, Surly and at Last You've Admitted It

In a mea culpa as welcome as it was unexpected, the owners of France's 60,000 bars, brasseries and cafes admitted yesterday that all too often their staff are surly, service slow and hygiene horrendous.

"Customers are right to complain of a poor or non-existent welcome, an excessively long wait and a lack of basic courtesy and reactivity," said André Dugoin, president of the French hotel and catering in dustry's main trade association, UMIH.

Mr Dugoin said the number of cafes in France had collapsed by more than 50% since 1990, and that each year brought fewer and fewer customers and more and more complaints. "We have to respond to criticism, or the haemorrhage will simply continue," he said.

The neighbourhood cafe, with its trademark counter or zinc and assortment of variously voluble or lugubrious Gallic drinkers, is suffering from social change. The French today have less time, do not drink as much and are increasingly inclined to favour cheap chain restaurants, fast-food joints and sandwich bars.

But the legendary (if largely exaggerated) rudeness of French waiters, particularly in Paris, has not done much to help the cafe's cause. Nor has an at times limited grasp of the concept of cleanliness, most often evident in the toilets.

In Le Firmament near the Place de l'Opera in central Paris yesterday, customers were naturally reluctant to condemn their regular watering hole. "This place is fine," said Jean-Pierre Mangin, a printer. "It's spotless, and the staff are genuinely pleasant. But it's true many places make you feel like you've got a disease."

The industry professionals said most customers' complaints revolved around the absence of a hospitable welcome, the unacceptable wait for an order to be taken (or for the drink to arrive), the near-impossibility of attracting a waiter's attention, staff's ignorance of the products they were selling, and poor hygiene.

"We need to train our serving staff more," a spokesman for the National Union of Hotel-Restaurants admitted. "All too often, the welcome extended to customers does not even reach the basic standards required of a supermarket checkout girl: smile, bonjour, monsieur/madame."

The industry plans to draw up 100 criteria by which bars and cafes should be judged, and to hire independent inspectors to visit thousands of establishments a year. Those that comply - a targeted 2,000 within three years - will be awarded a "seal of French cafe quality", Mr Daguin said. The project will be presented to the tourism minister next month.