Hacker News Reader

Comment by wink | Hacker News Reader

> serves French comfort foods at moderate prices,

I don't know, when I first visited Paris while still in school I somehow didn't find a single one of those, and lived a few days off of ham baguettes, spring rolls from Asian takeaways and McDonald's - everything going for "normal food" was very, very expensive.

Yes, this was a few years before mobile internet, and maybe it works if you live there not straight in the city center where the tourist attractions are ;) When I visited again last year I had no problem to find affordable food, but of course my viewpoint probably changed a bit.

View on HN

Bistros in touristic places in Paris are definitively expensive and are not used by low pay worker for their daily meal. They obviously target tourists and adjust their prices accordingly. I live in the very touristic neighborhood of Montmartre and the bistros here are about as expensive as the nice restaurants we have in the quartier.

If you go in the suburbs or less exposed locations you can find something closer to the bistro culture described in TFA, with meals for about ~12 euros not being rare.

I agree with you though, in my generation when we want to eat "fast and cheap" we don't think of bistros, instead we go to fast foods like McDonald's and kebab places or Asian restaurants which are usually pretty cheap. The problem with bistros is that they are somewhat in between: not cheap enough to compete with fast food outlets and (usually) not fancy enough to compete with actual restaurants.

I suspect bistros are a victim of development in transport (public and private alike). When it gets very easy to get from one end of the city to the other, you are unlikely to patronize mediocre establishments in your area: you'll optimize across the whole metropolitan area, either for cost or for quality.

We've had a subway for more than a hundred years, it's not exactly a new development.

It likely wasn't always as developed as it is now.

Not sure if it's your case, but the concept of "expensive" changes radically from when you are in school to when you have an actually paying job.

Most likley Paris has not changed, but you did :)

Not so sure. I live in Munich which is pretty expensive compared to the region, and you can absolutely get decent lunch at a normal restaurant for 6-8 EUR. (excl. drink). This is everywhere where many people go out for lunch breaks, or where many students are around, even in the city center.

TLDR: I'm not used to spending even 10 EUR for my lunch on a week day, so this part hasn't changed since then ;)

> everything going for "normal food" was very, very expensive

Almost anywhere in Paris you will find places where locals go for lunch, and they are not considered so expensive for middle-class workers. Locals are often paid Ticket Restaurant vouchers in addition to their salaries, and to retain these loyal customers these eateries keep the price of their daily set lunches fixed to the value of one voucher.

This is why healthcare is so expensive btw. (I can't help but notice the similarities)

Insurance hands out "tickets" that get redeemed by doctors. And as you rightly point out, everything gets warped and twisted based on what the payer (not necessarily the customer) wants.

What are you even rambling on about?

I understand the parent's idea. An employer gives his employees Tickets Resto. It's a 'social advantage' that may cost the employer less than simply paying the employees more because exempt from certain social charges. As a result, there are more of these scriptural Tickets Resto floating about than real money that people want to spend on restaurant meals. Which could lead to an inflation of restaurant prices in a fashion not so different to the inflation of the prices of medical prestations paid by private insurance.

Inflation is only one symptom. The bigger problem is that the providers (health or restaurants) start catering to what the PAYERS -- insurance, or the company handing out restaurant tickets -- want, not what's good or helpful for the customers.

The entire thing becomes a giant game of "what you can bill", which pretty much sums up healthcare today. There is no emphasis on outcome, quality, or cost, just whether something is "reimburseable". Will it be covered by the ticket?

Good explanation and I've read a number of articles about private health insurance under this angle. It's not an imaginary phenomenon.

I'm curious to know if a study has been done about the similar effects of restaurant tickets. The idea seems quite plausible, would go a long way towards explaining the doubtful quality of many parisian restaurants and, anecdotally, I remember a lot of use of restaurant tickets and incentives based on them when I was in the city of lights.

I'm not sure specifically for restaurants. A lot of my ideas on health come from "Catastrophic Care", where they talk about "the surrogates" who stand in, for the role customers would pay in an ordinary cash transaction.

P.S. Bisto food sucks. I went to Paris on my honeymoon last year, I live in SF and our food is better and way more innovate to boot.

I'll check the book. I'm relatively interested in health insurance and the financing thereof because I haven't quite identified the system that works the best and even the most successful countries need to tighten their game given the imminent demographic challenges.

As to bistros, well I've been to a hundred different restaurants in Paris, they don't all have 'bistro' written on the window but I'm sure that some were. For the money that I was willing to spend at the time, nothing stood out so much. The Bouillon Chartier was great since I'm a fan of the Lyon-style bouchon and I find them comparable. Generally, I wouldn't go to Paris for affordable and good food. I'm not particularly looking for innovation either, just some intelligence in the menu and ingredients.

Where did you find such a place ? One voucher is anywhere between 5€ to 10€, and even at 10, you will struggle to find french food. (You can find salad bar, burger, chinese/japanese ..)

> to retain these loyal customers these eateries keep the price of their daily set lunches fixed to the value of one voucher

I'm a bit doubtful about this point. My experience (2 4-months internships inside Paris, lived in Paris another year but working in suburbs) is that restaurants are more expensive than the ~8€ Ticket Restaurant. Never ate for less than 12€ in a bistrot, and obviously for this price you only get main dish, no desert. In one company we had this hot food delivery inside our walls that would cost exactly one Ticket Restaurant, but nothing similar with bistrots.

To be honest one of my internships was next to Bir-Hakeim (metro station closest to Eiffel Tower) so the prices may have been inflated, but still.

Americans have a different perception of cheap. Anything not on the dollar menu is considered expensive by a lot of them.

In general Americans spend a lot smaller fraction of their paycheck on food than Europeans. I think of this as a feature of the U.S, not a bug. And we're fatter, too, so we get more food for less money!

This is an interesting question because there are significantly different national attitudes towards spending on food, I see it every day.

For example, https://www.vox.com/2014/7/6/5874499/map-heres-how-much-ever...

Attention, such statistics don't answer all the questions though. Does the average person in country X spend more than in country Y because he wants to spend more, or because food is simply more expensive? That and many other questions. But I take it as a pretty clear sign that there are simply different cultural attitudes towards this spending when I compare the average supermarket in three neighbouring countries like France, Germany, and Switzerland.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com