Paris (AFP)

Ile-de-France restaurateurs were relieved Sunday evening of the green light announced by Emmanuel Macron to an early reopening of their establishments after three months of closure due to health crisis, but they remain worried about the recovery.

"It's going to be a party," rejoiced Stéphane Manigold, Parisian restaurateur. "We want. We were waiting for the speech of the President of the Republic. The teams are there. They want to work".

But this boss who runs four establishments (La Maison Rostang, Substance, Contraste and Le Bistrot d'à côté Flaubert) regretted that the announcement came on Sunday evening for Monday when he needed to be warned at the 'advanced.

"For us, tomorrow is not possible to open. At best we are opening two establishments on Wednesday and all the others next week," he said. "One day perhaps the politicians will understand that a restaurant does not reopen overnight. We could have avoided this brutality".

"As of tomorrow, the whole territory, with the exception of Mayotte and Guyana where the virus is still actively circulating, (...) will pass into (...) the green zone, which will in particular allow a stronger recovery in work and the reopening of cafes and restaurants in Ile-de-France, "said Emmanuel Macron on Sunday evening, in a television address.

This reopening, which comes a little earlier than anticipated, was hoped for by Ile-de-France restaurateurs, whose establishments had been closed for almost three months due to the health crisis.

Last Tuesday, the Secretary of State for Tourism, Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne, opened the door to this relaxation, saying that "the gradual decline in the virus should allow the reopening of restaurants as a whole by a few days" .

"It is a sigh of relief to finally be able to resume work all over France," said AFP Didier Chenet, president of the employers' union GNI (Groupement national des independants), but he called for an end to the distancing mandatory one meter between each client.

- The clientele remains absent -

"Morale will not be good until the day when we remove this distance. With the distance of one meter, the recovery will be very degraded and in economic conditions that are not viable for our companies," said he estimated.

According to him, this measure reduces the capacity of establishments to a minimum of 50%.

In addition, "the restaurateurs know very well that they will not find their customers as quickly, especially foreign customers," he lamented. According to him, one of the big difficulties is the absence of customers for lunch because of partial unemployment and especially telework which keep many employees at home.

Based on a survey of GNI members, it estimates that between 20% and 25% of the establishments that will disappear in the coming months, between those that will not reopen at all and those that will not shock.

On June 2, the bars, cafes and restaurants in the regions classified in the "green" zone could have reopened, but not the establishments in Paris and its region maintained in the "orange" zone and which had to be content to welcome their customers only on the terrace, pending the third phase of deconfinement scheduled for June 22.

In the Paris region, only 55% of establishments had partially reopened.

The sector, which has 168,000 restaurants and 38,800 bars or cafes in France, was severely damaged by the containment introduced in mid-March.

As of June 9, a total of 8 billion euros in State Guaranteed Loans (PGE) had been granted to the tourism sector, including 6.42 billion euros only for hotels, cafes and restaurants, according to data from the quai d'Orsay.

© 2020 AFP