Did you know that nine out of 10 new restaurants fail? That was brought home to me in a country on the far side of the world, France, which I first visited a long time ago.

A friend took me to a famous restaurant in a row of old mansion houses which contained eight restaurants, one below each building. They say location is everything, but this was proved wrong. One of the restaurants, which had been in the location for 50 years was full and had a queue outside. In the same location two restaurants were maybe a third full and the rest almost empty.

My friend told me that an  average of one of eight restaurants was closed and replaced every year. “Those two nearly empty ones in the middle are around two years old. I remember that they were very full just after their launches. They are owned by the kids of very rich people, and they got a whole lot of publicity in the papers and magazines. Their trendy friends and followers of fashion kept them busy for a few months, and there were even queues some nights, but fashion is fickle and after that they emptied out. No-one wants to eat in an ex-fashionable restaurant. They will both be closed within a year”.

As it happened the queue at the old and famous restaurant was just too long, and rather than wait we went to one of the third-full restaurants and had a very decent meal. This was actually a Turkish restaurant, and when I asked the owner why he stayed alongside the famous one he surprised me by saying, “You foreigners (Did he mean non-Turks or non-French? I’m not sure) don’t understand. Most of my customers, like you, are people who got too hungry to queue next door, and came here instead. I’m not getting rich but I make a very decent living out of feeding them and some have become regulars. Added to that I never have to advertise! So yes, I’m jealous of the success of my neighbors but no, I wouldn’t dream of moving.”

Isn’t it a strange world that we live in?