Restaurants in France lose their support for corona if they secretly or openly bypass or ignore the corona closures.
Minister of Finance Bruno Le Maire warned this on Monday in response to the call from chefs to cook and serve meals in protest against the corona measures. Chef Stéphane Turillon from the east of the country has called on the sector to open its doors in protest and prepare ‘resistance meals’.
At the end of last week, the Paris police discovered 24 secretly open restaurants.
According to the newspaper Le Parisien, one of those restaurants turned out to be discreetly open to magistrates from an appeals court in the centre of the city, opposite the police headquarters. Last week, a restaurateur was arrested in Nice who had had around a hundred customers for lunch.
The French government is offering companies forced to close because of the lockdown money to make up for some of the losses.
According to Le Maire, that costs half a billion euros per month. In the opinion of many entrepreneurs, especially in the hard-hit catering industry, the benefits are insufficient to continue paying rents and other costs without finding work.