Ten years ago, smoking in restaurants was still allowed

Since 2 January 2008, French law has barred smokers from lighting a cigarette in a restaurant or in any other public place. Before that, anyone could walk in, order a dish and smoke after the meal. Something that seems entirely unthinkable today. Here is how smokers’ habits in restaurants have changed in only ten years.

Before 2008: smoking in a restaurant was allowed

It is Friday evening and you are meeting friends in a tapas bar on a wide avenue in the town centre. Between a chicken skewer and a few patatas bravas, you light a cigarette inside the venue itself. The evening goes on that way, amid the smell of burnt tobacco, with a drink to loosen tongues and tapas to fill the stomach. Such were the customs of an evening spent with friends, colleagues or even future business partners.

Then came the “smoking areas”, which allowed non-smokers to sit in a space away from the smoke, without being directly exposed to its smell. That separation between smokers and non-smokers brought a number of upheavals to people’s lives, and to those of restaurant owners as well.

From 2008 everything changed: smoking in a restaurant was banned outright

The decree of 15 November 2006 provided for a complete ban on smoking in public places, restaurants included. It took two years for the venues concerned to put various solutions in place.

While some opted for enclosed smoking rooms, others chose to prohibit cigarettes in their premises altogether. Contracts are now signed without smoke, meals end with a dessert or a coffee, and evenings with friends are punctuated by photographs posted on social media.

What have the effects been?

Passive smoking is now a distant memory. Non-smokers can enjoy a family meal without taking cigarette smoke into their lungs. And while a drop in custom was recorded in February 2008, it soon disappeared, giving way to a sharp rise thereafter. The restaurant trade has never done as well as it has since the smoking ban.