Paris - All the traditional French Christmas fare was there: wild boar paté and escargot with hot wine.
The usual seasonal songs were playing, including Johnny Mathis singing that all-time French favourite: “It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”.
On the Champs-Elysées, one month after the jihadist attacks in Paris which killed 130 people, it was beginning to look something like Christmas. Not a lot… but at least a little.
The “Paris village”, a Christmas market of stalls and children's games which occupies the leafy, Elysées every winter, is usually so thronged that you can barely move.
On Sunday lunchtime, there was a sprinkling of visitors and even some tourists - a few courageous Britons and a handful of Italians, but no Chinese, no Japanese, and no Americans.
“For three weeks, it has been miserable. No tourists at all, a lot fewer French people than normal,” said Marie, 42, running a stall selling scores of different types of scented soap. “Now, finally, it is beginning to pick up. It's back to maybe half of what it normally is.”
Even at €20 000 (about R320 000) rent for 52 days, a stall in the Paris Christmas village is usually a money-spinner. Not this year. At the escargot stall, Gérard, 56, complained: “Business? It's been moving like these little creatures do, before I cooked them. Maybe I will sell a few today. Things are maybe a little busier.”
Paris - and especially tourist Paris - has yet to recover from the Friday 13th attacks. The hotel industry, and especially the four- and five-star end of the market, has been devastated. Just off the Champs-Elysées, four-star hotels which usually charge €450 a night are offering rooms for €120.
If you want a cheap winter break in Paris, this is the time to come. Officially, France has lost 9.3 percent of its hotel bookings since the terrorist attacks exactly a month ago. But that is the figure for France as a whole. In the two weeks after the attacks, cancellations and lost bookings reduced turnover in Paris hotels by between 50 and 80 percent.
The mass desertion by tourists, especially those with deep pockets from Asia and the United States, has been calamitous for both the city's big department stores and its scores of specialist boutiques selling up-market brands.
The luxury shops on the Avenue Montaigne and the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré conduct 30 percent of their annual business in the last six weeks of the year. These streets - and the western, built-up end of the Champs-Elysées - are still eerily quiet.
Luxury goods companies such as LVMH decline to reveal the extent of lost turnover. “The big unknown is what will happen in January when Fashion Week comes along,” said one luxury shop manager. “Will the wealthy visitors start to return? I fear not.”
At the snail stall in the Champs-Elysées Christmas market, Gérard was philosophical. “The last couple of weeks before Christmas are always our best,” he said. “I think things will start to pick up now. I think so.”
The Independent