Mallorca’s restaurants - the need for a rethink

According to the Circulo de Restaurantes Centenarios, as of 2017 there was only the one restaurant in the Balearics that was more than one hundred years old, and Miramar was this restaurant. Castile-La Mancha, Murcia and Navarre were the only other regions with just one restaurant of such antiquity. By contrast, and topping the list, was Catalonia with 39.

This doesn’t imply that Mallorca was a gastronomic desert, but it does suggest that little of real note had come out of the island. This is an observation with which some will disagree, even take exception to, but it has to be considered by comparison with Spain’s historical economic powerhouses - the Basque Country, Catalonia, Madrid - and a consequent gastronomic leadership. The tourism boom from the 60s does also play a part. It fostered its own boom in restaurants, which for the most part catered for the profile of holidaymaker as then was.

By the 1960s there was a variety of establishments. The new tourist restaurants added to the inns, to the ‘celler’, to the ‘bodega’ as well as to places like Miramar that had somehow managed to pre-empt what was still some three decades away. The ‘industry of the foreigners’ (which was how tourism was once called) started to be formalised with the founding in 1905 of the Fomento del Turismo, the Mallorca Tourist Board.

The first luxury hotel, Palma’s Gran Hotel in 1903, followed three years later by the Hotel Principe Alfonso in Cala Major, marked a movement towards a quality cuisine, and various other hotels were to come along that also boasted a luxury and menus to match - the Formentor in 1929 was an example. These hotels held their grand events and their wedding receptions and other celebrations, but they were for a certain class. The restaurants, meanwhile, those of a particular size at any rate, had their events and a culinary offer that didn’t come with all the expensive trimmings of the hotels for the well-to-do.

It was these restaurants, the traditional celler or bodega, that were at the heart of a general hospitality industry which only truly began to take off with mass tourism. They were as important as hotels in creating an entire industrial sector that was to come to employ thousands upon thousands of people. No, there wasn’t necessarily anything especially remarkable about them, not by comparison with elsewhere in Spain, but this didn’t matter. They were a growth sector, a great beneficiary of the Stabilisation Plan of 1959 and of the system of credit that focused on the hotel sector above all else in developing the tourism economy.

The restaurants thus constituted the ‘complementary sector’, a term to which some still object as it can seem like a pejorative in assigning secondary status. But once upon a time, there was a far greater balance in the hospitality industry precisely because of a fundamental part the restaurants had. Juanmi Ferrer, the current president of the CAEB Restaurants Association, points out that restaurants were the foundation of the beginning of the hospitality industry. Or every bit at least as the hotels.

As far as the operation of the hospitality industry was concerned, it was governed by employment regulations that the Franco administration introduced in 1944. There was no real distinction between hotels and restaurants, and these regulations - imposed at a time when there could be no union pressure - were curiously enough to form the basis of the unions’ approach once the transition to democracy started following Franco’s death in 1975. Complementary the restaurants may have become, but the unions were convinced of the need to ensure a hospitality industry unity. There was greater strength in numbers, and this was strength with which the employers could be taken on.

With the clubs and discos having been embraced as well within this united industry, the unions proved their point in 1986 when the threat of strikes during the tourism season brought about major concessions from the employers. The system of collective bargaining was fully established and it has remained in place ever since. But even in 1986, the balance on the employers’ side was in favour of the hotels. The Mallorca Hoteliers Federation had been founded in 1977. It was the principal ‘interlocutor’ in dealings with both the regional authorities and with the unions. And this is very much the case today.

Speaking last weekend, Ferrer harked back to events of forty years ago. If the unions had wanted a united front, so had the employers. It made sense for the employers to be together, but this was forty years ago. The hotels held the power back then and have merely added to it over the years. The restaurant sector does now have major players, e.g. multinationals, that it didn’t once have, but it is dwarfed in terms of both muscle and wherewithal to accede to demands by a hotel sector which by the mid-80s was expanding its horizons and growing at a fantastic pace. The imbalance of power has simply become ever greater.

One could argue that clinging onto the coat tails of the hotels when negotiating new agreements does offer an advantage. But recent evidence doesn’t back this up. The restaurants have been left with no alternative but to go along with offers and settlements that the hoteliers federation has made and agreed to. Since 2017 in particular, these have very much been to the unions’ liking. The current negotiations are proving to be far less straightforward, but wherever they may lead, the restaurants’ view is that they will be prejudiced.

Ferrer wants a rethink, a different arrangement. He argues that there should be a parity of voting among employer representatives at the negotiating table, which there most certainly is not. On the basis of number of employees alone, then the restaurants should be assured of a stronger vote. If not this, another option could be that of the Canaries, where there is a parallel agreement that takes account of issues specific to the restaurant sector. He says he’s not particularly bothered which arrangement. “The one that’s simplest, most practical and most legally feasible. The one that provides the most social peace for our workers.” As it is, he is alarmed by a union stance that has already raised the prospect of protest and strike action.

He does have a point. Yes, there are obvious similarities in respect of the hospitality offer, but the hotel and restaurant sectors have diverged over the years, there having been one development in particular that wasn’t a factor back in 1986. All-inclusive in Mallorca was a product of early 90s’ recession. While the restaurants have had to adapt and while it has also been the case that no accurate figures have ever been produced as to the percentage of hotel all-inclusive offer, this was a dynamic that pretty much definitively relegated restaurants to complementary status, if only in the resorts.

In overall terms, therefore, there isn’t a level playing field. People may cry that the restaurants can afford to pay whatever is demanded as their prices are high enough. But that neglects their costs and the advantages of scale that the hotels have and which the restaurants do not. It is time for a rethink, for Miramar and all the others.