French restaurant launches vending machine for gourmet takeout
The pandemic ushered in a year of takeaway food and drink in France, but even though restaurants have reopened, it seems that some still prefer to get their food to take out - as one Charente restaurant has found.
Andouillette, foie gras or even ris de veau - a restaurant in a Charente town has set up a vending machine so customers can buy fresh gourmet dishes to go.
Faced with a drop in custom because of Covid, the managers of the restaurant La Cour, in Ruelle, invested €27,000 to be able to distribute fresh, homemade dishes.
"Twice a day, we fill the machine with fresh dishes cooked in our restaurant," Martine Valladas, who runs the restaurant with her husband, told BFMTV.
READ ALSO 9 ways that 2 years of Covid have changed France
"Everything is homemade and we try to offer different dishes every day. The vending machine has a capacity of 40 fresh racks and we offer four to six different dishes a day."
She said that they were surprised to see that someone had picked up a meal at 4am one day, a matter of weeks after the vending machine was first opened.
They’re definitely not the first to give the automatic distributors a go - fresh bread and pizza distributors are a common sight in towns and cities across France, or in small villages where the boulangerie has closed.
The bread is often half baked and then the cooking finished in the machine, so if you time it right you can get freshly-baked, still-warm bread
In 2017, two oyster farmers on the île de Ré, off France's western coast, had the same idea as the restaurateurs and set up a distribution machine for their shellfish - becoming the second such operation of its type, after one had been set-up on Oléron, France's second largest island, in 2010.
Earlier the same year, the first 24-hour meat vending machine opened in Paris, while farms often sell cheese and eggs from automatic machines. In one town in central France, you can even get uncooked andouillettes, if you suddenly develop a late-night craving for pig intestine.
Astonishingly, the first oyster vending machines predated the first automatic baguette dispenser, which opened in Paris in 2011.
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Andouillette, foie gras or even ris de veau - a restaurant in a Charente town has set up a vending machine so customers can buy fresh gourmet dishes to go.
Faced with a drop in custom because of Covid, the managers of the restaurant La Cour, in Ruelle, invested €27,000 to be able to distribute fresh, homemade dishes.
"Twice a day, we fill the machine with fresh dishes cooked in our restaurant," Martine Valladas, who runs the restaurant with her husband, told BFMTV.
READ ALSO 9 ways that 2 years of Covid have changed France
"Everything is homemade and we try to offer different dishes every day. The vending machine has a capacity of 40 fresh racks and we offer four to six different dishes a day."
She said that they were surprised to see that someone had picked up a meal at 4am one day, a matter of weeks after the vending machine was first opened.
They’re definitely not the first to give the automatic distributors a go - fresh bread and pizza distributors are a common sight in towns and cities across France, or in small villages where the boulangerie has closed.
The bread is often half baked and then the cooking finished in the machine, so if you time it right you can get freshly-baked, still-warm bread
In 2017, two oyster farmers on the île de Ré, off France's western coast, had the same idea as the restaurateurs and set up a distribution machine for their shellfish - becoming the second such operation of its type, after one had been set-up on Oléron, France's second largest island, in 2010.
Earlier the same year, the first 24-hour meat vending machine opened in Paris, while farms often sell cheese and eggs from automatic machines. In one town in central France, you can even get uncooked andouillettes, if you suddenly develop a late-night craving for pig intestine.
Astonishingly, the first oyster vending machines predated the first automatic baguette dispenser, which opened in Paris in 2011.
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