The debate is not new - the issue has cropped up in Lausanne, as well - but more restaurants in Geneva now appear to be charging for water. The added cost comes on top of meal prices that already seem extremely high for newcomers to the region. Unlike in France and the canton of Ticino where customers have the right to ask for a carafe of tap water without charge, in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud there are no such laws. The manager of L’Incontro defends the practice of charging for such water. “Even if tap water has a minimal cost to buy, we shouldn’t forget that the people who serve and clean this glass must receive a salary,” he told the Tribune de Genève. “It is also necessary to pay the various maintenance costs of the restaurant.” The newspaper did a non-exhaustive search and uncovered a dozen eateries in Geneva that charge for tap water.

 

For many patrons, ordering bottled mineral water is an ingrained habit – one of the continental European traditions that have been successfully exported to Anglo-Saxon countries, where drinking tap water has long been an accepted right in restaurants. But it appears that H20 in bottles may be losing its lustre in some quarters, at least in places where high-quality drinking water is available via pipes and plumbing. Some North American politicians have raised ecological questions about the enormous expense of transporting bottled water when the equivalent can be provided out of a faucet at much less environmental cost. The Mayor of San Francisco in June signed an order banning the purchase of bottled water for city employees, noting that the California community has piped access to some of the best-tasting water in the world from a reservoir in the Sierra Nevada.

 

Resistance to bottled water has already begun to have an impact on revenues for Vevey-based food giant Nestlè, the world’s largest supplier of bottled water with such brands as Perrier and San Pellegrino. The company last week acknowledged that “perceived environmental issues around bottled water” had cut into sales. But that trend has not yet hit Geneva restaurants, where mineral water sales remain as strong as ever.

 

“Our clientele, which is largely from outside the country, really does not have much confidence in tap water,” the manager of the Café du Centre told the Tribune. (For its part, Services industriels de Genève, (SIG), Geneva’s utility, boasts on its website that its tap water sourced from Lake Geneva is a drink that is “environmental, cheap and of quality.” SIG claims tap water is “90 to 1,000 times more respectful of the environment than bottled water,” when the costs of packaging, transport and marketing are counted.)

 

Even if there is no obligation, most Geneva restaurants continue to provide tap water for customers, but you usually have to ask for it. The practice of charging for it is “mean,” said Armand-Bernard Dumoulin, owner of La Cave Valaisanne, near Plainpalais. “It will be necessary in any case to open the debate if more and more customers want tap water for environmental reasons.” Of course, if more people order tap water, restaurants may have greater justification in asking customers to pay for it if they begin to lose traditional revenues from mineral water . . .