The Licence to Serve (and not to Kill-Sink)

From Belgium to the Southern Med, restaurant regulations are wildly different. Where can we find the happy balance?

Denis Jin Young L. muses the question.

Order fugu in Tokyo and you’re placing your life in the hands of a stranger with a very sharp knife. One nick in the wrong place and - goodnight, Irene. Fugu (ふぐ), the pufferfish, harbours tetrodotoxin in its liver, ovaries, and skin. A neurotoxin roughly 1,200 times more potent than cyanide, with no antidote.

The notorious pufferfish can either make your night or end it. It’s delicious, delicate, and famously deadly if prepared by the wrong hands. The catch? Only licensed chefs who have spent years training, learning exactly which millimetre of liver not to touch, are allowed to serve it. One slip of the knife and dinner becomes a crime scene. The thrill is half the flavour.

That’s the hospitality business in Europe. Not fatal (usually), but the logic rhymes. Some countries insist you prove you won’t poison anyone before you can flip a pancake. Others hand you the keys, pat you on the back, and let natural selection tidy the dining room. Call it the Fugu Principle: the dance between freedom and discipline - and what it does to the places we love to eat.

A continental buffet of rules

On the stricter end of the table, you’ve got Belgium, Austria, Czechia, Slovakia - aka the “show me your papers” brigade, which treat running a restaurant like a proper trade. The kind you must learn. In Belgium’s Wallonia and Brussels regions, restaurateurs need to prove competence through a diploma, years of experience, or an exam at the jury central.

Austria’s Befähigungsnachweis sounds like paperwork you’d bring to launch a satellite, not boil a potato. Switzerland, being Switzerland, sprinkles precision over everything: cantonal restaurant patents, sometimes a host’s exam, always a sense that somebody checked the fridge temperature twice.

Then you step across a border and the vibe flips. France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, much of Scandinavia you’ll find more laissez-faire. Get your basic hygiene training, wrangle permits, promise your espresso machine won’t explode, and the law says bon appétit.

Democracy meets gastronomy. If you fly, you fly. If you flop, Darwin clears the table.

Result: Europe’s regulations look less like a curated tasting menu and more like a buffet - part labelled with tidy portions, elsewhere, delightful, tasty chaos.

The owner’s knife-edge

From behind the pass, regulation is a double-edged chef’s knife. On one side, it’s gatekeeping with a bureaucratic accent. Imagine a Maltese chef who’s done seasons in London and summers on yachts, only to be told they can’t open a 24-seat bistro because they lack the right stamp from Vienna. That’s not quality control, that’s dream deflation.

Flip the blade and structure suddenly looks seductive. When everyone has some baseline literacy in hygiene, numbers, and people management, the chaos dial turns down. Fewer ‘we’ll wing it’ operations. More operators who understand that suppliers are not an interest-free bank and that January is a hungry month.

In looser markets - France, Spain, Malta - the upside is fireworks. Tiny pop-up places spark into life, street food mutates into cuisine, and a garage project can end up with a Michelin inspector lurking in the corner. The downside? Empty dining rooms, creative accounting, unpaid invoices, and restaurants that close before your loyalty card hits stamp three. Freedom is thrilling, and incredibly expensive, when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pull up a chair: the diner’s view

As a guest, licensing is a soft pillow. You don’t see the certificate, but you feel it - fridges cold, knives clean, chicken not sunbathing by the back door. There’s comfort in knowing someone, somewhere, passed a test before being allowed to serve a steak tartare.

But pile on too much red tape and you iron out the crinkles where flavour hides. The scenes that make Europe’s food culture buzz - vegan tapas in Berlin, tacos in London, a grandmother’s stew reinvented in Rotterdam - tend to sprout where regulation leaves room for mischief. The best bites often belong to people who followed instinct before instruction.

Diners win either way, really: structure buys trust; freedom buys surprise. The magic is the tension between the two.





Can rules save restaurants from themselves?

Here’s the knife-edge question nobody wants to ask out loud over a staff meal: would pre-opening competence checks reduce the body count?

Probably. But not for the reason most people think.

Most restaurants don’t die because the sauce split. They die because cashflow ran out, Human Resources set the kitchen on fire, winter wiped out the covers, or the energy bill ate the margin.

A dash of compulsory business literacy - menu engineering, cost controls, labour planning, seasonality strategy - wouldn’t make the food better, but it might keep the lights on longer. Regulation done right isn’t a straitjacket; it’s a seatbelt.

Go too far, though, and you suffocate the very operators who change the game. Imagine if the next Noma, the next Dishoom, never opened because the forms were taller than the chef.

Meanwhile, in Malta

Malta sits firmly on Team Freedom. It shows, in the best, messiest way. The island’s dining scene crackles: one month it’s a sushi counter with 12 stools; six months later it’s a brunch spot with eggs on everything and neon on everything else.

Menus reincarnate. Concepts evolve. Landlords pray. Suppliers judge. Guests chase the new-new like it’s a sport.

There’s beauty in that chaos. There’s also a graveyard behind it.

It doesn’t have to be binary. Keep the creativity, add a backbone. Imagine a Maltese hospitality skills certificate that’s practical, short, and actually useful. A compulsory mini-course in the big four: hygiene, finance, HR, law.

Mentorships that pair first-time owners with battlescarred operators who’ve survived August, January, and three VAT inspections. Less paper for paper’s sake, more here’s how not to crash your dream by Easter.

The recipe card

Europe isn’t choosing between order and anarchy; it’s seasoning to taste. Some kitchens serve discipline and neat margins. Others sling joy and risk.

Both feed a city. Both can implode spectacularly.

The sweet spot?

Rules that guide, not smother. Education that opens doors, not closes them. A culture that rewards both the chef who colour-codes the prep list and the one who sneaks a fermented chilli into the linguine and somehow makes it sing.

Could Malta lead here? Why not? Keep the spark that makes the island fun to eat - those punchy little counters, the Sunday-lunch reboots, the chefs moonlighting as DJs. Freedom to dream; competence to endure.

Which brings us back to fugu. In Japan, you trust trained hands because they respect the risk. Open a restaurant in Europe and the risk is different. Less lethal, more ledger - but the respect should be the same.

Teach the cut. Honour the craft. Keep the knives sharp, the books clean and the poison off the plate.