French restaurant walls carry a small legal library: prices, meat origins, allergens, the 'fait maison' logo if you use it. Inspectors read these displays before they taste anything, and the fines for missing ones are the most avoidable money a venue can lose — because every required display is just information you already have, shown in the right place. Here's the current map: what's mandatory, what changed recently, and what's genuinely optional despite what the salesperson said.
Prices: outside, inside, and honest
Price display is the oldest obligation and the most checked: menus and prices visible from outside during service hours, prices inside, drinks displayed with their prices. The operational point isn't the poster — it's that the displayed price is a commitment. A price you display without knowing your cost per portion is a margin decision made blind; the menu engineering guide covers how to set prices that survive their own display.
Meat origin: extended to processed products in 2024
Since décret n°2024-171 (March 2024), the obligation to display meat origin covers not only whole cuts of beef, pork, lamb and poultry served in your dining room, but also meats used as ingredients in processed and prepared products — the ham in the croque, the chicken in the nuggets. It applies to commercial and collective catering alike, whether the food is eaten on site, taken away or delivered. Practically, that means your supplier records now feed a wall display: you can only show origins you actually track, invoice by invoice. A supplier sheet per product — origin included — stops being paperwork and becomes the compliance source.
Allergens: the 14 INCO, available in writing
The 14 regulated allergens must be traceable and available to guests in written form for every dish. The honest way to hold this isn't a laminated sheet that drifts out of date — it's allergen data attached to each recipe, updated when the recipe changes. That's exactly what an allergen matrix is for, and it's the display an inspector actually tests by asking about a specific dish.
'Fait maison': strictly framed, worth the frame
The 'fait maison' mention and logo (décret n°2014-797) are reserved for dishes made on site from raw, unprocessed products — with a short list of allowed exceptions like bread and puff pastry. No certification, no fee: the frame is declarative, and the DGCCRF checks it against your kitchen's reality. If you earn it, display it — it's one of the few mandatory-framework mentions that actively sells. And because it hinges on raw-versus-processed inputs, your ingredient list per recipe is the proof: a costed spec that names every input is also your 'fait maison' file.
Nutri-Score: not mandatory in restaurants
Despite recurring headlines, the Nutri-Score is voluntary — in retail and in restaurants. The current national nutrition programme (PNNS 2026-2030) plans experiments with extending its voluntary use to out-of-home catering, but there is no display obligation for restaurant menus today. If you choose to show it, it requires real recipe composition data — which is a choice, not a legal deadline.
The pattern: displays are recipe data, shown
Every obligation above resolves to the same source: what's actually in each dish, where it came from, and what it costs. Meat origins come from supplier invoices; allergens and 'fait maison' from ingredient lists; honest prices from real per-portion costs. A venue that keeps costed, documented specs doesn't prepare for inspections — it's permanently prepared, because the displays are just views of data that already exists. At Chat Noir, the allergen answer to any dish question is the spec sheet, not somebody's memory.
