It's my first time here. In Spanish, we have the word "restauración" to refer to the restoration of paintings, for example, and to places where food is served. For the first meaning, I believe the translation into English would be "restoration," but I think it doesn't fit the second meaning.
What would be the correct term to refer to the industrial sector encompassing restaurants, bars, cafeterias, taverns, etc.?
The term encompassing restaurants, bars, cafeterias, taverns, etc. is "the hospitality sector" or "hospitality industry". This is using the second definition for the word hospitality listed in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:
the activity or business of providing services to guests in hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. —usually used before another noun
a hospitality suite
Valet parking may be the most commonplace, least understood corner of the hospitality industry. —Bruce Feiler
… has turned the hospitality business upside down with his far-out hotel designs … —Robert Herzbrun
Note that this is still not a direct translation of the Spanish restauración since hospitality industry encompasses all aspects of hospitality and recreation, including for example travel. So airlines might be categorized as part of the hospitality industry, specifically in the "travel and tourism" sub-section.
So if you want to refer to those businesses providing food and drink and no other forms of hospitality, excluding hotels, for instance, then you would talk about the "food and beverage" or "food and drink" sectors instead.
This is the foodservice industry. From Wikipedia:
The foodservice (US English) or catering (British English) industry includes the businesses, institutions, and companies which prepare meals outside the home. It includes restaurants, grocery stores, school and hospital cafeterias, catering operations, and many other formats.
"restauración" means:
the restaurant business or industry
From the Real Academia dictionary (the OED of Spanish)
restauración:
Actividad de quien tiene o explota un restaurante.
The activity of a person who has or runs a restaurant.
From a trade publication called:
Restaurant Business
How do we judge 2023? In some respects, this was the first “normal” year the restaurant industry had since 2019. And yet everything seemed so not normal.
We spent most of the year worried about the economy. And yet by December, the U.S. consumer continued to spend, even if they did so a bit less often to adjust to prices. Restaurant companies boasted about performance and upped their projections for new unit growth. AND Here come the robots In 10 years, we might look back on 2023 and think this was really the year’s biggest story. Well, that or tipping. But robots are coming for the restaurant business, whether you like it or not.
Reference: Personal knowledge re Spanish-to-English translation
EDIT due to responses
food and beverage industry in Spanish is: industria de alimentación y bebidas OR alimentos y bebidas.
And hospitality industry in Spanish is: industria de hospitalidad
From a Spanish site in Spain:
[...] Entonces, lo que es la hospitalidad en el turismo se puede desarrollar en sus distintas áreas como: la recreación, entretenimiento, hotelería, hospedaje o alojamiento, actividades culturales, excursiones, exposiciones, celebraciones, transporte, administración de la industria hotelera, gastronomía, entre otras. Que es hospitalidad en el turismo?
[translations] So, hospitality in the tourism industry can be broken down into its various areas such as recreation, entertainment, the hotel industry, cultural activities, tourist excursions, hosting & lodging, exhibitions, events (celebrations), transportation, hotel management, and cookery (cusine), among others.
The Wiktionary entry for the Spanish word "restauración" gives the English translation as "restaurateurship":
The fact of being a restaurateur; ownership and management of a restaurant.
Looking up other translations suggests "catering"
The business of providing food and related services; foodservice.
The above mentions "foodservice":
The business of providing food and related services.
I wanted to suggest gastronomy industry, but after some research would actually advise against it. Some background:
In German we have Gastronomie for the sector of the economy that commercially serves food and drinks to other people. This would include bars and restaurants in hotels but not the rest of their business.
The English cognate gastronomy has a somewhat different focus: The "art, science, customs or style" of preparing and eating good food.
When googling "gastronomy industry" a number of usages turn up, among them "Addressing COVID-19 in the gastronomy industry", labor statistics and trade fair announcements. It all looks legit; but then I see the a page from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit who want to lure foreigners into low-payed jobs that no German wants to do. They say "working in the hotel and gastronomy industry", which raises a red flag: It is a direct translation of the technical German term Hotel- und Gaststättengewerbe which is the German equivalent of "hospitality industry".
When I check the other google hits, the trade fair is in Germany, the article is by a Southern Tyrolean, Dutch and Chinese group, the statistics are from Dubai and the German Fraunhofer society has written something as well.
Very few, if any, hits are by native English speakers. In a way, this resembles the recursive AI training data poisoning which happens if AI generated content is fed back into the training data. Germans take mistakes made by other Germans at face value and perpetuate them until they become part of the unwieldy, un-beautiful, hard-to-read "English as a utility language".
