In the lull between lunch and dinner, restaurant owner Francis Hocquet hurriedly wipes down the bar. Lamenting the recent skyrocketing of food prices, he rattles off the list of products whose prices have seen huge increases lately: Milk. Cream. Eggs. Salad. Fruits. Vegetables.

Hocquet runs Bebe, Chouchou et Moi, a side-by-side restaurant and ice cream parlour off Place Jourdan near the EU institutions in Brussels. Not exactly sure on the percentage of the increase — 15-20 percent, at least — Hocquet looks to his chef for confirmation. The chef simply rolls his eyes, takes a deep sigh and shakes his head in agreement.

It’s been called a “perfect storm” for world food prices: Australian droughts. Increased demand from Asia. More grains being set aside to make biofuels. High fuel prices. All of these factors have contributed to a meteoric rise in food costs. The cost of wheat on the world market has gone up 130 percent since March 2007. Prices for rice have gone up 74 percent in the same time period.

This rise has struck the restaurant business hard, and now owners are faced with a choice: either raise prices and risk losing customers, or keep prices static and hope food costs don’t eat too much out of their bottom line.

At Bebe, Chouchou et Moi, the price of a takeaway bowl of ice cream has risen 20 percent in just a couple of months — a price increase that’s been enough to change the clientele of the little restaurant, pushing some away. “There are some clients who don’t have enough to come here anymore,” Hocquet says. He also notes that he is shopping around for distributors with lower prices, something he’s never had to do before.

Just down the street at La Table, a snack shop that doubles as a gaming room, employee Marc Monin has a similar reaction to that of Hocquet’s chef. He does all the buying for the shop and says the prices of bread and cheese have gone up the most, 15 to 20 percent.

“We’re thinking of raising the prices but haven’t done it yet,” says Monin, who explains that the only reason they have been able to keep prices at their normal level is they also charge for games and sell a small amount trading cards and action figures. “If it were just the food, we wouldn’t survive,” he says.

Rising grain costs affect many other products. As the cost of wheat to make bread goes up, so does the cost of wheat to feed cattle. That in turn pushes up the price of milk, cheese, cream and meat. Apply that to most grains and there are few items price increases have not touched this year.

Restaurants across Europe and beyond are feeling the pinch. Last September saw huge protests in Italy over the price of pasta. Eateries in the U.S. and Japan are suffering from shrinking profit margins, too.

In Britain, some restaurants have started putting a surcharge on larger cuts of beef and chicken. Some have started to cut back on the use of rice, replacing it with vegetables or simply giving smaller portions. Other cost-cutting strategies include removing side dishes that normally come with certain items, like removing the coleslaw from fish and chips. Some restaurants have even started rewriting recipes in order to cut out expensive ingredients.

But, says Miles Quest of the British Hospitality Association, which includes the Restaurant Association, rising food costs probably won’t bankrupt most restaurants. “The industry will cope!” Quest says in an e-mail. “In the higher end restaurants, prices will rise because these restaurants can afford to increase prices and consumers will hardly notice. In the popular end, where prices are far more inelastic, restaurants will either reduce portion sizes — dangerous, but it can be done — or change the dishes on the menu to incorporate cheaper ingredients.”

Quest says that an increase in food prices is just one of the factors that determine a restaurants’ profitability. Some will of course go out of business. But, he says, it’s not just food prices that are putting pressure on restaurants and cafes. Rising energy and utility costs are also a factor, as well as rising wages, which represent 40 percent of a restaurant’s costs.

“Restaurants have to cope with all these pressures and those that succeed will be those that continue to provide value for money and know exactly what their customers want.”

Food prices won’t be coming down anytime soon. They are what economists call “sticky” — meaning the food market doesn’t respond quickly to increases in demand with increases in supply — because it takes a whole season to grow another batch of crops. So chefs and restaurant owners, along with their customers, will probably be sighing at their bills for a while to come.