Adapting the business model to ensure resilience: The case of michelin-starred french restaurants during the Covid-19 crisis

The Covid-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of the fine-dining hospitality sector and reignited debates on organizational resilience. While the literature distinguishes operational, functional, and strategic resilience, it often conflates temporary business model adjustments enacted under crisis conditions with genuine strategic reconfigurations, leaving the boundary between short-term adaptation and strategic resilience theoretically ambiguous. This article elaborates on these distinctions by drawing on a longitudinal, processual case study of Michelin-starred restaurants in France, based on 33 semi-structured interviews, 316 press articles, and archival data, which were analyzed. Our findings identify three empirically distinct response trajectories: (1) a bounce-back trajectory based on preservation mechanisms, characterized by a suspension of restaurant activity made possible by public subsidies; (2) a bounce-back trajectory grounded in continuity mechanisms, involving temporary and reversible business model adaptations; and (3) a bounce-forward trajectory driven by irreversible transformation mechanisms, marked by durable business model reconfigurations. Despite the apparent continuity of bounce-back trajectories, they mask a post-crisis erosion of key BM components, questioning the idea of a complete return to pre-crisis configurations. This study contributes to the literature by (i) clarifying the relationship between strategic resilience and business models through a component-level, processual analysis using the RCOV framework, (ii) challenging the implicit equation between BM change and strategic resilience, and (iii) showing that bounce-forward trajectories—rather than bounce-back responses—constitute the core mechanism of strategic resilience in hospitality contexts.