By JOHN TAGLIABUE


ZURICH - The bankers in this Swiss financial center are struggling these days to overcome a funk.

Some Swiss banks, like the largest, UBS, have run up huge losses, forcing them to lay off thousands. Others have had profits shrink with the declining stock market.

Wealthy foreigners, like the Russians, are coming less frequently to check their anonymous bank accounts, so sales in the luxury shops along the glitzy Bahnhofstrasse are hurting. Moreover, the recent agreement by UBS to turn over information on American clients suspected of using Swiss accounts for tax evasion has undermined the long tradition of secret bank accounts here.

But the problems are not apparent at Il Giglio, where the tables are filled six nights a week even while some of Zurich’s fanciest restaurants often sit nearly idle. “We’re always full,” said Vito Giglio, 52. “Even if they’re out of a job, they get six months’pay and lucrative package deals,” he said of his banker diners. “They keep coming in.”

The bankers here are seeing their industry change, and are, in surprising numbers, seeking comfort in Italian cuisine. This sudden appetite for Italian dishes seems to arise from their potency as comfort food, and the comfort factor seems to have grown in importance as Swiss banks have felt the pinch of the financial crisis.

Since the beginning of last year, when the recession hit here, unemployment in the restaurant sector has climbed by more than 10 percent, said Bruno Sauter, director of the city’s labor office. But Daniel Muller, the director of gastronomy for Bindella, one of Zurich’s largest restaurant groups, said that business at Bindella’s 16 Italian restaurants has fallen by less than 2 percent since last year, and in some price segments, not at all.

Restaurants that are not Italian are recognizing that they have to compete with Mediterranean cuisine. In an advertisement on billboards in Zurich, McDonald’s shows a large juicy cheeseburger and its price, about $2.25, with the words, “Four tortellini, or this.”

About a quarter of a million Swiss work in finance, about 40 percent of them in the Zurich area. Even so, in some traditional Swiss restaurants, well-known bankers have been booed out of the house.

But the restaurants that are not turning the bankers away are the Italians, which have displaced the Chinese as the largest group of restaurants in the city that do not serve up Swiss dishes. Mr. Giglio, for one, is not mystified by the bankers’ sudden taste for Italian cuisine. Like another Italian specialty, it is soothing, he said: “Like the music of a tenor. For lots of music has been written for tenors; for Caruso, Pavarotti.”

Mr. Muller of Bindella agrees with Mr. Giglio about the soothing factor in Italian food. Leisurely dining is fading in Switzerland, where life is increasingly rushed, he said. “Here you have the feeling of being on vacation.”