The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Britain or France – which is the best bet for your summer holiday?
Should you stick with a staycation or go on a classic cross-Channel trip this year? Anthony Peregrine rates Britain and its neighbour on everything from history to food and service, before declaring a winner…
FOOD
One can eat brilliantly in Britain these days. This was not often the case in my youth. Holiday dining memories include brown soup, silence and slices of beef so thin you could, to quote Woody Guthrie, “read a magazine right through them”. Cheese and onion crisps were a talking point.
Now pubs and, especially, restaurants, may have startling standards. In my favoured areas – Cumbria, the Ribble Valley, the Yorkshire Dales – one emerges sprightly and beaming. This is apparently common enough throughout the land. But older habits die hard. Not too far away are seaside cafés full of grease, ketchup-heavy lunches and unspeakable coffee served, in one outstanding spot, by a woman with all the panache of a pig-strangler.
I have sat in these places overlooking the Irish Sea, feeling both miserable and happy – Formica fuels memories – but also wistful for a seafood platter or a grilled sea bream, a bottle of rosé and a view of the Med or Atlantic. Wistful, in short, for France.
Please. I know. Not all French restaurants in holiday spots are outstanding. Mediocrity threatens quite a number. But vanishingly few are so positively appalling that only a sense of absurdity carries you through to the pud. There are reasons for this. Gastronomy is woven so tightly into the fabric of France’s past and present that being good at it is integral to the national self-image. Unlike Britain – its recent cooking revival fuelled topdown by chefs, fads and magazines – France has never needed a revival because cuisine never went away. It is rooted in a base where everyone reckons they are essentially peasants, and so experts. Being peasants, they don’t do squeamish. My neighbour has 17 ways with squid. Auvergne friends kill a pig outside their farmhouse each autumn, transforming it at once into edibles. In France, the food chain starts not vacuum-packed in the freezer cabinet but in the field and amid slithery items of the deep.
It is to this background that the continuum of French cuisine – bistros through to three-star Michelin establishments – must respond. That is why holiday eating in France is better, and more regionally varied – Alsace to Basque country, Brittany to Provence – than anywhere else. That is also why the French spend longer at the table than any other people – two hours, 11 minutes. I’m surprised it’s so little. (By the same figures, the British come in 21st, at one hour, 10 minutes.)
British dining can be terrific, especially at the wallet-emptying end. But, up and down the scale, France walks it. There are 30 good, mainly family-run, restaurants within 30 minutes of our French village. Make that 40 minutes. You arrive at Montpellier or Nîmes, and the figure hits hundreds. Give in?
DRINK
English wine can be fine, but it’s a trickle against a torrent. France’s 60,000 grape growers produce some 4.7 billion litres. UK production is around eight million. Beer-wise, the French are also catching up – though they haven’t yet quite grasped beer culture. They swirl, sniff and sip – as if the stuff were wine. By the time they get on to consideration of food pairings, British beer folk are ready for a kebab.
The French take a similarly serious, sipping and spitting approach to tea. But that’s OK. I’ve never had a mouthful of tea that I didn’t want to spit out. Fortunately, the French are immeasurably better at coffee. They are pretty good at spirits, too. Cognac, armagnac and calvados will cheer up the most cheerless mini-break. But even the finest come in behind single malt whisky. When one appears, I can see no way around a bottle of Bowmore.
But a key distinction between the two nations is where one does the drinking: in a café or on its terrace, which are extensions of the street – or in a pub, which is a refuge from it. The latter favours drinking beer and gin, the former pastis and rosé wine. The two balance one another out. And, overall, I’m scoring this round a draw. France might have the wine, but the UK better understands beer, has the whisky and also Tizer, the taste of my youth.