Restaurants James Pembroke

JOHN BULL’S MENU

Gastronomic historians will for ever remember this February as the nadir of the pandemic.

It was the month that the French abandoned the 1910 Code du Travail. It meant they legalised having lunch at one’s desk.

Have they gone mad? What will they legalise next? Crack cocaine on Sundays? Those once proud gourmands have been reduced to a Pot Noodle au bureau.

Antoine Beauvilliers, the great pre-revolutionary restaurateur, will be turning in his grave (if there’s any room among all the treats with which he was buried). The former chef of the future Louis XVIII, he launched La Grande Taverne de Londres in 1782 in the Palais-royal. He may have wanted to replicate the mixing of high and low clientele that he saw in London, but he certainly had no intention of imitating our brutal cookery.

After the highs of the Restoration, London gastronomy, symbolic of ‘the effeminate and tyrannical French’, was eradicated. Beer-bellied John Bull was launched in 1712, after Marlborough’s victories, bellowing, ‘God sends meat, but the Devil sends cooks.’ Hogarth ridiculed the fricasées of the ‘half-starv’d Frenchmen’ who had supported the Jacobites.

How our attitudes changed after Waterloo. Brits, Russians and Prussians laid siege to the restaurants of Paris until the end of the allied occupation in November 2019. The word ‘bistro’ may be derived from the Russian for ‘quick’ – the command of the triumphant Cossack cavalry officers.

Wellington requisitioned the palatial Hôtel Grimod de la Reynière – the grand townhouse belonging to the author of the Almanach des Gourmands – and the allied monarchs ordered their meals from Les Frères Provençaux, at a cost of three thousand francs a day, during the negotiations for the Treaty of Paris.

It wasn’t just the military. There was a proliferation of cartoons of English couples crossing the channel. A fortnight later, they were barely able to fit through

the gates of Calais, having behaved like touring football hooligans who had just beaten both France and Germany 5-0.

In 55 BC, Caesar denounced us as barbarians, not least because we didn’t cut our wine with water. Fast forward two millennia, and the diluting French felt the same. Brillat-savarin, author of Physiologie du Goût, wrote of the English invaders, ‘They stuff themselves with double portions of meat, order the most expensive dishes, drink the most heady wines and require assistance to leave the table.’

We were Neanderthals in the presence of nymphs. It wasn’t just the food; it never is. We had never seen such finery: the whole of Paris seemed to eat out, and they dressed up, flirting with one another in those mirrored walls, which you can still see in Brasserie Balzac. There was a show at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris called Les Anglaises pour Rire, a one-joke play about our backward dress sense, made worse by 25 years of exclusion from the Paris boutiques.

Used to the fixed fare of the ordinaries, we were overwhelmed by the menus. La Grande Taverne offered 13 sorts of soup, 22 hors-d’oeuvres, beef in 11 different ways, poultry and game in around 30 ways. And, to our great surprise, the prices were listed next to each dish.

Needless to say, those prices steadily rose, owing to our tradition of loudly toasting their cheapness, a gracious gesture which, down the ages, we have taken with us as far as the tiniest stall in remotest Polynesia.

Brillat-savarin attributed France’s ability to repay its war debt of 50 million francs to the lure of Parisian restaurants. ‘Who is the divinity that effected this miracle? Gourmandise.’ Open ye the gates of the city, Macron!