How French cuisine lost its flavour
For many years, French cuisine was the envy of the world. But more recently, culinary conservatism has threatened to turn it into a parody of itself, says Wendell Steavenson. Can a new generation of chefs help revive its reputation?
In 2006, after years reporting in the Middle East, I moved to Paris. It was meant to be temporary; at the time I was just looking for somewhere to hole up and finish a book. My friends all said: “Oh, Paris, how lovely! You must be eating well.” They were surprised to hear me complain that Parisian menus were dull and repetitive. “Pâté followed by entrecôte, entrecôte, entrecôte. Occasionally roast lamb, duck breast. No vegetables to speak of,” I told them. “It’s a tyranny of meat-in-brown-sauce.” As the rest of the world had begun to (re)discover their own cuisines and innovate, the French restaurant seemed to be stagnating in a pool of congealing demi-glace.
Elsewhere, places such as Balthazar in New York and The Wolseley in London seemed to be doing the French restaurant better than the French. But in France, the old guard of critics and restaurateurs remained convinced that French cuisine was still a point of national pride. The bistros cleaved to the traditional red-and-white tablecloths and chalked-up menus, even as they were microwaving preprepared boeuf bourguignon in the back. For my parents’ generation, and for 100 years before them, it was axiomatic that French food was the best in the world – but by 2010, when the French restaurant meal was added to Unesco’s list of the world’s “intangible cultural heritage”, it felt as if the French restaurant had become a parody of itself.
The restaurant was, of course, a French invention. The word originally referred to a restorative, a pick-me-up. In 18th century Paris, butchers began to sell bouillons, nourishing broths made from offcuts of meat, to workers and tradesmen. These early soup stalls became known as restaurants; a 1786 decree allowed “caterers and restaurateurs [those who make fortifying soups]” to serve the public on site. You could now sit at a table to partake of your soup instead of taking it away. This decree coincided with the construction of the Palais Royal, with its elegant arcades of shops and ateliers. This new shopping mall necessitated a food court for peckish Parisians, and many early restaurants were located in and around it. Le Grand Véfour – possibly the world’s most beautiful restaurant – still occupies the same corner where there has been a restaurant since 1784. Its tables bear plaques naming former patrons, from Napoleon to Jean-Paul Sartre.
After the French Revolution swept the old order away, Paris roiled with politics and plots, hungry pamphleteers and provincials; restaurants sprang up everywhere to feed them. By the time Napoleon had been defeated for the first time, in 1814, a gazette, the Gourmets’ Almanac, listed more than 300 in Paris. The lexicon of cuisine soon followed. Marie-Antoine Carême, the first celebrity chef, cooked for kings and emperors, and wrote the code of French cooking, categorising the first iteration of the five great mother sauces (béchamel, espagnole, velouté, tomato and hollandaise) from which all others were derived. Later, Auguste Escoffier organised the restaurant kitchen into the strict hierarchy that still prevails today, from commis chefs at the bottom all the way up to the chef de cuisine.
All the grammar and idiom of what we now understand as “a restaurant” was developed by the French in the 19th century. The menu, the progression of canapés and hors d’oeuvres followed by entrée, plat and dessert, the accompanying march of apéritif, wine, coffee, digestif. The way a maître d’hôtel, or master of the house, welcomes guests, the formality of waiters in black tie. Through the 19th century, the restaurant flourished and evolved. The bistro was a neighbourhood place, often run by a husband and wife. Brasseries were brewery eateries brought to Paris by Alsatian refugees from the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, serving choucroute and beer. Bouillons were popular, working-class cafeterias that served cheap food in vast dining rooms.
“The restaurant was a French invention. The word referred originally to the soup stalls
set up by butchers in 18th century Paris”
There were dozens of bouillons in Paris between 1850 and 1950. Some expanded – the first restaurant chains – reaping economies of scale and flipping tables as fast as a revolving door. But by the time I got to Paris in 2006 there was only one left, Chartier, in the 9th arrondissement. I went there often for the everyday classics:
oeufs durs mayonnaise, carottes râpées, poulet-frites, tête de veau.
It had nicotine-coloured walls, and I liked to imagine it was where Orwell had washed dishes when he was down and out.
During the Belle Époque, between the Franco-Prussian War and the German invasion of 1914, Paris was the capital of the world. It embodied the excitement of cinema, the Eiffel Tower, aeroplanes, impressionism, cubism, Proust, Rimbaud, Diaghilev, haute couture and towering hats. Paris then was the zenith of style – and the French still lament its passing. More than 100 years on, as I glanced at a menu rich with foie gras and cream, I’d sometimes think they were consoling themselves by eating the same dishes. By the 1920s, however, Paris was already living as a romanticised
version of itself – and plenty of older gourmets were lamenting that the French restaurant’s heyday was over. For a long time after the Second World War, no one noticed their decline, partly because there was little competition. The British were still boiling their vegetables to grey, while the Americans were gelatinising salads and defrosting dinner. Chinese and Indian restaurants were still widely seen as cheap options, and hardly anyone had been on holiday to Thailand or Morocco yet.
In the 1970s, my parents – like other foodies at the time – planned whole trips around the recommendations of the Michelin Guide. First published in 1900 to encourage motorists to visit restaurants in the provinces, it soon became the grand arbiter of French cuisine. Obscure, definitive, conjuring an image of a lonely, corpulent inspector able to swallow whole goose livers in one gulp, Michelin had the power of a king to award stars and turn around the fortunes of a restaurant. But it also became a leviathan that focused on one kind of restaurant – those with formal dining rooms, white damask tablecloths and serried ranks of waiters. By the 1990s, people had begun to complain that Michelin was hidebound and tended towards favourites.
By then, restaurant economics had become brutal. Even grand chefs were buckling under the expense of reaching Michelin standards. As Thatcher and Reagan liberalised their economies, French president François Mitterrand promised “a break with capitalism”. He raised the minimum wage, allotted workers a fifth week of paid vacation, lowered the retirement age to 60, and cut the work week to 39 hours. The bill was piled on to sky-high VAT – 19.5% for restaurants – and high social-security taxes. Michelin stars became prohibitive to maintain – while the owners of average restaurants complained it had become exorbitantly expensive to hire workers.
The crisis grew. In 2010, a TV documentary showed undercover footage of restaurateurs inside an industrial caterer’s warehouse piling frozen ready meals into giant shopping carts. One estimate said 70% of chefs were using pre-prepared ingredients or sauces. It was clear restaurants could no longer afford to employ people to peel potatoes, chop carrots, mince garlic, pick through parsley and all the other time-consuming jobs at the bottom of the food chain. Much easier just to buy the pre-prepped version. Soon, what I’d noticed as gravied blandness became a national scandal. The government intervened, reducing VAT to 5.5% and bringing in a new labelling system to show dishes were prepared in house.
Conservation can breed conservatism – and over the years French cuisine had also become increasingly codified. The system of
appellation d’origine contrôlée, a designation that creates legal labelling criteria for the provenance and quality of many food and wine products, was paired with exacting professional qualifications for chefs, patissiers, bakers, butchers, charcutiers and chocolatiers. With a myriad of gastronomic associations also set up to celebrate a grand culinary legacy, there was a danger of tradition being codified into obsolescence.
There has always been a tension in French restaurants between tradition and innovation. In the late 1960s, a new generation of chefs raged against the old order, as the student revolt of 1968 pushed change in restaurants too. They rebelled against Carême’s gluey, flour-thickened gravies and made sauces out of vegetables and herbs. Focused on simplicity, this movement became known as “nouvelle cuisine”. At the forefront of the new cooking, the Troisgros Brothers’ salmon with sorrel was as famous for its fresh acidity as it was for its pretty colours: pink and vivid green. It was as much an aesthetic revolution as a culinary one.
There is much that modern chefs owe to nouvelle cuisine – but at the time, many laughed at the fussiness of the presentation and complained that the portions were too small. In 1996, several well-known French chefs, including Joël Robuchon and Alain Ducasse, even issued a manifesto denouncing the “globalisation of cuisine” and innovation for its own sake. It is tempting to draw a neat loop from such culinary conservatism to culinary cul-desacs, but that isn’t really fair. France has consistently produced extraordinary chefs cooking extraordinary food. This year, The World’s 50 Best Restaurants, the list that largely replaced Michelin as a global guide, ranked Mirazur in the south of France as No.1. It’s more mid-level restaurants that had got stuck – but in France, as elsewhere, the internet has been collapsing distances between culinary trends and ideas.
In the past decade, a younger generation of French chefs – many trained in London, New York, Copenhagen or Barcelona – have established themselves. When I returned to Paris after four years away in 2014, I found a new era in full swing. Infused with the global foodie zeitgeist, hip new places used yuzu and turmeric in dishes, eschewed tablecloths and had pared a new “bistronomy” movement back to bare tabletops, small plates and daily-changing menus. They were even championed by a new guide, Le Fooding.
This was all very welcome, delicious and fun. But often it felt as if France was borrowing from other food cultures rather than reinventing its own.
“In 2010, an undercover TV documentary showed French restaurateurs piling frozen
ready meals into giant shopping carts”
For a long time, I felt as if good French food in Paris was the domain of a few prohibitively expensive old faithfuls, while the smattering of newer places were über-chic and often booked up. The perfect, affordable bistro around the corner no longer seemed to exist – so for many years, Chartier was my stand-by, the only bouillon in Paris providing a cheap but hearty meal. Now suddenly, in the past year or so, three others have opened. And they have been so successful that their proprietors are planning to open more.
Back to basics is proving popular. The Bouillon Pigalle opened a little over a year ago, an updated version of the genre. The space is modern and bright but the old, familiar style of decor has been respected – the banquettes are still red. The young manager, Jean Christophe, told me that the menu was deliberately nostalgic. “We thought: ‘What can we do that reminds us of our grandmother’s cooking?’” On the menu is céléri rémoulade, escargots, boeuf bourguignon, pot-au-feu, blanquette de veau.
The food is good – and you can come out with change from s20.
Perhaps restaurants are less about the food than we think, and our relationship with them more emotional than gustatory. When I asked a group of French restaurateurs what was the most important ingredient to a restaurant they answered, in unison, “ambiance” – the feel of the place. At Bouillon Pigalle, I watched people at tables talking, plotting, flirting, celebrating. There were old people, solo diners, families, couples. The tables are side by side so you rub elbows with your neighbour, swap menu advice, get chatting. I realised that this kind of joie de vivre is at the heart of the French restaurant experience. The waiter brought more wine, conversation hummed, people were laughing loudly. The line of people waiting to get a table is permanently out the door.