Why the Brits eat better than the French

Jonathan Miller

Move over, France. Britain is now Europe’s foodie mecca, said Jonathan Miller. Sure, 50 years ago, the U.K. culinary scene was “comically terrible,” a depressing slog of greasy fish and chips, while “everything French was better”—the bread, the cheese, the wine, the bistros. Now the reverse is true. We British have “shamelessly appropriated all the chefs and cuisines of the old empire,” so our streets teem with curry joints and dim sum cafés. Every cuisine in the world is represented or sublimely reinvented, and not just in London, but in small towns throughout the U.K. Across the Channel, the French ignore the cooking of their former colonies. And the traditional brasseries that tourists flock to are “mere theaters pretending to be restaurants.” The food isn’t cooked on site, but supplied by giant industrial kitchens owned by American corporations. What the French actually eat is McDonald’s—the country’s biggest restaurant business—when they aren’t scarfing down terrible imitations of pizza or gristly kebabs. Even home cooking has died in the French kitchen, where the ritual of preparing dinner now consists of microwaving a boeuf bourguignon from the frozen-food giant Picard. Am I “Froggy bashing”? Yes. That’s because “the French should be ashamed of themselves.”