I first went to France as a 13-year-old, in the company of my parents and my
brother, and it was during this trip that I, like many other visitors there,
experienced the great awakening — the moment at the table that changes
entirely one’s relationship to food. It was a vegetable that administered
the shock for me: Specifically, it was the baby peas (drowned in butter, of
course) served at a nondescript hotel in the city of Blois, in the Loire
Valley, that caused me to realise that food could be a source of
gratification and not just a means of sustenance — that mealtime could be
the highlight of the day, not simply a break from the day’s activities.
A few days later, while driving south to the Rhône Valley, my parents decided
to splurge on lunch at a two-star restaurant called Au Chapon Fin, in the
town of Thoissey, in the Mâcon region. I didn’t know at the time that it was
a restaurant with a long and illustrious history (among its claims to fame:
it was where Albert Camus ate his last meal before the car crash that killed
him in 1960), nor can I recollect many details of the meal. I remember
having a pâté to start, followed by a big piece of chicken, and that both
were excellent, but that’s about it. However, I vividly recall being struck
by the sumptuousness of the dining room. The tuxedoed staff, the thick white
tablecloths, the monogrammed plates, the heavy silverware, the ornate ice
buckets — it was the most elegant restaurant I’d ever seen.
Other trips to France followed, and in time, France became not just the place
that fed me better than any other, but an emotional touchstone. In low
moments, nothing lifted my mood like the thought of Paris — the thought of
eating in Paris, that is. When I moved to Hong Kong in 1994, I found a café
called DeliFrance that quickly became the site of my morning ritual; reading
the International Herald Tribune over a watery cappuccino and a limp,
greasy croissant, I imagined I was having breakfast in Paris, and the
thought filled me with contentment.
In 1997, a few months after I moved back to the United States, The New
Yorker published an article by Adam Gopnik asking, “Is There a Crisis in
French Cooking?” Gopnik suggested that French cuisine had become rigid,
sentimental, impossibly expensive, and dull. The “muse of cooking”, as he
put it, had moved on — to New York, San Francisco, Sydney, London. In these
cities, the restaurants exuded a dynamism that was now increasingly hard to
find in Paris.
I refused to entertain the possibility that French cuisine had run aground. I
knew that it was now pretty easy to find bad food in France if you went
looking for it. I also recognised that I was perhaps prone to a certain
psychophysical phenomenon, common among France lovers, whereby the mere act
of dining on French soil seemed to enhance the flavour of things. Even so,
as far as I was concerned, France remained the first nation of food, and
anyone suggesting otherwise either was being wilfully contrarian or was
eating in the wrong places.
It was the swift and unexpected decline of Ladurée just after the turn of the
millennium that caused the first doubts to creep in. Ladurée was a Paris
institution, a charmingly sedate tearoom on the rue Royale, in the eighth
arrondissement. It was famous for its macaroons and pastries, and it also
served one of the best lunches in Paris. I usually went with the artfully
composed salade niçoise, which I chased down with a glass or two of Marcel
Lapierre’s violet-scented Morgon and a deliciously crusty roll. At some
point, I discovered Ladurée’s praline millefeuille, which was also
habit-forming: I would finish every lunch with this ethereal napoleon
consisting of almond pralines, praline cream, caramelised pastry dough, and
crispy hazelnuts. Of all the things that I routinely ate in France, it was
the praline millefeuille that made me the happiest.
But returning to Ladurée, after a year’s absence, I walked into a restaurant
whose pilot light had been extinguished. The first sign of trouble was the
lack of familiar faces: the endearingly gruff waitresses who had given the
restaurant so much of its character had been replaced by bumbling androids.
Worse, the menu had changed, and many of the old standbys, including the
salade niçoise, were gone, replaced by a clutch of unappetising dishes. The
perpetrators of this calamity had the good sense to leave the praline
millefeuille untouched, but I had to assume that it would soon be headed for
history’s flour bin. While Ladurée was an adored institution, it had no
standing in the gastronomic world—no famous chef, no Michelin stars, no
widely mimicked dishes. Even so, I now began to wonder if the French really
were starting to screw things up — if French cuisine was genuinely in
trouble. You might say it was the moment the snails fell from my eyes.
A few days after my dismaying visit to Ladurée, I was in the Mâcon area, this
time with my wife and a friend of ours. As the three of us kicked around
ideas for dinner late one afternoon, I felt pangs of curiosity. Did it still
exist? If so, was it still any good? I quickly began leafing through the
Michelin Guide, found Thoissey, and there it was: Au Chapon Fin. It was now
reduced to one star, but the fact that it still had any was mildly
encouraging.
Several hours later, we were en route to Thoissey. One glance at the dining
room told the tale. The grandeur that had left such a mark on me had given
way to decrepitude. Those thick, regal tablecloths were now thin, scuffed
sheets. The carpet was threadbare. The plates appeared ready to crack from
exhaustion. The staff brightened things a bit. The service was cheerful and
solicitous — perhaps overly so — but they were doing their best to
compensate for the food, which was every bit as haggard as the room. The
evening passed in a crestfallen blur. What the hell was going on here?
In 2003, The New York Times Magazine published a cover story
declaring that Spain had supplanted France as the culinary world’s lodestar.
The article heralded the emergence of la nueva cocina, an
experimental, provocative style of cooking that was reinventing Spanish
cuisine and causing the entire food world to take note. El Bulli’s Ferran
Adrià, the most acclaimed and controversial of Spain’s new wave chefs, was
the focus of the article and graced the magazine’s cover. It contrasted
Spain’s gastronomic vitality with the French food scene, which he described
as ossified and rudderless. “French innovation”, he wrote, “has congealed
into complacency . . . as chefs scan the globe for new ideas, France is no
longer the place they look.” For a Francophile, the quote with which he
concluded the article was deflating. The Spanish food critic Rafael García
Santos said: “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we
love the French people and we learnt there. Twenty years ago, everybody went
to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”
It wasn’t just haute cuisine that was in trouble. France had 200,000 cafés in
1960; by 2008, it was down to 40,000, and hundreds, maybe thousands, were
being lost every year. Bistros and brasseries were also dying at an alarming
clip. Prized cheeses were going extinct because there was no one with the
knowledge or desire to continue making them; even Camembert, France’s most
celebrated cheese, was now threatened. The country’s wine industry was in a
cataclysmic state: declining sales had left thousands of producers facing
financial ruin. Destitute vintners were turning to violence to draw
attention to their plight; others had committed suicide. Many blamed foreign
competition for their woes, but there was a bigger problem closer to home:
Per capita wine consumption in France had dropped by an astonishing 50 per
cent since the late 1960s.
This wasn’t the only way in which the French seemed to be turning their backs
on the country’s rich culinary heritage. Ominously, the bedrock of French
cuisine — home cooking, or la cuisine familiale — was in
trouble. The French were doing less cooking than ever at home and spending
less time at the dinner table. The average meal in France now sped by in 38
minutes, down from 88 minutes a quarter-century earlier. One organisation,
at least, stood ready to help the French avoid the kitchen: McDonald’s. By
2007, the chain had more than 1,000 restaurants in France and was the
country’s largest private sector employer. France, in turn, had become its
second most profitable market in the world.
Food had always been a tool of French statecraft; now, though, it was a source
of French humiliation. In July 2005, it was reported that French President
Jacques Chirac, criticising the British during a meeting with Russian
President Vladimir Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, had
harrumphed: “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.” In the
not-so-distant past, Chirac, simply by virtue of being France’s president,
would have been seen as eminently qualified to pass judgment on another
country’s cuisine — and, of course, in disparaging British cooking, he
merely would have been stating the obvious. Coming in the summer of 2005,
Chirac’s comment revealed him to be a man divorced from reality. Was he not
aware that London was now a great food city?
French cooking had certainly lost its power to seduce. Several days after
Chirac’s gibe made headlines, members of the International Olympic
Committee, despite having been wined and dined for months by French
officials, selected London over Paris as host city for the 2012 Summer Games
— fish and chips over foie gras.
There were other indignities, less noted but no less telling. In October 2006,
New York’s French Culinary Institute marked the opening of its new
International Culinary Centre with a two-day extravaganza featuring cooking
demonstrations and gala meals. The FCI was one of America’s foremost cooking
schools, but it was also a wellspring of French cultural influence — a
culinary consulate of sorts. Its faculty included Jacques Pépin, André
Soltner, and Alain Sailhac, three expatriate French chefs who had helped
unleash America’s food revolution. To assure a suitably splashy debut for
its new facilities, the FCI brought ten eminent foreign chefs to New York.
Amazingly, though, the list was headed not by a Frenchman but by three
Spaniards: Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, and Martín Berasategui. Not only that,
the other seven chefs were Spanish, too. The French Culinary Institute threw
itself a party and didn’t invite a single chef from France.
There were certainly young chefs in France who were eager to meet the creative
challenge posed by Spain, to escape the shackles of tradition, and to
reinvigorate French cooking much as the nouvelle cuisine movement of the
1970s had done. The very talented Pascal Barbot, whose Paris restaurant
Astrance was awarded a third Michelin star in 2007, when he was just 34, was
the most prominent of their number. Other chefs were seeking new ways of
doing haute cuisine at a time when many French had neither the means nor the
desire to pay for lavish meals in ostentatious surroundings; the bistronomie
movement, which combined high-end fare with bistro settings and bistro
prices, was one of the most promising developments on the French food scene
in many years. In the kitchens, at least, it appeared the ingredients were
in place for a revival of French cuisine. For that to happen, however,
France’s economy had to awaken from its long slumber and the French
Government needed to make it easier for restaurants to turn a profit, and
there were few encouraging signs on these fronts. And, above all, there was
this question: Did the French still care about their gastronomic heritage,
or were they willing to let it just wither away?
An extract from Au Revoir To All That by Michael Steinberger. The book
is published by Bloomsbury on Monday at £18.99. To order it for £17.09, inc p&p,
call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/
booksfirst
