by Holly Hughes
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 (part of a local chain by the same name) 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. Most of the time, though, I was acutely aware that I was not in Paris. On several occasions, my comings and goings from Hong Kong’s airport coincided with the departure of Air France’s nightly flight to Paris. The sight of that 747 taxiing out to the runway always prompted the same thought: Lucky bastards.
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?” The essay was vintage Gopnik—witty, well observed, and bristling with insight. Gopnik, then serving as the magazine’s Paris correspondent, suggested that French cuisine had lost its sizzle: It 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. “All this,” wrote Gopnik, “makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersoll: you try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in.”
I didn’t share those Doubts: To me, France remained the orbis terrarum of food, and nothing left me feeling more in love with life than a sensational meal in Paris. I refused to entertain the possibility that French cuisine had run aground; I didn’t see it then, and I still didn’t see it when Émile Jung took off with my wife two years later during that Lucullan evening at Au Crocodile. Sure, I knew that it was now pretty easy to find bad food in France if you went looking for it. I was aware, too, that France’s economic difficulties had made it brutally difficult for restaurants like Au Crocodile to keep the stoves running. In 1996, Pierre Gagnaire, a three-star chef in the industrial city of Saint-Étienne, near Lyon, had gone bankrupt, and the same fate had almost befallen another top chef, Marc Veyrat. I also recognized 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 flavor of things. Even so, as far as I was concerned, France remained the first nation of food, and anyone suggesting otherwise either was being willfully contrarian or was eating in the wrong places.
It was the swift and unexpected demise 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 tea room 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, perfectly dressed salade niçoise, which I chased down with a glass or two of Marcel Lapierre’s violet-scented Morgon (a Beaujolais) and a deliciously crusty roll. At some point, I discovered Ladurée’s praline mille feuille, which was also habit-forming: I would finish every lunch with this ethereal napoleon consisting of almond pralines, praline cream, caramelized pastry dough, and crispy hazelnuts. Of all the things that I routinely ate in France, it was the praline mille feuille 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 (so, too, the Morgon), replaced by a clutch of unappetizing dishes. The perpetrators of this calamity had the good sense to leave the praline mille feuille 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. By then, however, my initial enthusiasm had given way to trepidation. For the dedicated feeder, the urge to relive the tasting pleasures of the past is constant and frequently overwhelming. But restaurants change and so do palates; trying to recreate memorable moments at the table is often a recipe for heartache (and possibly also heartburn). And here I was, exactly two decades later, hoping to find Chapon Fin just as I had left it.
Well, the parking lot hadn’t changed a bit—it was as expansive as I remembered it, and most of the spaces were still shaded by trees. Sadly, that was the high point of the visit. 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?
En route back to Paris, my wife and I stopped in the somniferous village of Saulieu, at the northern edge of Burgundy, to eat at La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant owned by Bernard Loiseau. He was the peripatetic clown prince of French cuisine, whose empire included the three-star mother ship, three bistros in Paris, a line of frozen dinners, and a listing on the Paris stock exchange. Loiseau’s brand-building reflected his desire to emulate the venerated chef Paul Bocuse, but it was later learned that it was also a matter of survival: Business in Saulieu had become a struggle, and Loiseau was desperate for other sources of revenue. The night we had dinner in Saulieu, the food was tired and so was he. It was another discouraging meal in what had become a thoroughly dispiriting trip. Maybe the muse really had moved on.
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, written by Arthur Lubow, 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. Lubow 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 told Lubow, “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learned there. Twenty years ago, everybody went to France. Today they go there to learn what not to do.”
But by then France had become a bad example in all sorts of ways. Since the late 1970s, its economy had been stagnant, afflicted with anemic growth and chronically high unemployment. True, France had a generous welfare state, but that was no substitute for creating jobs and opportunity. By the mid-2000s, hundreds of thousands
of French (among them many talented chefs) had moved abroad in search of better lives, unwilling to remain in a sclerotic, disillusioned country. France’s economic torpor was matched by its diminished political clout; although prescient in hindsight, its effort to prevent the Iraq war in 2003 struck even many French as a vainglorious blunder that served only to underscore the country’s weakness.
A sense of decay was now pervasive. For centuries, France had produced as much great writing, music, and art as any nation, but that was no longer true. French literature seemed moribund, ditto the once-mighty French film industry. Paris had been eclipsed as a center of the fine-art trade by London and New York. It was still a fashion capital, but British and American designers now seemed to generate the most buzz. In opera and theater, too, Paris had become a relative backwater. French intellectual life was suffering: The country’s vaunted university system had sunk into mediocrity. Even the Sorbonne was now second-rate—no match, certainly, for Harvard and Yale.
Nothing in the cultural sphere was spared—not even food. The cultural extended into the kitchens of France, and it wasn’t just haute cuisine that was in trouble. France had two hundred thousand cafés in 1960; by 2008, it was down to forty thousand, 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 percent since the late 1960s and was continuing to tumble.
This wasn’t the only way in which the French seemed to be turning their backs on the country’s rich culinary heritage. Aspiring chefs were no longer required to know how to truss chickens, open oysters, or whip up a béarnaise sauce in order to earn the Certificat d’Aptitude Professionnelle; instead, they were being tested on their ability to use processed, powdered, frozen, and prepared foods. France still had its outdoor markets, but hypermarchés—sprawling supermarkets—accounted for 75 percent of all retail food sales. Most 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 thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century earlier. One organization, at least, stood ready to help the French avoid the kitchen and scarf their food: McDonald’s. By 2007, the chain had more than a thousand 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, criticizing the British during a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, 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? Just four months earlier, Gourmet magazine had declared London to be “the best place to eat in the world right now” and devoted an entire issue to its gustatory pleasures. As the ridicule rained down on Chirac, his faux pas assumed metaphoric significance: Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline. They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen.
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 Center with a two-day extravaganza featuring panel discussions, 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 expatriated 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.
All this was a reflection of what was happening in France. Twenty-five years earlier, it had been virtually impossible to eat poorly there; now, in some towns and villages, it was a struggle to find even a decent loaf of bread. The France memorialized by writers like M. F. K. Fisher, Joseph Wechsberg, Waverley Root, and A. J. Liebling; that inspired the careers of Julia Child, Alice Waters, and Elizabeth David; that promised gustatory delight along every boulevard and byway—that France, it seemed, was dying. Even those epiphanic vegetables were harder to come by. When Waters started regularly visiting France, she would smuggle tomato vine cuttings home to California; now, she smuggled vine cuttings to her friends in France.
It saddened me to see this way of eating, and being, disappearing. In France, I didn’t just learn how to dine; I learned how to live. It was where my wife and I had fallen in love, a bond formed over plates of choucroute, platters of oysters, and bowls of fraises des bois (Ladurée pastries, too). When we began traveling to France as a married couple, great meals there weren’t just occasions for pleasure ; they were a way of reaffirming our vows. The calendar indicates that our children couldn’t have been conceived in France, but from the moment they were able to eat solid foods they were immersed in our Francophilia. They became acquainted with crème caramel before they ever knew what a Pop-Tart was. But it now appeared that the France I grew up knowing would no longer be there for them.
A REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PRESENT
By Alexander Lobrano From Gourmet
Forget the Michelin-starred gastronomic temples with their cutting-edge cuisine, countends Lobrano, an American food and travel writer based in France. Paris is still studded with wonderful vintage restaurants—if you know where to look.
On a stifling August night in 1974, I was led down a steep flight of stairs into a vaulted basement in the Latin Quarter. In my madras jacket, I immediately felt like a dork. Everyone else in the dining room was wearing jeans, and my mortification was magnified by the fact that both of my brothers were also wearing madras, while my sister was sporting a daffodil-yellow frock. Plunged into the heart of bohemian Paris, a place I’d always dreamed of, I was suddenly desperate to be elsewhere and furious with the aunt who’d told us we couldn’t miss this restaurant, a real old-fashioned bistro that had been a memorable find on her most recent trip to Paris.
Still, I liked the slightly musty smell of the room, which reminded me of a country well, and the sour stink of the Gauloises that were sending up small curls of blue smoke from every table but ours. The bread was delicious, and it was a relief when the waiter understood Mom’s French, especially since a wonderful salad of sliced tomatoes in a silky mustard vinaigrette—so
simple, but so good—arrived a few minutes later, along with a pocked white porcelain plate of sizzling snails for Dad, who insisted I try one (I gulped it down with a big sip of water). Then, after a stately pause, the graying waiter returned with a heavy copper casserole, which he set at my end of the table. Lifting the lid, he released a fleeting cloud of steam. The mingled aroma of wine, beef, and onions was so intoxicating it seemed an eternity before everyone had been served and I could dig in. I burned my tongue, never quite realizing that I was experiencing my first round of primal pleasure at table. Nothing had ever tasted as good to me as the shiny mahogany sauce, an amazing mixture of wine and butter, that glazed the tender chunks of beef on my plate. That boeuf bourguignon , served at a long-vanished restaurant on a street I barely remember how to find, left me with an irresistible craving for more—more Paris and, most of all, more French food. So much so that 21 years ago I moved to Paris.