The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine

Perhaps I made some classic tourist mistake, but when I was in Paris last year I felt like every mid-priced French bistro was extremely mediocre and overpriced. Menus all the same and food did not taste fresh at all. Wine bad too.

French cuisine in Paris can be really good, but you need to know a few tips :

- price doesn’t mean quality or taste or fresh. More often than not, location is almost the only thing that drives price. But even that could be random (some hipster places of the north of paris are both dirty, expensive, in a crap neighborhood, and not that good at all).

- you need to find the right balance between hipster and tourist trap. If you’re in a very touristic area, favor extremely small restaurants ( 10 tables), where you feel that the owner is still passionate about his food, and can still get fresh ingredients.

- if there are « plat du jour », pick in that list. Best is if there are only plat du jour and nothing else.

- some touristic area are great for food, others are an absolute expensive crap, and they can be 200 meters away. Le marais is great, some streets of the 10th are great, but bastille is awfull. It can be pretty hard to guess from the outside.

- finally, look at the menu. It’s really the best way to tell, but it requires experience. Too many meals is a bad sign, style (hand made, or nice font, or simply good looking and stylish) is also a good sign. Indication of things beeing hand made are also a good sign.

All in all i’d say it’s pretty similar to french language : there are more exceptions than rules. Go look for something with an authentic feel ( as in you can feel the effort that was put in designing the place, and the owner’s personality), but try various things to build your intuition.

Needless to say, quality of restaurants can change a lot with time.

The good thing about all this, is that « knowing good places to eat » has real value in Paris, and after you found your first gem you’ll understand why parisians talk about restaurants with such passion when they meet.

This reminds me of an article describing how bad restaurant food in San Francisco is getting because housing inequality is so high that all the food-prep workers are getting pushed out of the cities.

You can’t have head chefs commuting four hours a day to cook you fish...

I could believe this is happening in Paris as well.

I could be starting a food war here but I dare declare that California has the best cuisines in the world because

1.) for many of the ethnicities, california usually has the largest immigrant communities, outside of the native country. Therefore the dishes can be much more authentic and cater to the native crowds. As opposed to a Greek restaurant in Tokyo, or a Thai restaurant in Paris. When I lived in Japan I often missed my Vietnamese pho. And when i lives in Paris I often craved for my Mexican burrito.

2.) it doesn’t have any food history, and therefore no codified rules on how and what cuisines should be ( as opposed to French cuisine, like mentioned in the article ). Therefore we have Californian sushi, Korean tacos, Japanese pastas, Korean hot dogs, and so on. Fusion and innovation is alive and well

3.) fifth largest economy in the world that helps to support diverse and vibrant restaurants, farms and foodies

4.) real focus on vegan cuisines. If you were a vegan you would be blessed to live in la or sf. You would be able to not just be able to get vegan but also Vietnamese vegan, Thai vegan, American vegan or Japanese vegan cuisines. If you tried backpacking through Asia or Europe as a vegan you would know how hard that is.

Michelin guide recently released a California guide and California is now on the map as a foodie destination. Even though it only has 90 Michelin restaurants as opposed to Japan’s 230, I have way more fun dining in la or sf than Tokyo due to the diverse ness and casualness of the cuisines. (But Tokyo will always have a place in my heart on how perfectly executed a single ingredient/dish could be)

My parents lived in France for a while after they retired; so I've been there many times as a visitor. They lived pretty far from Paris in the country side. Things have changed a lot in the past decades in France. For one thing, the French have somehow been enthusiastically embracing the north american concept of strip malls with huge super markets and fast food outlets with such names as Pizza Hut, Burger King, etc. as well as a few local variations of these. Most smaller cities have these at the edge of their town and the local retail sector has been struggling to compete. The food in these supermarkets is still pretty good but the food in these fast food outlets mostly isn't.

The french are the proto-snobs; they pretty much invented the notion of snobbery and their cuisine is a big part of it. But it's an invented tradition and it's a very recent thing (at least their cuisine is). And indeed it is past it's glory and lot of the lower class French are growing up eating the same kind of junk food that everybody else is getting obese on. However, you could do worse in the French country side than going to some family run place that is frequented by the locals (as opposed to hordes of tourists). You'll be eating pretty decent food generally. This still exists and people are fiercely traditional when it comes to this stuff. But it's not as widespread as it used to be. But buying local produce is a thing and generally it is pretty good stuff given the climate and farming standards.

The reality of food in France and elsewhere is that it is rooted in a long tradition that is based on history, people moving around and importing their traditions, and people discovering ingredients. E.g. tomatoes and potatoes are relatively recent additions to European cuisine and yet considered staples of local cooking across Europe now.

For example, if you go to Italy, there is history dating back to the Roman era and earlier in some cases. Written history in this part of the world dates back more than two millennia. And Iran, formerly known as Persia, and formerly part of misc. historical empires has many thousands years of history. These places have interesting dishes that have been around in some form or another for thousands of years.

And you can get them from all over the world in most decently large cities across the globe these days. Including Paris. I think this is pretty awesome. I love that you can go to the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands and find a few locals that are passionate about sushi or something similarly foreign and find a few decent places serving it. This was not a thing when I grew up in the eighties.

> Australians had established Italian coffee bars and you could finally get a decent cappuccino.

A fun parallel here to the classic startup story where the megacorp stagnates while ex-employees leave to create a startup that does it better and eventually beats the megacorp at its own game.

Italian immigrants brought a love of coffee with them to Australia, but that's developed into a culture and standard of coffee that's better than the original, that's now being exported back.

I live in Melbourne, and was surprised on first visiting Italy and France that the coffee was utterly inferior. Same with the US: There's certainly decent coffee to be found, but you have to seek it out, rather than taking it for granted as ubiquitous everywhere.

Dining in Paris is a land mine for exactly the reasons stated in this article. You can’t really pop into a random restaurant in Paris and expect a good meal. I’ve been burned too many times in the past that every visit to Paris and France involves days and weeks of research for food that is better than mediocre. (Paris is usually the cheapest way to get to Europe which is why I go so often)

Maybe it’s the proliferation of tourist traps. Maybe it’s stubbornness of sticking to the same old cuisine. It does feel like visiting a gastronomical museum.

I’ve been in europe on travel and business for the past few weeks, and this may be entirely provincial and American of me, but the best meal i’ve had in a week was the €20 moroccan takeaway for four I had for dinner last night.

The classic continental cuisines are good, and i’ve found good examples of them, but good lord i want something with hot sauce. Then a salad. And maybe a decent bagel.

Too many “fall of”s in the title

> “But isn’t the point to taste the chicken?” Furious and foreign, I replied: “No! It’s just the opposite! Cooking is about messing with the chicken! Cooking is about adding flavour!”

One cannot blame people for wanting to add flavor to the meat of a sick animal. I feel sad for her never having had the chance to taste a happy chicken. No amount of cooking can compensate for the lack of good ingredients. Natural ruin can be fertile soil for human creativity.