The Mouth: Is our glut of French bistros a faux pas, or fabuleux? Blame Balthazar

New French bistros seem to be opening in Sydney as quickly as you can say steak frites. Blame social media, New York landmark Balthazar and it’s Instagram-savvy chef, says The Mouth.

Balthazar Restaurant in Little Italy, New York City, New York. Picture: Getty.

One of the more fun, yet sadly less studied, bits of Australian history has to do with the race between France and England to be the first to plant a European flag on the continent.

We know how that turned out (Rule Britannia!) but looking at the sheer glut of “French bistros” open and opening across Sydney, a time traveller might suspect that it was good old Captain Jean Laperouse who “arrive le premier”.

The Mouth suspects that with so many things today, social media is to blame.

Particularly, in this case, the presence on Instagram of New York restaurateur Keith McNally whose feed (as it were) largely revolves around the highs and lows and dramas and hijinks at Balthazar, his French bistro in Manhattan’s Soho.

McNally has a decent following of about 114,000 folk, and his reports of life behind the scenes including celebrity dust-ups have become essential viewing.

Balthazar’s Keith McNally. Picture: Instagram

And indeed Balthazar is a blast.

Our last time in Manhattan we arrived as walk-ins and lost an entire night to French 75s and steak au poivre in a dining room full of locals who, unlike Sydneysiders, didn’t seem to have a 5am PT session to get up for.

The real deal: Balthazar steak frites. Picture: Instagram

But borrowing a couple of mill to buy a Josper grill and some crap a la Francaise to throw up on the wall does not a Keith McNally make.

It’s like a young guy picking up a NIDA voiceover student for a one-night stand and thinking he’s Errol Flynn bedding all of Hollywood, or a Cleveland middle manager chucking on a Hawaiian shirt and getting blitzed on P & O Cruise margaritas and thinking he’s Jimmy Buffett (RIP).

Those with long memories, of course, will say that Sydney has always had a strong French influence and recall the Banc/Becasse/Balzac era fondly.

But that whole era bespoke a different era when it was about classical French cooking led by chefs who had been exposed to Marco Pierre White and Raymond Blanc, not hospitality “groups” deciding that bistros are the thing this year.

Not that any of this is necessarily a bad thing.

Indeed, as a friend who recently had a hilariously awful week in New Caledonia quipped, Sydney has better food as part of the Commonwealth than we likely would have had if Laperouse planted the French tricolour first.

But it does suggest that dining wise, our dining scene is evolving like the rest of the city: more corporate, more homogenous, with less room for character and quirk.

— The Mouth is an anonymous critic and bon vivant who pays his own way around Sydney and beyond.