Mean cuisine: the fall of French food

IT'S disarming to review a book containing a lot of stuff you have already written.

Illustration by Michael Perkins of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

AU Revoir to All That: The Rise and Fall of French Cuisine, by Michael Steinberger, Bloomsbury, 256pp, $49.99 (HB)

IT'S disarming to review a book containing a lot of stuff you have already written. I'm not accusing Michael Steinberger of plagiarism, far from it. It's just that much of what he says about French cuisine has been well-known for many years. I, for one, have been writing about its overrated place in world gastronomy for a couple of decades, and I'm not alone.

So this is a book by an American journalist and wine writer pitched, I suspect, at his compatriots, who perhaps are not all that up with international culinary trends. It's written in a breezy, often twee style, aiming to surprise us by asserting that the reputation of fancy French food has faded.

Hyperbole is rampant, adverbs shimmer. And when Steinberger likes something, he gushes: Cheese is insanely runny and pastry impossibly light.

Steinberger appears to be a slave to the feature writer's narrative arch: French food and cooking has fallen from grace . . . but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Of course there is.

What I wanted was more analysis, and Au Revoir to All That is at its best when discussing France's post-war stagnation and Francois Mitterrand's disastrous presidency. High cuisine needs wealthy people to pay for it, and a 19.6 per cent value-added tax and 15 per cent service charge in restaurants hardly encourages patronage.

But even then Steinberger doesn't get to the heart of why French gastronomy has failed to keep up with the times. That requires the kind of portrait of the Gallic character you'll find in the two volumes of Theodore Zeldin's France, 1848-1945 (1977), which is based on immense statistical evidence and thorough sourcing. Essentially, the French don't like change and believe their ways are best. They give the word conservative its true meaning.

Au Revoir is a pastiche of a dozen chapters. We're given an excellent short history of the development of French cooking and restaurants, a summary of what happened during the nouvelle cuisine era, a look at the monstrous power of Michelin's restaurant guide and an opinion on what the new Spanish chefs have achieved.

Irrelevant to Steinberger's thesis but entertaining are the terrific chapters on Jean-Claude Vrinat, owner of Taillevent and the world's most charming man, and on the difficulties of continuing to make raw-milk cheese as French palates allegedly decline and European authorities attempt to introduce uniform health and safety regulations.

There are winners and losers, heroes and villains, the stamp of popular nonfiction. Steinberger has a thing about Paul Bocuse, the best-known French chef. He casts him as a triumph of marketing over skill and originality, declaring the food he tried at Bocuse's restaurant was awful.

Alain Chapel and Joel Robuchon, on the other hand, are heroes.

The book argues that French women do get fat, that French McDonald's outlets are the world's second most profitable and that in "more and more French households, supper [consists] of slapdash meals consumed in haste, often with the television blaring". (The last assertion is nonsense without solid statistics to support it. In what amounts to quite a few years in France, I've never experienced it.)

Quoting an unnamed 2005 source, Steinberger states that 40 per cent of French are overweight or obese. In less than a minute online I discovered the comparable figure for Americans aged over 20, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, is 68 per cent. Few French are overweight in comparison with people in other developed nations, even if they may be getting fatter. Generally speaking, they never snack and almost always eat healthy meals at set times, although customs may be slowly changing.

As for the McDonald's furphy, Steinberger fails to point out that France benefits from more than 74 million tourist arrivals each year, about 36 per cent more than the next most visited country, the US. Every time I look through the windows of a McDonald's in France I see tourists, and it would be interesting to know how many Big Mac sales can be attributed to them.

Five years ago in Paris on a Plate I wrote about the French capital's most innovative and interesting chef, Pascal Barbot. I'm pleased Steinberger caught up with him. Now in his mid-30s, Barbot says he owes much of his success to having worked in Australia, where he cooked at Tony Bilson's Ampersand at Cockle Bay. (His Parisian restaurant Astrance has acquired three Michelin macarons in an amazingly short time.) According to Au Revoir, Barbot was culinarily freed in Sydney, which offered a "dizzying array of cuisines and where an exuberant inventiveness held sway". Right on. At Astrance he has tried to express the same freedom he experienced in Sydney, and Parisians and tourists have lapped it up.

I enjoyed the account of Alain Ducasse's climb to the summit of world restaurantdom. Like Steinberger, I think Ducasse's food is overrated. Soon after it opened in 1996, Restaurant Alain Ducasse served me about the worst pasta I've eaten. I told Ducasse so when I interviewed him after the meal. He changed the subject to Southeast Asian vegetables. When I visited his Hong Kong restaurant Spoon a few years ago, the experience was very ordinary. It was a place where you selected your own meat, a vegetable and a sauce and took responsibility for how they got together on the plate, which meant it wasn't the restaurant's fault if the dish didn't work.

When I interviewed Chapel in 1987 he talked about what he believed were the essentials of the best French cooking and eating. He was adamant: there had to be a table on which there was food to share. The table had to be surrounded by comfortable chairs. But the most important thing was what tracked between those chairs and across that table: conversation. Judging by my frequent visits to in-laws and others, I can affirm that France will never need to say au revoir to all that.

Stephen Downes is a Melbourne-based writer, journalist and restaurant reviewer.