Insider's guide to culinary theatre

SOMETIMES it's hard to believe how far television food shows have come.

SOMETIMES it's hard to believe how far television food shows have come.

I can still remember Graham Kerr's The Galloping Gourmet and its light-hearted humour, tomfoolery and the copious use of clarified butter, cream and fat. This was the late 1960s, when unbridled self-indulgence was not only tolerated but compulsory. His most famous line on the show was his response to someone's criticism of his cooking: "Madame, you could go outside and get run over by a bus and just think what you would have missed."

It's a long stretch to this sumptuously photographed and produced French-inspired nine-part series featuring Food Safari's Maeve O'Meara and acclaimed chef Guillaume Brahimi. O'Meara's shows are culinary reveries, largely based on her foodie globetrotting, seeking out great food and the cultures that create it, informed by her expertise as food editor in magazines and cookbook author.

She seems to know everyone from three-hat chefs to passionate home cooks, and her many shows feed food enthusiasts' desire for insider knowledge. "Many of the chefs and cooks appearing are my old friends, so as a viewer you feel like you get a kiss on both cheeks as you pull up a chair to learn some great recipes and tips," she says. And there's certainly a lot of cheek kissing in her shows.

In this series, O'Meara accompanies the urbane Brahimi on his highly personal pilgrimage across France, visiting kitchens and markets in Paris and in the regions, tracking down butters, cheeses, wines, chocolate, charcuterie and truffles. They open with a tour of the world's largest wholesale produce market, Rungis, and go backstage for a sneak peek at Alain Ducasse's famous restaurant at the Plaza Athenee in Paris. As Ducasse suggests, no country has more reverence for food, displays it more theatrically with such operatic gestures or worships digestion with such style.

French Food Safari

7.30pm, SBS One