The Zeitgeist and The Pyrenees
“You don’t have to be too ardent a Francophile to see that thinking about the table and its rituals means thinking about France,” Adam Gopnik wrote in The Table Comes First, a book where he explores and worries about the contours of French food. Thing is, for most of us these days, thinking about the table and its rituals means thinking about destinations other than France.
Twenty years ago, writing in The New York Times, Arthur Lubow declared that French food was pale, male and stale, and that the culinary zeitgeist had crossed the Pyrenees, out of the fire and straight into Ferran Adria’s frying pan, in El Bulli.
Lubow identified a culinary stasis that had actually been preoccupying some French chefs for quite some time. Whilst the old guard of 3-star chefs who had made France the envy of the world, icons like Paul Bocuse and Georges Blanc, argued that French cuisine must remain la grande cuisine, a younger set of chefs, personified by Pierre Gagnaire and Marc Veyrat, wanted to chase down something more avant garde.
Whilst they were having a barney, the Spanish stole their crown. When we first met Arthur Lubow, significantly, it was in San Sebastian, at their annual Gastronomika food festival. Food lovers might have Paris on their radars, but the City of Light was way down that bucket list after Copenhagen, Madrid, Bangkok and a host of other brighter city lights.
Yet criticism of French restaurant cooking is nothing new. Back in the early 1970’s, in his book The Food of Italy, the great gastronaut Waverley Root allows Enrico Galozzi, an Italian food authority, to analyse the problem:
“French cooking is formalised, technical and scientific,” pontificates Galozzi “Order bearnaise sauce in 200 different French restaurants and you will get exactly the same sauce 200 times. Ask for bolognaise sauce in 200 different Italian restaurants and you will get 200 different versions of ragu.”
Paul Bertolli, the great Chez Panisse chef, concurs: “The French sauces were developed first for the aristocracy and later, the international hotel set, who expected them to taste the same whether in London or New York,” Bertolli writes in his magnificent book, Cooking By Hand.
So, is this the root of the issue: homogeneity versus heterogeneity? Travel through France, and at each point you eat the same thing. Travel through Italy or Spain, however, and you get everyone’s individual iteration of the dish, depending on location, temperament and ingredients.
And so, we all hunt down home and hearth, and shun the grand cuisine in the grand gastronomic temples, where you will be served that identical bearnaise à la Francaise, 200 times.
Se Défendant
In 2024, France will host the Olympic Games, and some are using this as a springboard to fight back and recapture the crown.
“French gastronomy is no longer stuck in the past,” insisted Gwendal Poullennec, the editor of the Guide Michelin in France as he announced no fewer than 52 new stars for 2024. 52? Why not 365 for the Olympic year that’s in it?
Unlike in Ireland, where change happens at a glacial pace, the French Michelin ‘24 selection includes 23 restaurants that opened in the past year, with half of the recipients are under the age of 40. This marks “the emergence of a whole generation,” he said, speaking of a “cultural dynamism.”
A whole generation matures in just one single year: who knew? Michelin used to represent a critical culture for the culinary world. Now it’s a handmaiden for publicity stunts.
Tribute and Tribute Bands
The problem with all this historicising is that it’s a cliché. The fall from pre-eminence and the rise of the plucky upstart is a story as old as fire itself. But, if it were true, then we need to explain why Henry Harris’s Bouchon Racine was one of the hottest new openings in London in recent times.
Henry, who wrote a great book called The Fifth Floor Cookbook when he was chef at Harvey Nichols, cooks and serves food that is a tribute to French bistro cuisine: jambon de Bayonne with celeriac remoulade; chicken liver pâté with cornichons; veal chop with Roquefort butter; rabbit with mustard sauce and smoked bacon; plum and almond tart.
And Carlingford oysters, natch.
Everyone loves Bouchon to bits. “The older things, done as well as they can be done” wrote The Observer.
Harris’s secret is simple: he pays tribute. He doesn’t form a tribute band. His aim is true. If a restaurant’s cooking is an homage to the strictures of French cuisine, then it can work, it can find the essence and discipline that makes these dishes timeless. If what is offered is a pastiche, or a facsimile, then it just won’t work. The brief sojourn of Flaneur, in Dublin’s Rathmines in 2023, showed how offering a parade of dishes with French names won’t find an audience.
In Belfast, we ate at Marcel, on Belmont Road, and had poulet frites, and Comte gougeres and chocolate delice. The restaurant, which only a short while before had been another restaurant concept called Monad, offers great value – 3 courses for £22 – and whilst the kitchen had fun deconstructing a boeuf bourguignon, there was little that was memorable in the food.
To The Frontieres
The same £22 will buy you 2 courses at lunchtime in Noble Rot Soho, where the chef is Alex Jackson, author of a thrilling new book called Frontières, which describes the food of France’s Borderlands, from Catalonia to Alsace. Get yourself to Soho and you can enjoy Morteau sausage with lentils and egg; roast chicken with morels and Vin Jaune; guinea fowl with brandied prunes; and finish with crêpes Suzette. Classic French dishes, in other words, but dishes that are brought to vivid life thanks to being filtered through Jackson’s experience, technique and Francophilia.
Eamon Barrett, editor at McKennas Guides, is a huge fan of Jackson’s cooking, which he describes as “stupendously good.” For Eamon, Noble Rot Soho is “a mainstay of any trip to London…cooking where ingredients, seasonality and flavour are given the ‘front and centre’ treatment and you’re barely aware of technique - although that, of course, is the true skill.”
And just how good was the Noble Rot roast chicken with morels and Vin Jaune? “Lip-smackingly good.”
When chefs and owners turn toward French cooking with an honest heart, the results can be agelessly charming. Garret Fitzgerald and James Boland of Brother Hubbard have been two of the pivotal Dublin food actors for more than a decade, dreaming up new ideas whilst confidently steering Brother Hubbard into new rooms across the city. “We thought, let’s have an adventure, and the stars aligned,” says Garret, explaining the circumstances that have brought two French chefs, Thibaud and Davide, into the kitchen in BH Ranelagh. Thibaud and Davide have seized the chance to riff on French bistro dishes cut with Irish tropes, offering chicken chasseur and socca flatbreads and Toulouse sausages with Savoy cabbage and the result is quite lovely: tasty, good value, unpretentious, fun, and relaxed.
If you want to taste that honest heart in full flight, then a trip to Savoir Fare, in Westport, will convince you that French cuisine is in no way stuck in the past. Alain Morice utilises his French parentage to cook in a style that hearkens back to Escoffier and Fernand Point, creating terrines and forcemeats of epic proportions, baking top class baguettes, and respectfully transforming boeuf bourguignon into a contemporary masterpiece. M. Morice’s food is full of joie de vivre, using old techniques to free up contemporary West Coast flavours.
Gwendalle Poullenec’s statement that “French gastronomy is no longer stuck in the past,” is also an admission: French gastronomy has been stuck in the past, and for quite a long time.
The reason why is simple: the French codified cooking, and by bringing the commandments down from the mountain, they thereby robbed the art of spontaneity. A French chef could fight the law, but the law would always win.
There is another way to look at this Holy Writ, however, and that is to view it as a template, a springboard for creativity, a textbook of Gallic techniques that invite improvisation. “Rules in cooking are not iron-cast” writes Richard Olney in Simple French Food. “They are merely the expression of a well of experience formed and enriched over the centuries”.
French cooking can be a catechism, or it can be catharsis, allowing the cook to absorb principles and structures to be used as you wish. You don’t have to cook by the book and, once you realise this, the cultural dynamism French cuisine needs can be made real. Technique is simply a means to an end, which means you can tweak that bearnaise sauce any way you fancy.