7:57PM BST 14 Jun 2014
75 Comments
I have just spent a few weeks in France. Not once did I eat a half-way decent, let alone memorable meal. The ordeal was so depressing that it made me lose the will to eat.
Let us not beat about the bush: French restaurant food, these days, is a national disgrace. What added insult to injury was the “couldn’t give a damn” contempt for the customer and the absurdly high bills – roughly 50 euros for a simple three-course meal from the formule du jour and a half bottle of plonk de plonk. How dare they? It was not, I assume, even personal. Everyone, as far as I could see, got dished up the same old rubbish.
No doubt, great French restaurant food does exist somewhere or other, round the next corner, or over yonder hill, but I am talking about your average restaurant in the centre of your average provincial town. Such places, 40 years ago, possibly even 20, used to be a delight. What better, for example, than a proper steak-frites and a decent salad? Not any more.
I was covering the European elections and based in Fréjus, on the Côte d’Azur between Cannes and Saint Tropez, which the Front National had dramatically taken from the Gaullist centre-Right at the earlier municipal elections. The south of France, east of Marseilles, is the Front National’s traditional stronghold. Brigitte Bardot, who lives near Saint Tropez, is a supporter.
Le Front puts the renaissance of la Patrie traditions at the top of its agenda. Well, if it made a revival of the nation’s restaurant food a crucial element of that crusade it would do it a great service, and gain tons of extra votes as well. So bad was the restaurant situation in Fréjus that my mind began to throw up bizarre thoughts such as: what is the difference between a tranche of terrine de veau at 12.50 euros a time and a can of dog food; or between two tiny slices of foie gras de canard at 14.50 euros and a can of cat food?
Yet, the terrine and the foie gras were the best things to be had in the restaurants of Fréjus. For one good reason: those restaurants buy them in, and so no French chef had had anything to do with their creation. Thank God.
I love France, and one of the great experiences of my life was a nine-course meal in 1969 at the Hotel Grande Bretagne in Beg Meil on the Atlantic coast of Brittany near Quimper. I was 10 years old. Ever since, one way or another, I have tried to relive the magic of that exquisite experience. Sadly, probably during the Eighties, French restaurants lost the plot.
For wherever I went in Fréjus it was the same old story, the same old ennui. I had to make sure I arrived before 9pm or else I would not even get served. As soon as a French restaurant opens at 7pm, its staff are in closing mode, and at 9pm they start whipping away the tablecloths like matadors and stacking the chairs menacingly, as if the town were about to be struck by a hurricane or an invading army.
The menus were as limited as the quality of the food. I did not once see, let alone eat, a decent fresh, raw vegetable such as a tomato. Nor a decent cooked vegetable. In Fréjus, a so-called speciality is ratatouille: it was like warmed up compost. Meat or poultry? If you must. Better than the frozen farmed fish, perhaps. But the magret de canard – Fréjus style – invariably made me think of the sole of a shoe melded with the foot of a man whose days are numbered.
As for the steak, there are no half measures – raw or burnt – and tough as an old boot, even when called entrecôte. Naturally, the chips are oven-ready or frozen, never fresh. I did, it must be said, have a very good moules marinière one night, but I’m convinced that this was the result of the hand of God and nothing to do with the restaurant. For how could it be? As for French coffee, it is to be avoided at all costs.
Whenever I recall Peter Mayle’s 1989 bestseller A Year in Provence, which begins “The year began with lunch”, I am forced to conclude that he was writing a fictional account of some non-existent wonderland.
I kept asking myself: why do the French, supposedly the world’s most refined gourmets, put up with this filth? The answer, I concluded, is that they have no choice, because a 35-hour week, work-to-rule, closed-shop regime operates in restaurants as in so much of the French economy. The whole thing is reminiscent of Seventies, three-day-week, “Sick Man of Europe” Britain.
For the sad truth is that when I was in Provence, not just lunch in a restaurant, but dinner too, was something to be avoided if at all possible.
