Questions about France

[Keith Talent]

How does one go about picking a good simple restaurant in France without outside guidance? No guides, e-gullets etc. Somewhere with good homestyle cooking.

We dined, and scare quotes should be around the word dined, in Nuit St. George in a local cafe/brasserie. We were tired of formal restaurants, wanted a break and some good honest homestyle cooking. Went to a place with a daily special of Crepes Champignon, plat choice of either Lapin moutard or bouef and tart au pommes for desert. Place was busy with locals, price was right, we decided to head in. Crepe came, it had strange "machined" looking seams, and the inside was piping hot while the outside was cool. Hmm.

Wife suggests it's been microwaved. I dismiss the idea out of hand. "C'mon honey, this is France, there is absolutely no way the local cafe in the heart of the Cote D'Or would microwave anything. Don't be insane. Microwaved! Ha!" I walk to the bathroom, look through the passthrough into the kitchen, where no one is, and see to plates covered in plastic, ready to warm. The "cook" stops chatting with friends at the bar, walks to kitchen, emerges seconds later, five minutes after a distinctive DING is heard, "cook" brings entrees. Damn.

How do I avoid accidents like the above in the future? People that say they've lived their lives with no regrets have clearly never dined on boil in the bag entrees in France.

Second, we were in Reims, Sunday night, wanted Moules et Frites, never had them in France, only familiar with the North American version. Pick a likely brasserie, crowd again looks local, moules look excellent, lots of people with big black pots on the table. Order and wait with extreme anticipation. If there is anything both my wife and I like better, I'd be hard pressed to guess. Moules arrive, lid lifted, steam rises and I'm hit with...the beach, at low tide. Not the sea, the beach, and a beach in New Jersey too, on a summer day, with no breeze. Moules are anemic rather than plump, beards occasionally trimmed, but not always, and worst of all, barnacles still attached, thus the beach/low tide funk. What the...? Horrid. Add insult and the mirapoix wasn't sauteed, the onions carrots and celery were merely thrown in raw. What the hell? Everyone else in the place seemed to be enjoying them. Anyone explain this? Are mussels really this grim all over France, or was it just an undiscerning crowd?

[Bux]

France isn't what it used to be, especially when it comes to eating. On the other hand, I don't know that it ever was what you think it might have been. I've never sauteed a mirepoix in the process of making moules marinière and I've never seen such a thing in a recipe I've seen. Moules frîtes is a dish of Belgian origin and almost unknown in France when I started visiting. It's an import from Belgium. Actually so are "French" fries if most experts are to be trusted. Celelry and carrots? Sound like a Belgian recipe or at least one from Flanders which is not so surprising in Champage. I'd not look askance at barnacles on my mussels although I suspect the unexpected visual may have colored your taste as well. The French eat barnacles. My Larousse Gastronomic says they are cooked like mussels. They shouldn't ruin the soup. I had mediocre, at best, mussels in Lille in a cafe crowded with mussel eaters, however and much better ones in Antwerp for whatever that's worth. Mussels are also a seasonal food and not always plump.

I knew France in the days when one couldn't find a bad meal, or maybe in the days when my taste buds were less developed. It's hard to be absolutely sure, memory plays tricks on us, but I'm fairly confident things are not as they used to be and bad food is common. I've always thought it harder to get a bad meal in Italy than France, even in the past and today, I find I'd rather take my chances in Spain without a guide. All that said, food is a serious matter in France and guide books abound. Why not make use of them? They're my first suggestion for avoiding bad food even at the lowest price level. I suppose one develops a sense for what to look for, but even an experienced French hand will only be able to improve his odds of finding good places and avoiding the bad ones. There's no guarantee. Sometimes it's important to compare the prices with what you might get back home at the same price.

As for boil in bag food. It's all the rage. It's called "sous-vide" and used at the best places in NYC.

[Carlsbad]

I agree with Bux. I think it's always wise to use (good) guidebooks and whatever sources of information are available to decide where to eat in France, or anywhere else for that matter, if food is a big deal to you. If it's not, then just pick places on looks.

I can't remember ever having a bad meal in France, but I always have a list of researched restaurants that is much larger than needed for the trip, and most of my dinner reservations are made before I leave home. I seldom pick a place unless there are several sources recommending it. I have to say that when I have picked places without research, I've either been lucky or I've learned how to pick the right ones.

You need reservations in advance for the best, whether it is a bistro or a three star. Next time, post where you are going on here in advance, and see what is recommended. You will get everything from simple cafes to three star wonders. You will get varying opinions, but I'll bet that even the worst of the those recommended will be far better than what you described.

[bleudauvergne]

Keith, it's the luck of the draw sometimes, really, but there are some things you can do.

How to identify a restaurant that's going to give you quality if you don't have help from a guide.

1. If it looks too good to be true, most likely it’s not. First of all, nowadays we can't expect miracles. Thus the 8€ lunch menu that includes cheese, wine, and coffee is most probably going to get you micro waved frozen food. Try and come to some understanding when you first get into a town what the menus in that town generally cost, it's common practice for French and foreigners alike to examine menus carefully. It's the law to post them outside.

What I like to do is choose one somewhere in the middle that's not the highest, and not the lowest. This way I minimize my risk of disappointment (I hate being disappointed with a meal, and I’ve found that a quality/price ratio does not always directly apply, i.e. you're more likely to have a better quality price ratio on middle ground than in the higher priced plain eating places), this way I’m more likely to be pleasantly surprised. Always try to compare several menus, even if it takes you an extra few minutes.

Second, The idea that you get outside the tourist areas and eat home-style country food like kings for a song is now myth, unfortunately. Now that reality has set in, much of rural France is extremely economically depressed, and the little towns you roll into are more likely than not to be cutting corners or buying the cheapest available to them, which is not always the local product these days. Try and always keep that in mind, and look carefully at the menus. Understand that now all over France, the highest quality local products are going to be sold at a higher price to boutique markets all over the EU. So assuming that local products will necessarily stay local no longer applies.

Third, and this follows from point 2, You not only have to get to know what the region offers, you're going to have to look further and make sure you're actually getting local product. Example. When we ate in Epoisse - I was hankering for a nice slab of Charrolais beef which is really wonderful in all of its incarnations. I didn't look closely enough at the menu at the time (although I did take a picture of it which I will paste up later). At the bottom, in small wording there's a disclaimer about the beef. That should have set the alarm bells ringing... "All of our beef is either French beef or E.U. produced beef. " I should have understood by looking at the lowest common denominator - Frozen beef from a warehouse in the hinterlands is a possibility in that scenario. In most circumstances, if there's a disclaimer, it means something. It tasted -eh-. I detected freezer burn.

if you see this, you know you're most likely not getting local beef

4. If you don't have a guide, and you just don't know, Ask. Practice asking and make it a habit. Go to the post office, buy a stamp, and ask where the best place for [insert local food you seek here] is to be found. Practice your French write it out, tell them clearly. You want the best quality, not the most expensive. People normally answer with candor when approached by someone they think is taking this seriously. Mussels, Crepes, cakes, cassoulet, etc. If you can't bring yourself to speak, you need to get the book.

5. You simply cannot judge the quality of a place by the number of people inside or the looks of the place. France is in hard times right now. People who live in a town don't necessarily go to the best place in town for a local product because they are trying to save a few bucks here and there. A price difference of 3 Euros on a pot of moules frites is enough to fill a place up with locals even if the moules are not the best in town. But when asked where the best in town are, the fixtures in town (ask them at the, post office, grocers, butchers, etc.) will tell you.

You can still get excellent food, don't get me wrong. It can be really fabulous. But it's the exception now and not the rule. Try and maximize your chances.

[raisab]

Okay I will be nice this time, Bleu and Bux are right. Do look to guidebooks and the internet when searching for places to eat in an unknown city. I have had mediocre meals in Paris and even one bad one! But then I started doing research. The same goes with my hometown of Washington DC. Egullet is a wonderful resource, John Talbot does the homework for me for Paris! But surely you must of had one good experience in France? I have stopped at little restaurants in villages and had wonderful rustic (if you want to call it that) cuisine. Mussels is a Belgian dish, but even a chain like Leons gets them right in Paris. If you are really weary stop at a cheese shop, get a few cheeses, at a butcher for some sausages, get a good bottle of wine and some bread and surely you can't go wrong, especially if you are with the one you love in France!

[Bux]

.

You can still get excellent food, don't get me wrong.  It can be really fabulous.  But it's the exception now and not the rule.  Try and maximize your chances.

←

Sadly, but true, there's a great disconnect these days between the way the French think about food and the way they think they think. There's a disconnect between the attention given to food and chefs in the press and what's on the table in homes and local restaurants to eat. There's a disconnect between the glorious tradition of French cuisine and the way that parents regard McDonald's and processed cheese as proper for children. The French are no longer raising their chldren to have a taste for "French food." Almost in opposition to the national trends a gastronomic "elite" continues to exist and while it's based on a tradition we don't really have in this country, it is dependent to some degree on educating adults who were not raised to appreciate good food.

Yet, for such a small country, they probably still have a greater number of good little country restaurants and more fine pastry shops than we probably have in the US. Certainly they beat us hands down on a per capita basis. Food in the US seems to be getting better. Certainly it has over the last forty years. Food in France seems to be on a plateau lower than it was in the sixties, but there are strongholds of the old standards and there are renaissance movements afoot in many regions.

[Keith Talent]

Wow! France has the (incorrect) steroetype of being haughty and arrogant, while e-gulleters are typlified as helpful and friendly, also incorrect if the sample size was one and raisab was the selected sample. It's weird how the opposites are true.

Thanks to all those that answered, perhaps I need to clarify a few points. First in ten days, the two meals above were the only two complete diasaters, the ratio of heaven to trainwrecks is about ten to one.

With regards to planning at home via here and other resources, that's not really feasable, outside of a few special destination type spots. We prefer to travel spontaneously, have no idea where we're sleeping that night when we get out of bed in the morning; Thus the need to improve out ability to asceratain quality prior to sitting at the table. Getting lost, wandering is one of the great joys of travel in my opinion, losing that because of the possibility of a few bad meals just wouldn't be worth it.

I love France, and I love the food, I was suprised at how bad these two meals were in a country that in previous visits seemed to serve amazing meals at any random place, regardlesss of price or appearance. I always maintained that Paris was a place where a bad meal was impossible, average perhaps, but bad? C'est impossible.

Asking a local where to go seems to work very well approx. 50% of the time for us. Occasionally you get directed back into the tourist area, or worse, ask someone that doesn't know/like/care about food and they just give you bad advice. Although when they do tend do get it right, or more accurately you ask the right question of the right person, the results are brilliant.

I guess if my initial post sounded cynical, it was caused by the disappointment of seeing the curtain whipped aside and diiscovering the truth that France has some crappy food too, just like everywhere else.

Thanks again to everyone that took the time to add their two cents.

[kerriar]

When faced with the situation Keith Talent describes, one strategy which has always worked for me is to ask a good local wine grower. Apart from any natural connection, good wine producers will as part of their business need to either entertain or at least direct foreign or non-local buyers on whom they depend commercially. They generally give good advice on where to stay – I've got some very good chamber d'hôtes in this way as well as good restaurants.

I don't think you even need to buy from them – particularly if you have come from afar and have obviously limited capacity to carry wine on a plane – a tasting session can be honestly ended with a question along the lines of "who is your distributor in X, I would like to buy your wines if they available near where I live".

Word of mouth recommendations are certainly the best of all sources (and here I include eGullet) and you should certainly add the wine grower to the others mentioned.

[jayt90]

Mussels with barnacles, beards, and variable sized interiors, reminds me of wild mussels I used to buy, until the farmed P.E.I. product took over the market in eastern Canada quite a few years ago. The farmed product is cleaner, more uniform, and plumper, but not any better tasting than wild. I think I could put up with wild mussels in Reims.

[Ptipois]

Sadly, but true, there's a great disconnect these days between the way the French think about food and the way they think they think. There's a disconnect between the attention given to food and chefs in the press and what's on the table in homes and local restaurants to eat. There's a disconnect between the glorious tradition of French cuisine and the way that parents regard McDonald's and processed cheese as proper for children. The French are no longer raising their chldren to have a taste for "French food." (...) Food in France seems to be on a plateau lower than it was in the sixties, but there are strongholds of the old standards and there are renaissance movements afoot in many regions.

What you're writing is so, so true. I feel like clipping it out and putting a frame around it.

This is a sad situation. I've noticed it as well as you have. I see reasons for it, of course they are complex but I can describe two:

1) Food has become fashionable but it's no longer "a fact", to borrow some words that Marlene Dietrich once said about something different (i.e. sex). It's no longer spontaneous. It used to be that, in France, one produced and consumed good food just because that was the way it was — one hardly even thought about it. French cuisine used to be a popular affair, everybody's affair, the very air we breathed, shared by all at different levels. Now it has become an elite item, just like all the good things in life are about to become, as marketing items. I suppose (and I fear) that the same thing will happen, gradually, to other places in the world with a culinary tradition, like some Asian countries.

And 2) French food has been confiscated by the chefs. This may sound blunt but I'm standing up for it. I'm not thinking of real persons, of a conscious action at all — I'm thinking of a symbolic figure: the Chef figure, the authority, playing Indian chief with his chef's hat on, the only one who is supposed to know about food nowadays. Chefs have been around for a long time. They have always embodied culinary excellence, but until recently they were not the only ones. There were "mères", there were household cooks, there were simple inn and auberge cooks, bistrot owners, family housewives ; good cooking used to be better distributed amongst the population, and good cooking used to be cheap and available to nearly everybody.

Now it seems that the only authorities about cooking are chefs, professional-trained male chefs in 99,99 per cent of the cases. You're mentioning the Sixties as the terminus post quem: isn't that significant? What happened to French cuisine in the early 70's? Nouvelle Cuisine, while it had some interesting and positive effects (no phenomenon is neutral, and none is one-sided), was the starting point of a large movement that, by and by, removed good food from the home, from women and from simple, popular eating places, restricting it to the secret savoir-faire of those in the know. More than thirty years later, you can see the result in a country that used to be famous for its simple, delicious, cheap food all over the territory: except for a few remaining exceptions, good food is available only if you have the knowledge and the money. And simplicity, cheap pricing, unaffectedness is gradually disappearing; so is personality and individuality, which is paradoxical when cooking is now centered on the personality of chefs. In spite of this stress on personality, "innovation" and "creativity", originality (the thing that made some country inn's cooking inimitable or some lady cuisinière's dishes unmistakable) has become a very rare thing indeed.

[Keith Talent]

Bux - I was suprised at your statement that you've never sauteed the mirepoix for moules mariniere, I googled moules mariniere recipes and the top five pages displayed all call for the onion to be softened, not like that it's all that important, but interesting none the less.

[bleudauvergne]

Food has become fashionable but it's no longer "a fact", to borrow some words that Marlene Dietrich once said about something different (i.e. sex). It's no longer spontaneous. It used to be that, in France, one produced and consumed good food just because that was the way it was — one hardly even thought about it. French cuisine used to be a popular affair, everybody's affair, the very air we breathed, shared by all at different levels.

One thing that struck me when I first came here was the way almost everyone would lapse into a discussion about food in one way or another almost everywhere you go. I mean you're walking down the street and the garbage men are talking about food, people o the bus are talking about food, people on the street, in the stores, etc. This is not a myth, almost everyone you meet has a sincere interest in and suprising knowledge about food. When I first started entertaining I thought it was wierd that every time I served something, especially something they were not familliar with, my French guests all tried to list all of the ingredients. The focus on food actually made me uncomfortable at first because in my mind they were supposed to simply enjoy it and not deconstuct in a long drawn out discussion. But then I realized that France is at heart a nation of foodies.

I did not grow up here but I believe what ptpois says. I can only imagine what it must have been like many years ago when there was more to enjoy.

But the hypermaches are continuing to be built, and global logistics and superfarms take over providing for the masses. The seasons are dissapearing in the stores.

[John Talbott]

Egullet is a wonderful resource, John Talbot does the homework for me for Paris!

←

Since my name was used, and very nicely, indeed, I have to plunge in here. One is never sure. You do the research, you search eGullet, the guidebooks, the newspapers, the friends, colleagues and trusted sources and still you go wrong. When Colette and I travel outside Paris, rare but true, we carry a bag of books, we ask, we try, and as our 3rd experience in Sicily (see the Circumnavigating Sicily thread) a few weeks ago ago demonstrates - you win a few, you lose a few. So I guess there's no sure thing, but whatever was? But when you hit it, isn't it great?

[markk]

Occasionally you get directed back into the tourist area, or worse, ask someone that doesn't know/like/care about food and they just give you bad advice. Although when they do tend do get it right, or more accurately you ask the right question of the right person, the results are brilliant.

Well, I wasn't going to chime in, knowing my response would be long and possibly perceived as off-the-wall... until I read this comment, which is, of course, right on the money! So here goes nothing...

In the early 1970's I was in Verona (Italy) with a friend who was a native of Milan. Neither of us had ever been to Verona, although he had the advantage of being fluent in Italian. When it came time for our first meal in the city, we were strolling around. He detoured because of a chubby postman he saw down the street, and went over and asked him for a restaurant recommendation. They had a short discussion, and my friend got directions to a nearby place where we had a simple but fantastic meal. "You see" said my Milanese friend, "the secret is to find an overweight public servant, and ask them to suggest a place. You want somebody overweight - that means that they like to eat. And you want somebody like a public servant, because that means that they aren't rich and will have found places with great food and great value!"

Well, I thought my Milanese friend was a lunatic... until I started to put this into practice. Some years later I was in the city of Strasbourg, France, and looking for an authentic Tarte Flambee. We were staying at hotel where the night desk clerk was a rather large guy who looked like he liked to eat. I engaged him in conversation and asked what he knew about Tarte Flambee and where to get it. Well, what a fountain of knowledge he was! He knew all about it, enough to tell me that a proper one couldn't be had in the city itself, but required a venture into the nearby countryside. Then he recommended a place about a half-hour outside the city, and lucky for me I had a car - but also very lucky for me that I had asked him. This was a little place in the middle of nowhere, and everything that they cooked us was the quality of local food that you dream of when you travel in Europe. But the point of my story is that I learned the lesson, and have gone out of my way to rely on it over the years - look for somebody who looks like they like to eat (i.e. fat), and probably isn't rolling in money - indeed somebody at the Post Office or somebody working in a local shop, and ask them for a suggestion. I'm not bashful about doing this - more often than not you get a very knowing and enthusiastic response, and a great local meal. It's somewhat of a strange thing to bring yourself to do, but well worth it if you like to eat. In fact, once in a crowded Parisian brasserie, two tables opened up at once and although the host started to seat me at the one with the skinny waiter, I pointed to the portly guy I had seen waiting the other available table and said I wanted that guy instead. The waiter in question of course asked me why, and so I rubbed my own considerable stomach in response and said "I'll eat better." Well, I made the quickest friend ever, and I was steered towards the best meal I could have hoped for. People who like to eat are eager to share their suggestions, and they're worth seeking out when you travel.

Edited November 20, 2004 by markk (log)

[Druckenbrodt]

"In the early 1970's I was in Verona (Italy) with a friend who was a native of Milan. Neither of us had ever been to Verona, although he had the advantage of being fluent in Italian. When it came time for our first meal in the city, we were strolling around. He detoured because of a chubby postman he saw down the street, and went over and asked him for a restaurant recommendation. They had a short discussion, and my friend got directions to a nearby place where we had a simple but fantastic meal. "You see" said my Milanese friend, "the secret is to find an overweight public servant, and ask them to suggest a place. You want somebody overweight - that means that they like to eat. And you want somebody like a public servant, because that means that they aren't rich and will have found places with great food and great value!""

Markk that is such a fantastic post! Trust an Italian to have such a funny, simple and inspired solution! And thank you for sharing that brilliant piece of wisdom.