The fear—first unspoken, then whispered, then cautiously enunciated, and now loudly insisted on by certain competitors—is that the muse of cooking has migrated across the ocean to a spot in Berkeley, with occasional trips to New York and, of all places, Great Britain. People in London will even tell you, flatly, that the cooking there now is the best in the world, and they will publish this thought as though it were a statement of fact and as though the steamed hamburger and the stiff fish had been made long ago in another country. Two of the best chefs in the London cooking renaissance said to a reporter not long ago that London, along with Sydney and San Francisco, is one of the capitals of good food and that the food in Paris—“heavy, lazy, lacking in imagination”—is now among the worst in the world.
All this makes a Francophile eating in Paris feel a little like a turn-of-the-century clergyman who has just read Robert Ingersolclass="underline" You try to keep the faith, but Doubts keep creeping in. Even the most ardent Paris lover, who once blessed himself at every dinner for having escaped Schrafft’s, may now find himself—as he gazes down one more unvarying menu of boudin noir and saumon unilateral and entrecote bordelaise and poulet roti, eats one more bland and buttery dish—feeling a slight pang for that Cuban-Vietnamese-California grill on Amsterdam Avenue or wondering whether he might, just possibly, enjoy the New Sardinian Cooking, as featured that week on the cover of New York.
I would still rather eat in Paris than anywhere else in the world. The best places in Paris, like the Brasserie Balzar, on the rue des Ecoles, don’t just feed you well; they make you happy in a way that no other city’s restaurants can. (The Balzar is the place that plays Gallant to the more famous Brasserie Lipp’s Goofus.) Even in a mediocre Paris restaurant, you are part of the richest commonplace civilization that has ever been created and that extends back visibly to the previous century. In Paris restaurants can actually go into a kind of hibernation for years and awaken in a new generation: Laperouse, the famous swanky nineteenth-century spot, has, after a long stretch of being overlooked, just come back to life, and is a good place to eat again. Reading Olivier Todd’s biography of Camus, you discover that the places where Camus went to dinner in the forties (Aux Charpentiers, Le Petit St. Benoit, Aux Assassins) are places where you can go to dinner tonight. Some of Liebling’s joints are still in business too: the Beaux-Arts, the Pierre a la Place Gaillon, the Closerie des Lilas.
These continuities suggest that a strong allegiance to the past acts as a drag on the present. But, after several months of painstaking, tie-staining research, I think that the real problem lies in the French genius for laying the intellectual foundation for a revolution that takes place somewhere else. With movies (Melies and the Lumiere brothers invented the form and then couldn’t build the industry), with airplanes, and now even with cooking, France has again and again made the first breakthrough and then got stalled. All the elements of the new cooking, as it exists today in America and in London—the openness to new techniques, the suspicion of the overelaborate, the love of surprising juxtapositions—were invented in Paris long before they emigrated to London and New York and Berkeley. But in France they never coalesced into something entirely new. The Enlightenment took place here, and the Revolution worked out better somewhere else.
The early seventies, when I was first in France, were, I realize now, a kind of Indian summer of French haute cuisine, the last exhalation of a tradition that had been in place for several hundred years. The atmosphere of French cooking was everywhere in Paris then: thick smells and posted purple mimeographed menus; the sounds of cutlery on tables and the jowly look of professional eaters emerging blinking into the light at four o’clock.
The standard, practical account of the superiority of French cooking was that it had been established in the sixteenth century, when Catherine de’ Medici brought Italian cooks, then the best in the world, to Paris. It was not until after the French Revolution, though, when the breakup of the great aristocratic houses sent chefs out onto the street looking for someone to feed, that the style of French cooking went public. The most famous and influential figure of this period—the first great chef in European history—was Antonin Careme, who worked, by turns, for Talleyrand, the future George IV, Czar Alexander I, and the Baroness de Rothschild. He invented “presentation.” His cooking looked a lot like architecture, with the dishes fitted into vast, beautiful neoclassical structures.
The unique superiority of French cooking for the next hundred years depended on the invention of the cooking associated with the name Auguste Escoffier. Escoffier’s formula for food was in essence the same as Jasper John’s formula for dada art:
Take something; do something to it; then do something else to it. It was cooking that rested, above all, on the idea of the master sauce: A lump of protein was cooked in a pan, and what was left behind in the pan was “deglazed” with wine or stock, ornamented with butter or cream, and then poured back over the lump of protein. Escoffier was largely the creature of courtiers and aristocratic patrons; the great hoteliers of Europe, particularly Cesar Ritz, sealed in place the master sauce approach that remains the unchallenged basis of haute cuisine.
It was also an article of faith, dating, perhaps, to Alexandre Dumas pere’s famous Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine, that the cooking of Careme and Escoffier had evolved from a set of provincial folk techniques. At the heart of French food lay the pot-au-feu, the bouillon pot that every peasant wife was supposed to keep on her hearth, and into which, according to legend, she threw whatever she had, to stew for the day’s meal. French classic cooking was French provincial cooking gone to town.
I heard another, more weirdly philosophical account of this history from a professor named Eugenio Donato, who was the most passionately intellectual eater I have ever known. Armenian-Italian, reared in Egypt and educated in France, he spoke five languages, each with a nearly opaque Akim Tamiroff accent. (“It could have been worse,” he said to me once, expertly removing one mussel with the shell of another as we ate monies marinieres somewhere on the place de la Sorbonne. “I had a friend whose parents were ardent Esperantists. He spoke five languages, each with an impenetrable Esperanto accent.”) Eugenio was a literary critic whom we would now call a poststructuralist, though he called what he did philosophical criticism.
Most of the time he wandered from one American university to another—the Johnny Appleseed or Typhoid Mary of deconstruction, depending on your point of view. He had a deeply tragic personal life, though, and I think that his happiest hours were spent in Paris, eating and thinking and talking. His favorite subject was French food, and his favorite theory was that “French cooking” was foreign to France, not something that had percolated up from the old pot-au-feu but something that had been invented by fanatics at the top, as a series of powerful “metaphors”—ideas about France and Frenchness—that had then moved downward to organize the menus and, retrospectively, colonize the past. “The idea of the French chef precedes French cooking” was how he put it. Cooking for him was a form of writing—Careme and Escoffier had earned their reputations by publishing cookbooks—with literature’s ability to make something up and then pretend it had been there all along.