Kermit Lynch on French restos!

Peter Creasey

Peter Creasey

Peter Creasey
In his "Summer Sampler", Kermit Lynch reporting on his stay in Provence...

I ... was told that, in fact, the majority of French restos today don't cook. Don't cook, folks. They buy frozen meals sous vide and heat your orders in hot water or a microwave. That would explain why the meals I'd had reminded me of airline fare.
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Interesting!

. . . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:
Kermit Lynch on French restos!
In his "Summer Sampler", Kermit Lynch reporting on his stay in Provence...

I ... was told that, in fact, the majority of French restos today don't cook. Don't cook, folks. They buy frozen meals sous vide and heat your orders in hot water or a microwave. That would explain why the meals I'd had reminded me of airline fare.
Click to expand...

Interesting!

. . . . . Pete
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Michael Steinberger, in Au Revoir to All That, makes broadly the same observation, not so much about preparation as about end result. Yet in the many restaurants we ate at in Brittany last summer, we had (almost) only excellent, authentic, and, occasionally, sublime meals.
 
I don't know if the 'majority' of restaurants anywhere do any serious cooking. But this lament about France is certainly not new.
 
France has its problems, but that "majority" is a misrepresentation. Quite a few restos still do real cooking. What's true is that many, many regular, 'non gastronomique' restos where 40 years ago you got a real pot-au-feu now only deal in defreezing. At that basic level you do much better in Spain or Italy these days.
 
originally posted by VS:
France has its problems, but that "majority" is a misrepresentation. Quite a few restos still do real cooking. What's true is that many, many regular, 'non gastronomique' restos where 40 years ago you got a real pot-au-feu now only deal in defreezing. At that basic level you do much better in Spain or Italy these days.
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Part of that is due to changing hygiene laws in France, too. One can no longer legally prepare a traditional veal stock, for instance, owing to the long cooking time needed. Ditto with pot-au-feu.

Mark Lipton
 
This sounds like typical Kermit shtick. It's hard to believe that someone with his wine and food connections would end up eating in thaw-and-heat restaurants with any frequency. Note the "I was told" setup for the observation.

This doesn't accord with our experience last summer in France, where we mainly ate at modest restaurants but didn't seem to encounter prefab food. Of course, that's just one small sample, but "the majority of French restaurants don't cook" sounds like a factoid. Although it's easy to see the appeal of such a shortcut for the many low budget cafe's or hotel-restaurants.

And then there's the question of what kind of prefab? I'm sure there are massive industrial suppliers of bland or mediocre sous-vide, en-boite and frozen food to restaurants. But then there's a place like Au Petit Sud-Quest on Avenue Bourdonnais in Paris, where the conserves (cepes, gesiers, confit etc) are of excellent quality and used to complement or garnish simple but good quality produce. It's also possible to make artisanal quality sous-vide cooking, in fact La Bedaine right near us in Albany does just that. You don't need a big capital investment or expensive equipment anymore.

Would well-made sous-vide be an improvement over a disinterested cafe' employee cranking out cheap plats du jour in a closet sized kitchen? I don't know.
 
I think, too, it's possible to overreact to the idea of advance preparation. Very nearly all restaurants do some, and those with refrigeration tend to use it where applicable. So then you get into the question of how much you care if Chef Franois cooked and froze the chicken or if someone else did it. If the owner picked the cheese or if Marie-Anne Cantin did. If the restaurant baked their own bread or got it from a great baker in Toulouse. Or a lousy baker in Toulouse.

At Mugaritz, everything is not only pre-prepared to the extent possible, it's pre-proportioned and pre-packaged. It's one of the best restaurant experiences I've ever had, but I'm sure Lynch would be philosophically offended and call it no different from mix-and-eat frozen dinners with those little packages of pasta, cheese, and "flavorings." And he'd be both right and wrong.

I don't think that, when and where there's a problem with French restaurant food, it's because someone delivered sous vide chicken yesterday that was warmed up today. That may be a symptom, but it's not the cause.
 
Kermit likes to troll, and although there may be large truth to what he says, there is not necessarily absolute truth. Take, for example, his comment that there is not a restaurant that he and his wife can stand near where they are in Provence. Just last April I was discussing with him a very good one that is probably only 4-5 km from Kermit's house. Maybe it slipped his mind when writing the newsletter.

That said, the restaurant situation in France is sufficiently grim if you pick blindly, and has been for a long time (i.e., decades). Not so if you do a bit of homework.
 
That said, the restaurant situation in France is sufficiently grim if you pick blindly, and has been for a long time (i.e., decades). Not so if you do a bit of homework.
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Would a random selection of restaurants in France yield better or worse food than in the U.S.? Italy? Spain? How much does it vary by region? Obviously in the U.S. a random selection in the Bay Area or NYC would yield very different results from a random selection in Kansas or Scranton.
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
That said, the restaurant situation in France is sufficiently grim if you pick blindly, and has been for a long time (i.e., decades). Not so if you do a bit of homework.
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Would a random selection of restaurants in France yield better or worse food than in the U.S.? Italy? Spain? How much does it vary by region? Obviously in the U.S. a random selection in the Bay Area or NYC would yield very different results from a random selection in Kansas or Scranton.
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True that a random selection of the US would be very different from a random selection of the Bay Area, but it's always been that way. Not so in France, which has long been proud of the quality of its food from most, if not all, regions. As for random selection of Bay Area vs. France, not really comprable. Random selection here would include a lot more chains and fast foods than in France (although they are rapidly expanding there). It would also include a much wider ethnic mix here, at least in percentage of restaurants although not necessarily in number of ethnicities. I'm happy that I know enough to eat well in both areas (and as a result, patronize a relatively few places in each, rather than exploring at random or even by popular press reviews).
 
Whether it would be different or not, one has to remember that the reputation for being able to do so (pick blindly) has not, in the past, attached to the U.S. like it has France. [edit: I see Claude was posting at the same time]

That said, I'd wager that you'd do better in Italy with random selection than you would in France. Part of that's qualitative, but part of that's just my personal opinion that mediocre pizza is better than mediocre French classics. Don't know enough about Spain. Random selection in Barcelona was unsuccessful, random selection in Bilbo was marginally successful, random selection (of pintxos) in Donostia-San Sbastian was as big a win as one can conceive.

All that said, I still prefer a folio of recommendations.
 
I regrettably don't have enough experience of Spain to opine, but my limited forays in the US, France, and Italy would rank them in ascending order. It is easy to eat badly in the first two. I've been amazed by my random successes in Italy, with the major exception of Venice, where you really need to know where to go.
 
Yes on Venice. I beg and plead with friends, acquaintances, and random passersby who are headed there to take a list of places they should consider choosing. Inevitably, they don't and then complain to me about the food.

I haven't hit one with a 18 hybrid yet, but I admit it's tempting.
 
You know, it's all so local and so quickly changing. Easy to eat really well in Piemonte, not so easy in Venice unless you have a good list to choose from; by reputation, Rome possibly not even if you have a good list unless you are local and known. Tain-l'Hermitage/Tournon used to be a real dump for eating, then suddenly within a year or two there developed many spots to eat (and drink) well.
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
Tain-l'Hermitage/Tournon used to be a real dump for eating, then suddenly within a year or two there developed many spots to eat (and drink) well.
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i used to really enjoy rive gauche...
 
I've had trouble finding a decent restaurant in certain parts of the Bay Area in the past. SFJoe full on mocked me when I texted him requesting Sausalito restaurant recomendations.
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:
I've had trouble finding a decent restaurant in certain parts of the Bay Area in the past. SFJoe full on mocked me when I texted him requesting Sausalito restaurant recomendations.
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I'd say Sausalito is like a miniature Venice in that regard. The East Bay gets pretty grim east of Walnut Creek.
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
The East Bay gets pretty grim east of Walnut Creek.
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That's East Bay? I thought it was Folsom suburbs.

East Bay does get pretty grim south of Oakland, though.
 
originally posted by Claude Kolm:
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
The East Bay gets pretty grim east of Walnut Creek.
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That's East Bay? I thought it was Folsom suburbs.
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You beat me to it, Claude, and I was born in the Walnut Creek Kaiser. To me, the East Bay ends once you crest the hills and descend into Wildcat Canyon.

East Bay Ray
 
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