Can Anyone Save French Food?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/magazine/can-anyone-save-french-food.html

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Last year, outraged headlines worldwide announced that as many as 70 percent of the restaurants in France were using ready-made meals produced offsite at large industrial kitchens. The real surprise was that anyone was surprised. France’s culinary tradition has been withering for decades, the decline reflected in any number of data points — from the disappearance of raw-milk cheeses (less than 10 percent of all French cheeses are lait cru now) to the fall in French wine consumption (down by more than 50 percent since the 1960s) to the fact that France has become McDonald’s’ second-most-profitable market in the world. Since the late 1990s, Paris has come to be regarded as a dull, predictable food city. The real excitement is in London, Tokyo, New York, Copenhagen, San Sebastian.

Suddenly, though, Paris is showing signs of renewed vigor, much of it coming from an unexpected source: Young foreign chefs. The city’s most-sought-after tables now are at places like Spring, whose chef, Daniel Rose, is American, and Bones, whose chef, James Henry, is Australian. These are not restaurants serving foreign dishes; they are restaurants serving French fare that happens to be produced by non-French chefs. At the same time, the most talked-about French chef in Paris these days, Gregory Marchand, did much of his training in New York and London and brings a distinctly Anglo-American sensibility to cooking and hospitality. As a group, these chefs are reviving an artisanal spirit that had largely vanished from French food culture, composing menus based entirely on what’s available in the market on a given day and cultivating relationships with individual vendors. (“I have 16 different suppliers for the four dishes on the menu,” Rose says. “It’s kind of crazy.”)

Twenty years ago, the idea of an American or an Australian cooking French food worthy of discerning Parisians would have been dismissed as laughable. But diners in Paris are yearning for the sense of adventurousness and fun that prevails in other international cities. As Simone Tondo, the young Italian chef behind Roseval, puts it: “They want Paris to be New York.” This openness expresses itself in the embrace of foreign wines (which were rarely found on wine lists in Paris a decade ago), in the long lines for the gourmet hamburgers that the American Kristin Frederick serves from her food truck (another phenomenon that has now reached Paris) and in the acceptance of the idea that an Illinois native like Rose can make French food every bit as authentic, sophisticated and delicious as a chef from Lyon.

The stirrings of insurrection began in the late ‘90s, with the advent of the bistronomie movement, during which some of the city’s most talented young French chefs eschewed the quest for Michelin stars in favor of opening no-frills bistros serving upscale fare at modest prices. (For generations of French chefs, it has been an article of faith that the more sumptuous the setting, the more likely a restaurant is to win Michelin’s approbation.) But the food they were serving was, on the whole, pretty conservative — classic French bistro fare made in a lighter style. Moreover, bistronomie was as much a reaction to economic circumstance — a weak French economy was a powerful disincentive to open luxury restaurants — as it was about remaking French cuisine.

Today diners are flocking to restaurants acclaimed by publications like Omnivore and Le Fooding, which focus on “young” cuisine and are at the forefront of the love of the new that is sweeping Paris. “The food scene is the strongest cultural movement in France right now,” Luc Dubanchet, Omnivore’s founder, told me recently. “For this generation, it’s what music was in the ‘60s and ‘70s.” In his view, this is now a watershed moment in French food history. The nouvelle-cuisine movement, which made French cooking lighter and more seasonal in orientation, was the last time French cuisine underwent a major overhaul. But that was primarily a revolt by a new generation of French chefs who, caught up in the revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s, wanted to liberate themselves from Escoffier classicism. What’s different today is that change is being led not from the kitchen but from the dining room. For the first time, Dubanchet says, young restaurantgoers are seizing control of France’s culinary tradition and making it their own.

In embracing expat chefs like Henry, these patrons are also signaling that French cuisine no longer belongs exclusively to the French. In 2010, the French food establishment succeeded in getting Unesco to designate what was termed “the gastronomic meal of the French” as part of the world’s cultural patrimony. The effort to win Unesco recognition generated some criticism in France, both because it was viewed as consecrating the idea that French cuisine had become an artifact, a museum piece, and because it was seen as an expression of French chauvinism. Regardless of the judgment of world bodies, what matters is what’s happening in the kitchens and dining rooms of the most exciting restaurants in Paris. The food there, for the first time in a long time, is very much alive.

BONES

The son of an Australian foreign-affairs official, James Henry lived as a child in Canberra, Paris, Riyadh and San Francisco before ultimately settling in Brisbane. He moved to Paris in 2010 and opened Bones to instant praise in January 2013. His menu changes daily and is based on seasonality and relationships with individual purveyors, like the farmer from the Ardèche who drives to Paris each week to drop off fruits and vegetables at Bones and a few other restaurants. Henry also makes his own charcuterie and churns his own butter. He demurs when asked if Bones serves French cuisine — “We use French product, but I don’t know how to describe it” — while suggesting that his ultra-artisanal approach has been instrumental in winning over French critics and diners. “It’s a way of touching a French person’s heart.”

ROSEVAL

When you talk to expatriate French chefs in London and New York, the constant refrain is it is too expensive to open a restaurant in France and there is too much red tape. The regulatory hurdles are steep, but the actual start-up cost of a restaurant in Paris is not particularly high if you are willing to open in out-of-the-way districts like Belleville, where a Sardinian cook named Simone Tondo and an Anglo-American cook named Michael Greenwold opened Roseval in 2012. The avant-garde wine list created by their Colombian-born sommelier, Erika Biswell, put Roseval at the forefront of the natural-wine craze in Paris. She says she has learned to be diplomatic dealing with Frenchmen intent on proving that they know more about wine than a woman. “I have patience,” Biswell says. “But I am also Latin.”

ALBION

In late 2011, two colleagues from the highly regarded Left Bank restaurant Fish La Boissonnerie — Hayden Clout, a New Zealander, and Matt Ong, a Brit — opened Albion, its name a nod to the latter’s British roots. Clout oversees wine service (including the small wine shop at the front of the restaurant), while Ong runs the kitchen. The fact that Ong is British doesn’t appear to be an issue for Paris restaurantgoers: When I had lunch at Albion recently, much of the conversation around me was in French, and Ong and Clout told me that dinner draws a heavily local crowd. One thing they have come to appreciate about Paris is that its restaurant culture moves at a slower pace than other cities’. “In London, you can be a hit for a year, then it’s over,” Clout says. “It takes a long time to fail in Paris. It is a bit of a breather — you get more of a chance to get it right.”

LES ENFANTS ROUGES

Like French cooking, Japanese cuisine emphasizes seasonality and terroir, which surely goes some way toward explaining why the Japanese have proved to be so adept at French cooking. There are said to be around two dozen French restaurants in Paris with Japanese chefs at the helm. One of the most talked-about is Les Enfants Rouges, which the 35-year-old Dai Shinozuka took over last fall. A Tokyo native, Shinozuka moved to France in his early 20s, and after half a dozen years working in the kitchen of Yves Camdeborde, widely regarded as the father of the bistronomie movement, he is now serving terrific neo-bistro fare in his own charmingly dilapidated space. A recent lunch there — crab meat and celery rémoulade in lobster broth; roasted veal with winter vegetables; Baba au rhum with a big bowl of whipped cream — was homey, totally satisfying French cooking.

ABRI

Abri has become one of the toughest reservations in Paris. It’s also quite possibly the craziest restaurant in Paris, just slightly larger than a shoe box, and the open kitchen, set on a raised platform to one side of the narrow space, looks as if it belongs in a diner. The staff is all Japanese, none of them speak English and their French is pretty spotty, too. (Not that it matters; they almost never pick up the phone or respond to emails. I got in only because I stopped by one afternoon, put myself on the waiting list and received a call at 11 in the morning two days later saying I could have a table at 1:30 that afternoon.) The enigmatic man behind Abri, Katsuaki Okiyama, trained with the celebrated French chef Joël Robuchon and also worked at Taillevent, one of the great old-guard Paris restaurants, before setting out on his own. He said he had no interest in opening a restaurant back in Japan; he wanted to “cook French for the French.”

FRENCHIE

Gregory Marchand is perhaps the most American chef in Paris — despite having been born and raised in France. After graduating from cooking school in Brittany, he went to work first in Scotland, then at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in London. In 2003, he was hired by the British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver at his renowned London restaurant 15. The experience, says Marchand, who rose to head chef, “freed me from all this French-based cooking.” What’s more, the atmosphere there — “this notion of team, of let’s make it nice” — stood in marked contrast to the rap-the-kid-on-the-knuckles approach prevalent in many French kitchens. After three years with Oliver, Marchand decided to move to New York. Though he had a job offer from Daniel Boulud, he chose to work at Danny Meyer’s Gramercy Tavern instead; he had no interest in crossing the Atlantic to cook French fare: “What was the point of going to New York to do French-style food?” When Marchand and his pregnant wife returned to Paris in 2008, he had no idea it was on the cusp of a food revolution. He knew only that he wanted to serve upscale fare at prices affordable to younger diners in a casual setting. Frenchie, from Oliver’s nickname for him, opened in April 2009. Following its success, Marchand opened a wine bar across the street and then, in 2013, Frenchie to Go, an all-day cafe and carryout shop that is the most unabashedly American of his ventures, with offerings like doughnuts and pastrami sandwiches.

VERJUS

The opening of Verjus at the end of 2012 was the next step for a young American expat couple, Braden Perkins and Laura Adrian, after several years of holding first a monthly dinner party and then a more frequent supper club in their apartment. Expat food writers and bloggers immediately embraced Verjus, but the French magazine L’Express gave it a blistering review. Perkins says that people in the neighborhood would chide him, too. “I was definitely hurt,” Perkins says. “I thought we would win over the French immediately. Greg [Marchand] was cooking modern American food, I cook modern American food. But because I was American, they closed me out.” Ultimately the many French who patronized the wine bar in the basement began to give the dining room a try. Suddenly, two years after opening, Verjus is drawing a substantial number of local diners. But hardly any French cooks. “The system in France is that you spend your first nine months washing lettuce in the basement,” Perkins says, comparing that to the autonomy he gives his staff. “I get these guys cooking right away, and the French just can’t take that freedom.”

SPRING

Daniel Rose is American by birth — and considered the forerunner of the expat invasion — but he is perhaps the most French chef in Paris. He moved to France to study the language in 1998 after earning a joint degree in philosophy and the history of mathematics from St John’s College in New Mexico. But he was quickly seduced by the flavors of the food, the elaborate rituals of the French restaurant experience and the fact that the French culinary tradition was an intellectual as well as aesthetic one. Rose attended Paul Bocuse’s cooking school in Lyon, then worked in restaurants in Brittany and Avignon; he opened Spring in 2006. Although the Michelin Guide has yet to award Spring even one star (a snub that says more about Michelin’s unreliability than it does about the quality of Rose’s cooking), Rose believes he’s answering to a higher authority: Escoffier. “I think Escoffier would understand what I’m doing,” he says. “He might even like it.” Validation comes in other ways. Last fall, Gilles Chesneau, who worked for nearly 20 years for the three-star chef Guy Savoy and is one of the most respected veterans of the high-end Paris food scene, left Savoy to become chef de cuisine at Spring. Rose says: “I spent about five minutes feeling flattered when Gilles agreed to come to Spring, and 25 minutes feeling anxiety about whether I was up to the task.”

LE CAMION QUI FUME

Introducing the French to two American phenomena — quality hamburgers and gourmet food trucks — isn’t exactly the future that the Los Angeles native Kristin Frederick saw for herself when she left a job as a traveling-nurse recruiter in 2009 to attend cooking school in Paris. The French didn’t see it, either. Acquaintances, she says, “told me that the French don’t like to eat in the street and don’t like to eat with their hands.” But she had noticed that burgers were the most popular items on the menu at the few restaurants in Paris that served decent ones. Once she got permission to bring her truck, which she named Le Camion Qui Fume (the Smoking Truck), to two outdoor markets in Paris in November 2011, it was immediately written up by Le Fooding; the next day, 200 customers showed up. Frédérick now has two trucks crisscrossing Paris, and recently opened both a sandwich shop called Freddie’s Deli — which serves pastrami sandwiches, Philly cheesesteaks and Brooklyn Brewery beer — and a popcorn bar at a multiplex cinema on the outskirts of Paris. She’s also creating a Chinese restaurant, having noticed on moving to Paris that there wasn’t much Chinese takeout there. Along with things like fried rice and noodles, she’s going to do to pork buns — “People here have been staring at pictures of Momofuku for years,” she says.