Checking out at my local Carrefour supermarket in France

Day three of the second lockdown of the year in France, and I’m really missing American supermarkets.

As a food writer who’s lived in Paris for more than thirty years, I understand why Americans go weak in the knees for all things French. The bakeries! The cheese shops! The outdoor markets! Yes, France is a food-lovers paradise. Except when it’s not. And if you wonder what I’m talking about you might visit a Franprix or Leader Price supermarket the next time you’re in France.

Every summer since I’ve lived in France, I’ve returned to the U.S. to see family and friends. Why I’d never describe myself an expatriate. Rather, I’m an American who lives in France, because my career grew up there, and I’m very happy living here. But I didn’t reject the United States. I chose the world instead, because I love to eat and I love to travel. So as soon as I understood that the world map on the wall of my elementary school in Connecticut was wrong—it implied that the Americas are in the middle of the world, I wanted to live in Europe. I’m insatiably curious about the Old World’s food ways and cultures, and it’s an easier base from which to travel to other places that fascinate me, like Africa and Asia.

An essential foodstuffs delivery during the second lockdown in France

Grounded in Europe this year, because my French spouse can’t enter the United States, I miss my friends and family. I also really miss American supermarkets, because this institution of daily life has come to reflect the quality I love most about the United States, its human diversity. American supermarkets also mirror and accelerate major changes in the American diet, like the growing number of Americans who are eating organic, vegetarian or Vegan.

This is why when I return home I can happily spend hours in the aisles of a Publix, a Stop & Shop, a Whole Foods or a Trader Joe’s shopping for things I can’t easily find in France, if I can find them at all. The sad little truth is that French supermarkets are often mediocre. To be sure, they’re things travelers love picking up to bring back to the U.S. with them—sea salt, jams, bouquet garni, and mustard, but otherwise they reveal the fact that the middle-class French diet is generally less adventurous and diverse than it is in the United States, and this is a reflection of the society itself.

Oh, and by the way, of course I have been to La Grande Epicerie in Paris, which just may be the best supermarket in France. In fact, I lived about ten doors away from it for many years, and yes, it’s good, but not that good, and it’s also very expensive. It’s also very much the outlier when it comes to French supermarkets, too.

At my local Carrefour (a big French chain), ethnic foods are still jumbled together in a short set of freak-show shelves that mix expensive industrially made Asian condiments with one-off exotica like British tea biscuits, Marmite, Newman’s Own Caesar Salad dressing or pastel pink marshmallows made in New Jersey. To be sure, there are some wonderful goods not found in many American supermarkets, like pickled Moroccan lemons and couscous, a nod at France’s large North African population, but good luck finding fresh lemon grass, tofu, organic chicken sausages, adobe sauce, black beans, frozen pot-stickers or yogurt as good as the maple-syrup flavored organic sheep’s milk one made by the Old Chatham Creamery in the Hudson River Valley. And bagels, pastrami, half-sour dill pickles and deli—none of these favorite foods have gone mainstream in France.

But wait, you may be thinking. Maybe French supermarkets aren’t great because the French shop at butchers, cheese shops, open-air markets, etc. instead of doing one-stop supermarket shopping like Americans Mais non. Though this verity of Gallic connoisseurship is a major part of the seen-through-a-keyhole gastronomic image of France espoused by many editors at legacy American food magazines for generations, it’s just not true. You need the time and the money to shop this way, which is why the vast majority of the French do a once-a-week run to their local supermarket just like Americans do. Occasionally, they’ll top up their purchases with the special-occasion extravagance of shopping at much more expensive local specialty shops and the pleasure of hitting a real market.

Today, the way people eat in all of the western countries is tied to income and education, which is why the vast majority of the French eat battery-farm-raised chicken like the vast majority of Americans do. France has some of the most spectacular food in the world, but you have to be able to afford it.
American ideas about French food and restaurants and Paris are pretty intractable, too. For example, the last time Gourmet magazine did a special Paris issue, I went to an editorial meeting in New York during which I explained as the Paris editor for the magazine that the best new restaurants in the French capital were found in double-digit arrondissements, especially the 11th Arrondissement. I suggested a story on the double-digit arrondissements, because aside from the multiply Michelin starred tables found in the city’s expensive business districts, this is where the best food in Paris is found today—think Septime, Mokonuts, Le Chateaubriand and many more. When I finished speaking a pall had fallen over the conference table. Finally, one of the other editors spoke up with a passionate and slightly indignant defense of the Left Bank, as I suspected would happen.

Dining out in Paris

To their credit, editor-in-chief Ruth Reichl and travel editor William Sertl had heard what I’d said. We ultimately ran a story on “The New Paris,” but even in print, it didn’t completely efface the skepticism of the many editors on staff for whom Paris will always and only be Saint-Germain-des-Pres, now a pretty but lackluster district drained of life by high rents, luxury boutiques catering to tourists and a prevalence of pied a terre apartments owned by rich foreigners whose occasional presence can’t keep local food shops in business.

“Paris is sort of like Hawaii,” the late Los Angeles food writer Jonathan Gold once said to me. “It’s a place that everyone existentially needs to believe is perfect. So they don’t want to hear anything bad about it.” The truth about Paris, of course, is more nuanced, since there’s spectacularly good food in France, but there’s also some pretty awful stuff around, too, just like the United States.

Other things you don’t find at most French supermarkets include butcher’s counters, fish counters, a lot of organic produce, and tofu, any kind of tofu. My love of American supermarkets isn’t only health-conscious and high-brow either. I unapologetically love Trader Joe’s Bacon-Cheddar dip, and I still think of the French customs official who held up the box of Lipton’s Onion Soup packets that he’d retrieved from luggage during an inspection when I returned home to Paris last summer.
“What is this It could not really be French,” he said with the alarm of someone observing a haywire chemistry experiment. I explained that I brought it back with me from America to make dip.
“What is it, dip?” He shook his head when I translated the recipe on the back of the box.
“America is a very strange country,” he said.

I shrugged, because in some ways it is, but at least we have amazingly good supermarkets. You’ll find epic junk food—I defy you to find anyone who doesn’t love Nacho Cheese Doritos, and amazing health food—I’m always craving Niman Ranch ginger-lemongrass sausages, on the shelves of the same supermarket. You’ll also find the basic ingredients to cook the foods of at least some dozen or more other countries. This is the brilliant high-low American food shopping I’m missing this year in France.

The burger and fries at La Pie Qui Couette in Les Halles de Nimes

In the meantime, of course, I have more than 365 different cheeses, the world’s best chicken, excellent wines for less than $10, superb bread, amazing pastries, and superb oysters to console myself with until I can once again stalk the aisles of at Trader Joe’s supermarket and rejoice at easily finding fresh daikon and Thai curry paste or stock up on Organic Caribbean Black Bean Soup and Chosen Food’s Vegan Avocado Oil Mayonnaise at Whole Foods (their Black Garlic Mayonnaise is another favorite). And as soon as this second lockdown ends, I’ll also scoot down the road to Les Halles de Nimes to get my hands on another famous American food I’m missing right now in a truly excellent French iteration, the burger and fries served at La Pie Qui Couette, a lunch-only counter inside of what is one of the best covered food markets in France.

And if you’re missing Paris right now, and day-dreaming of your next trip to France, you might want to have a look at this list of spectacular AirBNB properties, one of which might be right for you the next time you come: https://www.yoreoyster.com/airbnb/paris/

The post Why I Miss American Supermarkets appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Me, my mother, and my brother John at the Trevi Fountain in Rome, 1972

My Bostonian mother, who died last Fall, was a cultural appropriator in the kitchen, and this was a good thing. Her English and Scottish ancestors had left her with only the most meager of gastronomic legacies. The totemic foods of her Boston upbringing included B & M Boston baked beans; canned brown bread, which is pretty much inedible and must be descended from some sort of sailor’s rations; frozen codfish cakes; little tins of Underwood’s Deviled Ham, a pink sandwich paste of a mysterious provenance doubtless best left unknown; and the traditional English Christmas puddings that in America are mostly only eaten in New England— but she inflected our meals with her curiosity about the world and other cultures. My father often teasingly disparaged her culinary daring, but I loved it and so did my three siblings.

Hamburger was Mom’s medium, because it was economical when she had four kids and a husband to feed. It could also quickly be conjured into a dish that dispatched us from suburban Connecticut to Cuba, China, or Italy. Sautéed with chopped onions, canned tomato sauce, sliced green cocktail olives, pimientos, and paprika, it became her version of Latin picadillo. Simmered with a small can of La Choy water chestnuts and another one of bean sprouts, plus chopped onion, celery, and soy sauce, it ferried us down the Yang-Tse to dinner. Another day, we’d have hamburger “pizza,” the meat patted into a square baking pan, topped with spaghetti sauce, a can of mushrooms, grated Romano, and oregano.

At our dinner table, we made virtual visits to Hungary with Mom’s stuffed peppers, looked forward to the Viennese rhapsody of her wiener schnitzel with an operatic flourish of fresh lemon slices and capers, and became regulars at a cozy little imaginary bistro in Paris with her Beef Burgundy, aka boeuf bourguignon, which she made with Holland House red cooking wine, a jar of onions, canned beef bouillon and a roux.

“Sometimes it would be nice to have a piece of meat that’s just a piece of meat,” my father would often say in response to a new recipe, to which she always had the same reply. “In a nation of immigrants, we get to know each other by eating each other’s foods, Sandy.”

Mom had her standards, too, once looking up from an issue of Woman’s Day to remark that pineapple alone did not make something Polynesian and another time (rightly) scoffing at recipe for clam chowder in Family Circle that rather insanely suggested you could substitute canned tuna for clams, fresh or canned.

A busy and very intelligent woman, my mother spent her years as a suburban mother—she went back to work very successfully after getting divorced when we were in college, insisting on her twin passions for racial justice and art history. She designed a volunteer-staffed program to bring art history to the elementary schools of a nearby industrial city, because she looked askance at the well-educated women in our leafy suburb who did nothing but play tennis and bridge all day. “They were privileged to have had their educations, and they should be using them,” she said.

As a child, she also scared me witless during the sixties by threatening to go south and join the Freedom Riders, the volunteers who worked with the Civil Rights movement. Ultimately, my father persuaded her to stay home but she drilled her fierce passion for racial justice into our heads the same way she shared her fascination with the cooking of other countries.

Were the dishes inspired by other kitchens authentic Of course not. In the seventies, she couldn’t get the ingredients in a New England supermarket to make them so, and no one had ever taught her to cook ‘real’ Mexican, Greek—she also made moussaka, or Chinese food. But aside from gustatory variety at the table, these feints at other kitchens were meant to provoke our curiosity and remind us that the world was a vast and culturally rich place beyond the confines of whatever might be found on the shelves at our local Stop & Shop supermarket.

If you’d suggested to that she was being disrespectful of other cultures and food ways with the dishes she made, I know she would have been mortified, because her goal was exactly the opposite. By introducing us to foreign flavors, she was attempting to fight the homogenizing centrifuge of white middle-class American culinary culture, the edible emblem of which is probably Velveeta, the processed orange cheese of no little taste and no provenance.

Curiously, though, she was often skeptical and even a little exasperated when the seeds of culinary curiosity she’d sown in our childhoods bloomed when we became adults. “When did you kids become so fancy and fussy at the table,” she asked once when I brought her some expensive fresh white asparagus from a greengrocer in New York City. The arugula I loved made no sense to her when there was iceberg lettuce to be had, because this cannonball-like green kept longer and could quickly be sliced into wedges and then slicked with bottled salad dressing; Mom drew the line at washing salad greens. And what was the point of a quart of black currant Haagen Dazs when you could get a gallon of Sealtest chocolate ice cream for less money Her bread habits never evolved past supermarket white in a plastic sleeve, and she had no interest in wine, keeping one gallon of Carlo Rossi red and another of white in her front-hall coat closet for those occasions when her wine-drinking children visited. We joked among ourselves about these bottles of wine as only being a last-resort emergency-landing delivery system and always brought our own wine, knowing enough to pick off the price tag before she went anywhere near the bottle. She remained a convinced customer of supermarket pies and cakes, and was a loyal customer of Saucee shrimp cocktail in pressed-glass tulip-shaped flutes—just pry off the lid and you’re ready to go; Progresso bread crumbs; the canned whipped cream we referred to as Jiffy Lube; and plain old supermarket-brand American baloney.

A suggestion that herbs and spices had best-before dates for a reason, which was that they faded or became acrid, was dismissed as unwanted and unconvincing bad news, and even after the canned vichysoisse made by the Bon Vivant soup company in Newark, New Jersey gave several people botulism, she clung to the cans lurking in the back of her kitchen cabinets (“Bon vivants, no more! My father guffawed the night we heard this news on the radio). Tomato aspic would always be a perfect summer lunch, and the most expedient form of garlic was powdered.

Living alone, her diet regressed to her childhood favorites as she grew older. She actually liked frozen peas and carrots, made omelettes with pennants of American cheese, and renewed her ardor for Gorton’s frozen fish sticks. And yet Mom never stopped surprising me. One of the last dishes she ever cooked for me before moving into an assisted-living home was chicken yassa, a savory West African favorite of chicken cooked with lemons and onions. She’d found the recipe in a magazine, of course, and it was absolutely delicious. “I would so have liked to visit Senegal,” she said when she came back to the table with dessert, Bisquik biscuit shortbread with frozen strawberries. “You know, there’s a huge African imprint on Southern cooking,” she added.

My mother’s gone now, but if she was still alive, I’d insist that she would have been a valuable addition to the test kitchen of any major food magazine. She knew that it was the unselfconscious culinary pastiches of other culture’s kitchens like the ones she cooked for us as children that made us Americans. For many people, these were the essential gateway which induced the culinary curiosity that often led to a sincere desire for more knowledge and authenticity about the foods and cooking of other cultures and countries. And you might want to try her hamburger pizza before you knock it, because with all due respect to the brilliant pizza makers of Naples, it was actually pretty good.

The post My Mom, the Culinary Cultural Appropriator appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

Steamed croacker (fish) in nasturtium juice at Clover

Released this week, The Michelin 2015 Guide to France attests to the good health of gastronomy in Gaul as a talented new generation of chefs are slowly acknowledged by the august institution. Among the stand-out awards were three stars to chef Yannick Alleno at Ledoyen and a star to chef David Toutain for his eponymous restaurant, both in Paris, and a star to chef Albert Riera at Le Jardins des Plumes in Giverny. So it seemed an opportune time for a little musing on the state of French cooking right now.

Blanquette de veau at Semilla

Ever since gastronomy, which is what cooking and eating are called when they’re done as much for pleasure as for nourishment, stopped being a uniquely aristocratic pleasure and went mainstream during the 19^th century, cooking in the western world has spun on a Gallic axis. This is because the epicurean culture of France, a country with one of the world’s most prodigiously blessed larders, was lavishly codified in terms of those calibrated instructions we call recipes long before the same precisely scored orchestration of culinary techniques occurred in most other European countries.

And well beyond the refined dishes that were originally concocted in chateaux kitchens, a profound love of great food and wine has always permeated French society and the country’s self-identity. The French phrase, ‘Les arts de vivre’ (the arts of living), among which is good cooking, conveys the deep seriousness with which the French shop for food, cook and consume it, and talk and think about it, which they do constantly and with real erudition.

This passionate devotion to gastronomy doesn’t look set to be changing anytime soon, and as an American who’s lived in France for almost thirty years, I have no doubt France will continue to be the ultimate culinary reference for the West and, sometimes beyond, since no country in the world has a deeper respect for French produce, technique and culinary prowess than Japan, for a longtime to come.

Why Aided and abetted by a quiet revolution in Gallic gastronomic media in all forms—newspaper columns, guidebooks, television shows, websites, and magazines, French cooking has been the object of a typically subtle but ever accelerating renaissance which began well before I arrived in 1986 with that unjustly maligned sequence of brilliant experiments and culinary innovations known as “La Nouvelle Cuisine.”

Chef Yannick Alleno’s stuffed cep at Ledoyen

But wait. What about all of those articles about how French food has become lousy, and the kerfuffle around the recently announced ‘Fait Maison’ (House Made’) label, which has been created to indicate that a French restaurant is serving food that’s actually been cooked on the premises rather than stuff bought from an industrial caterer Doesn’t this mean French food has hit the skids And what about the French passion for McDonald’s (France is one of the largest and most lucrative markets for the American burger titan) And the decline of French raw milk cheese production, and the fact the majority of the French now do their shopping in the kind of vast neon-lit hangar-like supermarkets so woefully familiar to Americans.

Well, yes, France has changed, and so have we. But what’s perhaps changed more than anything else is the way the western world perceives of French cooking, which is through an enthusiastic but erroneous prism of schadenfreude. To wit, those arrogant Frogs were always a bit too fancy, a bit too big for their britches, so let them eat floppy factory baguettes instead of cake now that we’ve got some good really food in our own country and theirs isn’t the best—whatever that might mean–anymore.

Of course, the real story—the quiet one, is much more layered and nuanced than all that. Let me begin to explain by recalling a long ago visit to Paris with my brother. For reasons I no longer remember, we decided to visit the Chateau de Vincennes during a weekend in Paris from London on a blustery February morning some thirty years ago. Following a long Metro ride, we got soaked wandering around this imposing but melancholy medieval fortress in suburban Paris. Even as supremely dutiful tourists hoping to impress ourselves and those who’d listen to tales of our travels back home by going off the beaten track in Paris, the problem was we lacked enough history to appreciate or imagination to animate the old stones, especially since that morning we were both worse than wooly headed after an enthusiastic first discovery of Armagnac in a cafe the night before. So finally we threw in the towel on anything erudite and went across the street for lunch in a restaurant in a faux half-timbered building with rippled amber panes in its front windows.

We were wearing rain-soaked ski jackets and jeans, as I recall, but Madame la proprietaire received us like lost Counts, which immediately set us up for a good meal by making us feel welcome and even a little important. Small warm flakey buttery pinwheels of pastry filled with smoked salmon arrived unbidden after we’d decided that, well, yes, of course we’d have a glass of Champagne before lunch. And just after the bubbles had balmed our spirits, a wispy breeze started to tease us even before our first course reached the table, since the fine feral perfume of chopped black truffle in a fluffy yellow blaze of scrambled egg invisibly proceeded the actual dish. Our first truffles! And this as part of a modestly priced prix-fixe lunch menu in a randomly chosen restaurant.

Steak at Restaurant Hugo Desnoyer

Then we ate veal Marengo, the dish created for Napoleon after he’d won a battle with the Austrians near the battle of Morengo in northern Italy in 1800. Hearty, savory, and saucy, the stew of tender veal braised with tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, white wine and herbs was obviously a general’s feed, and its taste thrilled us as much as its history. Next a vast willow cheese tray that creaked under the weight of its contents when the proprietress rested an edge on the table and tipped it towards us. Knowing nothing about cheese, we both randomly pointed at a few, and scored a couple of fabulously funky mouthfuls. And finally, a big bowl of chocolate mousse arrived, and clearly enjoying our puppy-like pleasure in the meal, the owner, a middle-aged lady with softly waved meringue colored hair and glasses on a filigreed resting on her abundant bosom, offered us both a little pour of vieille prune.

This meal left us elated, as did a big dented aluminum tray of freshly shucked oysters on crushed ice and a bottle of Muscadet in a brasserie across the street from the Gare du Nord the next day, and even if we went our separate ways—me back to London and then New York, my brother to Greece, we shared the troth that French food was something remarkable, even transcendental. But then what did we, or almost any other American baby boomer who wasn’t born of first generation immigrant parents, know about food in those days when Parmesan cheese for the few Americans who’d even heard of it came as a sharp powder in a green metallic tube, salad meant iceberg lettuce with bottled dressing, and cakes were made from mixes with a smiling lady with a perky brown bob in a medallion on the front panel.

Then, slowly, all things edible started to change in the United States and most of the other English-speaking countries, as a new generation slowly became interested in gastronomy, and not just French dishes with fancy sauces, but Spanish paellas and the various regional kitchens of Italy—as opposed to the garlicky red sauce version of this country’s cooking that had been billed as ‘Italian’ the world over for a very longtime outside of its borders, and even ‘real’ Mexican and Indian food. Other kitchens suddenly became part of the middle-class vernacular, too—Thai, Japanese, even Moroccan.

Meanwhile in France, the country continued its post-war fascination with a Gallic take on an American lifestyle based on the two words that have become the most common coffin nails of good cooking anywhere—“modernity” and “convenience.” During “Les Trente Glorieuses,” as the French called the thirty years of prosperity that ran roughly from from 1945 to 1975, the French middle class suburbanized and began shopping in the new supermarkets in the dozens of malls that were built to service the housing developments that came to ring many French cities. Americans like my brother and myself knew nothing about this evolution of the French diet, however, since we came to France to verify the Grand Tour adage “You can’t get a bad meal in Gaul” with expectations amped up by the new flutter about French food Julia Child was making in affluent American suburbs.

It took a while for the news to really register in the U.S., but at the same time Mme. Child was rightfully extolling the glories of boeuf bourguignon and blanquette de veau, serious change and bold but brilliant reasoned innovation was already afoot in French gastronomy. Reacting to the gastronomic excesses of post-war affluence and the prevailing boilerplate of Auguste Escoffier and his five mother sauces, a new generation of French chefs, including Alain Chapel, Jean and Pierre Troigros, Michel Guérard and Roger Vergé began writing a new chapter in French cooking.

Crayfish salad with anise gelee at Hexagone

What ultimately came to be known as “La Nouvelle Cuisine” espoused dramatically shorter cooking times to preserve the natural flavors of foods, championed the freshest seasonal produce, and rejected heavy dairy or flour based sauces in favor of jus (reduced or concentrated juices), fresh herbs, lemon juice and vinegar. New cooking methods and tools, including the microwave, were embraced, and 20^th century cuisine bourgeoise was politely side stepped by chefs who drew inspiration from traditional regional dishes, which they configured in new ways in terms of both taste and presentation.

It began so well, but then it suddenly became the object of ridicule in food magazines and restaurant columns all over the world. What made it an easy target were its aesthetics, notably its modest portions, which set it up as effete, mannerist and deeply unsatisfying, or everything the English-speaking world ever instinctively believed about French gastronomy, bis. So La Nouvelle Cuisine was mocked and discredited and ultimately sworn off by many French chefs, who affirmed the holy grail of Escoffier, or the kind of classical French cooking that had always worked so well as both Michelin Guide and tourist bait.

The thing is, though, that the basics of this modern kitchen not only never went away, but became even more important as a subsequent generation of chefs, notably Yves Camdeborde, Thierry Faucher, Thierry Breton, and others, assiduously applied them to bistro cooking. In doing so, they completely reconfigured the gastronomic landscape of France, so that the country’s globally adored bistro cooking is now served in versions traditional or modern, the later style meaning it’s informed by the precepts of La Nouvelle Cuisine. Short take: France has been rebooting its brilliant cooking for the last forty some years, and without this new Gallic thinking, the ground-breaking gastronomy in Spain or Scandinavia could never exist.

Squid carbonara at Mirazur, Menton

Against the backdrop of this relentlessly questing and innovative avant-garde cooking, however, the thing that’s confused everyone about France today is that the silhouette of the basic conversation about food and cooking has become more or less the same as it is in any other rich western country. The United States has Alice Waters and Blue Hill Farms on the one hand and Paula Dean and the Cheese Cake Factory on the other. You could pretty much parse out France the same way today, too, and in both countries the power that huge international food and packaged goods companies has over what we eat is nearly crushing, or it would be if an ever louder public debate about good cooking and healthy food hadn’t begun to force enormous changes on the food chain everywhere.

So France isn’t Oz anymore, but then maybe it never was. In fact I suspect there’s always been some really lousy food to be had in France (see George Orwell “Down and Out in London and Paris” etc.), that is if you knew where to find it. But is there any another western country that’s so brilliantly reinvented much of its restaurant offer over the course of the last forty some years in favor of cooking that’s better, healthier, more cosmopolitan, more creative, and more interesting I don’t think so. And abetted by what just may be the world’s best transportation system and a growing preference for rural rather than urban living, there’s also no place you’ll find so many spectacularly talented young chefs in the ‘middle of nowhere.’ In fact it’s probably truer today that you can’t get a bad meal in France if you have your wits about you than it’s ever been.

And if the country has wrong footed itself with crackpot schemes like the thirty-five-hour work week, which threw the door wide open to every industrial culinary short-cut you can imagine, because restaurants suddenly saw their already modest profit margins become nearly transparent, no country sustains a more ferocious public conversation about the quality of its food and its gastronomic menaces and failures than France.

As the fantasy of American style ‘modernity’ and ‘convenience’ reveals itself to have been a destructive mirage, the French are returning to their traditional food ways with a rightfully proud vengeance, too. This is why the country has so many different labels that help consumers identify regional produce, traditionally raised produce, organic produce and other measures of quality. And since France still has the world’s best produce, its most exigent system of professional culinary education, and gastronomically literate public, the fifty-year long renewal of the French kitchen solidly assures the country’s ancient role as the ballast of and most exacting arbiter of western gastronomy. France may no longer be the epicurean Mount Olympus it was once perceived to be, but this is mainly because its been so successful at teaching the rest of the world that good food not only really matters, but is essential to any happy healthy life.

The post Why French Cooking Still Matters Mightily appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

The Sofitel, New York City

“So what is French food#8221; she asked me. I very much doubt that she’ll ever read these words, but before all else, I want to thank Betty Russo for both her question and her kindness.

Several months later, I still cringe when I remember the way our conversation began. On a warm Spring night, a New Haven bound Metro North train jolted when the transformers were turned on, and then gently rocked its way out of New York City’s Grand Central Station and under Park Avenue to come above ground a few minutes later just before a stop at 125th Street. On my way to speak about my books HUNGRY FOR PARIS and HUNGRY FOR FRANCE at the public library in Westport, Connecticut, my hometown, that night, I was roiled by various emotions. Earlier in the day, it had first dawned on me that this event would be about much more than a just little speech about a pair of books I’d written and my life in Paris to a group of politely interested people. My mother would be in the audience, along with other family members and many other people who’ve known me since I was a little boy. Having chosen to live abroad for most of my adult life, I’d realized that my speech in Westport, a place I’ve always had mixed feelings about–it’s beautiful, smart and morally self-examining on the one hand and way too grossly privileged on the other, would be about splicing myself together, or reconciling the shy little boy who spent hours reading about faraway places and who yearned to know a larger and more vivid world than the one I inhabited with the adult I have become.

So on the train I was sort of fitfully reading a copy of PARIS MATCH I’d lifted from the airport lounge in Paris a few days earlier, and I was so preoccupied on so many different levels that I was startled when someone, the woman I’d sat down next to but hadn’t really seen, spoke to me.

Escargots at Benoit @pierremonetta

“Do you speak French#8221; she asked, which momentarily exasperated me. Why would I be reading a French magazine if I didn’t know the language So I nodded, and then registering that she was an older lady, I relented, and I spoke. “I do,” I said and smiled. “And where did you learn that#8221; she asked. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk, and I’m not generally much of a talker with total strangers in public transport situations under any circumstances, because I like the rare time to myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to be unkind. Maybe I didn’t feel like having a conversation, but maybe someone else really needed one. “Well, I started learning French in school–” I noticed the lady had gentle green eyes “–but I really learned it after I moved to Paris.” “Oh! So do you live in Paris now#8221; I nodded. “Is that where you bought that magazine#8221; Another nod. “How lovely that must be, especially now that you know how to speak French.” I nodded, and was still tempted to return to my reading out of some ill-defined fear that this conversation could be depleting me of the fragile social and psychic energies I’d soon be needing in front of the crowd at the public library. Then I noticed that her soft white hands, which she held together loosely in her lap, were lightly trembling. “So are you on your way home then, or is New York home#8221; I asked. “Oh, New York, I don’t think I could ever do that. It’s very interesting but I love my little garden too much to ever sell my old house in New Haven.” “What do you grow in your garden “Tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplant, corn, all kinds of nice things. Right now, though, all I’ve got is just a little bit of lettuce and some radishes.” Her name was Betty Russo, a retired seamstress who used to work in a Gant shirt factory, and she’d gone into New York City for the first time in five years to visit her son, “Tommy,” who’d just had a serious operation in a Manhattan hospital.

So I told her who was I was, too–from Westport, a food and travel writer, living in Europe for a longtime, now returning home to speak at the library. When I finished, she laughed, and patted me on the knee. “So it’s a big day for you then!” she said and chuckled. She really chuckled. I laughed, too, with her and at her, and also with and at myself. Then she said, “You know what It’s a good thing you’re doing this, and it’s going to be a big success. You just wait!.” I nodded. “Too bad you don’t have time to come to New Haven for a nice pizza, a nice white clam pizza.” I told her I have a permanent yearning for New Haven clam pizza but wouldn’t have the time. We paused, a fleeting but sweet space during which I think we were both trying to think of ways to be kind to each other in the context of a brief encounter. “So Alexander what is French food I know, it’s fancy and expensive and all that, but I’ve never really understood what it is, like I know that Mexican means tacos, or Japanese means sushi, which I wouldn’t eat if you held a gun to my head, mind you, raw fish, no thank you, but French, well–beyond quiche, I just draw a blank.”

So we chatted about French food, and I wasn’t sure if I was making much sense with my talk about produce and terroir and what have you, and then Betty, ever alert–we’d just stopped in Darien, which meant I’d be leaving the train soon, cut to the chase. “Alexander, can you give me the address of French restaurant or two in New York City One would be for my grand-daughter who loves good food, so maybe a real French place, not too fancy, but okay, a little expensive if it’s worth it, so I can take her out for graduation from nursing school, and the other would be for my daughter-in-law….” Betty sighed. “You know, well…they’re times when you do your best. She’s a very bright girl, Tommy’s wife, a lawyer! But she has all sorts of what she calls ‘issues’ with food, can’t eat this, can’t eat that. Won’t eat anything from my garden because she says the soil might have heavy metal, whatever the heck that might be.” Betty brushed some imaginary crumbs from the front of her blouse. “I think we may be spending more time together, because of my son’s illness, so think I’d like to take her out to lunch and try and put things off on a better foot between us.”

I might have wept. Instead, I told Betty to take her daughter-in-law to lunch at Gaby’s at the Sofitel New York City on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, an easy walk from Grand Central, which would mean she could arrive without taking a cab, and her granddaughter to Benoit. If you know more about French restaurants in New York, you may be thinking, but what about Daniel or DB Bistro or Batard or Jean-Georges or dozens of other French places in New York Why these?

I’d recently discovered Gaby, the restaurant at the Sofitel, sort of by accident. This upmarket French owned and run hotel most recently made notorious due to what did or didn’t transpire in one of its rooms between International Monetary Fund chairman Dominique Strauss Khan and a West African chambermaid has always been a stealth address for me in New York City. By this I mean, they’re times when I arrive in New York City from Paris so bone-deep tired I can barely put one foot in front of another, and then all I want is a really comfortable well-run hotel with reasonable prices in a great location. I don’t want a pillow menu, I don’t want a bath butler, I don’t want all of that. I just want a good well-run hotel with a little style that doesn’t make you wonder if you’re casting yourself correctly. I never stay more than a night or two, because I have friends in New York, but this little sojourn is a gift to myself to get things off to the right foot on a U.S. trip. I’d never really given any thought to the restaurant here–I’ve always gone out–but when I was there in May, the weather was almost tropical the day I got in, the heavens opened as I was walking up Sixth Avenue from Penn Station, and I arrived looking and feeling like a drowned rat. A nice hot shower made me hungry.  Still, it was pouring outside, and I was suspended in that strange but not unpleasant place  of being both famished and exhausted, so as rain streaked my windows, it occurred to me that I could look up the menu at the hotel’s restaurant online, and low-and-behold, it looked good, really good.

So I went downstairs to Gaby, where a pair of charming French speaking Cambodians couldn’t have possibly made me feel more welcome, and I had a really good meal. First I succumbed to the gimmicky sounding ‘foie gras spring rolls,’ and was surprised they were delicious–gorgeous little spools of foie gras, figs, prosciutto and just enough greenery to make it all seem healthy, and then a beautifully cooked Vancouver Bay salmon filet on a bed of crushed purple potatoes with an impeccably made beurre blanc. This meal really surprised me–it was such an unexpected exemplar of intelligent contemporary French cooking within the confines of a hotel setting–and probably because I was asking the nice older ‘Yugoslav’ waiter so many questions, chef Sylvain Harribey stopped by my table before I went upstairs. A nice guy from Bordeaux, he said he loved cooking in New York, was motivated by Sofitel’s new commitment to healthy dining in its restaurants, and was intensely aware that he was representing France in the world with his efforts. “French food is still often a little misunderstood in the U.S.,” he said. “A lot of people still think of it as rich, fancy and expensive, so  so I’m pretty point blank my cooking here. What I do is healthy contemporary French cooking, and it’s all about the produce and all about technique. What’s changed since I’ve lived in the U.S. is that I can now get such fantastic raw materials. In terms of my style, I’m a modern but feet-on-the-ground type of guy. I don’t want to eat flowers–I’m not a goat!–I want a good meal.” I wasn’t in the mood for edible flowers that night either, and what I had was a very good meal from a chef who knows to cater to a sophisticated health-conscious clientele without neglecting the wick of pleasure that lights up any good meal.

Benoit, NYC @pierremonetta

So in this instance, I was confident Betty could invite her complicated daughter-in-law to lunch here and call her bluff in more ways than one. For the granddaughter, however, I had to do some quick thinking on my feet. In days of yore, there were a dozen or so plain-vanilla French restaurants in the West 50s that were run by the families of mostly Breton cruise-liner crew members who’d decided to stay on make a life for themselves in America. To my knowledge, they’re mostly all gone now, so the type of beautifully prepared classic Gallic menus they offered have become rare.

I haven’t lived in New York City in twenty-five years, but I so wanted to suggest a perfect second address to Betty for her special dinner with her granddaughter, and happily I could, because I’d recently gone to dinner with my old boss, a certain Madame Ruth Reichl, at Benoit, Alain Ducasse’s spin on the Paris original in New York City. I’d been to Benoit once before a very longtime ago, and hadn’t particularly liked it, first of all because the food was so wiltingly removed from the mother ship and also because I just plain didn’t cotton to the idea of trying to merchandise such a profoundly Parisian bistro in a city that had such a different culinary history and produce culture. On this particular evening, the only one Ruth and I could find that cross-hatched, she was just getting out of a book promo event late and wanted somewhere easy and midtown, and since NYC pals had insisted that Benoit has evolved into a really good restaurant , I booked it and hoped for the best.

Roast chicken at Benoit @pierremonetta

As it turned out, the best was actually much better than that, too. We had an excellent meal. The almost poignantly talented French chef Philippe Bertineau–I say poignantly, because how many of his foreign and out-of-town clients can really understand just how good he is in the context of being a Frenchman charged with flying the flag of traditional Gallic gastronomic glory in New York City and cooking almost exclusively with North American produce–immediately won us over with some of the best soft-shell crabs I’ve ever eaten.

Calf’s liver with potatoes @pierre monetta

I don’t mind admitting that I made a real pig of myself during this meal either, since I evinced an urgent need for tart flambé, the thin-crusted Alsatian tart topped with creme fraiche, bacon and onions, the moment I saw it on the menu, and we also wolfed down one of the best lobster salads I’ve eaten in a longtime. Then Ruth went for the roast chicken, as I rather knew she would, and I decided to see what calf’s liver might be like in the U.S. (When I moved overseas many years ago, I was not yet a calf’s liver eating type of guy, an error that has since been lavishly rectified). Bertineau’s liver–crusted but custard-like inside, with chive-flecked sautéed potatoes, brought on a blanket of homely pleasure and also the exuberance of an expat off-handedly rediscovering the spectacular evolution of the daily  quality of American food, even in the context of a classic French dish cooked by a French chef.

MIllefeuille @pierre monetta

And finally, even though it was late and we were tired, we were having too much fun to shut down our dinner too quickly, and so we shared a gorgeous millefeuille that was sort of a communion-wafer-stand-in for how we became friends and colleagues–we both love great French food. Some other time I’ll blow on the embers of the absolutely catastrophic lunch over which Ruth and I first met each other, but for now, suffice it to say that this meal made it easy for me to tell the lovely Betty that this was where she should take her food-loving granddaughter.

Gaby, Hotel Sofitel New York City, 44 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036 Tel. (1) 212-782-3040, www.gabynyrestaurant.com Open daily. Average three-course dinner for two without wine $130

Benoit, 60 W 55th St, New York, NY 10019, Tel. (1) 212-646-943-7373, www.benoitny.com Open daily. Average three-course dinner for two without wine $150

The post “So What is French Food#8221; Benoit and Gaby Offer a Delicious Answer to That Question in New York City appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.