About 20 years ago I had dinner at a small restaurant near the station at Brive-la-Gaillarde in Périgord. It was the sort of unpretentious family establishment used by commercial travelers and those (like myself) about to put their car on the overnight motorail to Boulogne. You know the plot: red-check tablecloth, plateau de crudités, steak with thin-cut jaundiced frites, local cheese, fruit or crème caramel, a bottle of red opened and left on the table. The kind of friendly, reliable place that leaves no special memory. This one did. I was sitting there in genial anticipation of my final French meal of the trip when something awful happened: They brought me an amuse-gueule.
Nowadays this wouldn’t even provoke a pause in the conversation. Then it made my spirits sink. You think this is what you ought to do? You think this is what I expect? You think people will have a lower opinion of you if you fail to offer a dinky je ne sais quoi in a flaky-pastry whatsit? My doomy response may have been excessive but was not, in retrospect, inaccurate.The French, for all their reputation as anarchic individualists and committed regionalists, have also been ruthless centralizers and dogged followers of fashion. One minute it’s the amuse-gueule, next it’ll be plates the size of birdbaths, followed by an outbreak of courgette circles topped with hillocks of fake caviar, and before you know where you are the chef at the humble Restaurant de la Gare will be shaking your hand, bugging you for praise, and trying to sell you raspberry vinegar and his book of culinary secrets on the way out.
It’s not nouvelle cuisine and its auxiliaries that have been the villain for the past quarter of a century. It’s the turning of that style into an orthodoxy, and the craven implementation of its supposed principles by chefs whose talents lie elsewhere. It’s also the languid, preening prose of its long-time propagandists at Gault-Millau, who do not blush to begin a restaurant description thus: “Artists often feel, at a certain moment in their lives, the need once more to hear the world begin to shake.”
There is nothing wrong, or odd—or, for that matter, nouvelle—about nouvelle cuisine. The first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary may date only from 1975, but the phrase itself is as old as the mid-18th century. As Elizabeth David pointed out, “Nouvelle cuisine then, as now, meant lighter food, less of it, costing more.” Then, as now, new meant healthier and more delicate; then, as now, the wiser of the “nouvellistes” admitted that their innovations were only successful because they were based on a sound foundation of traditional methods. A fair comparison might be made between nouvelle cuisine and the slightly earlier nouvelle vague. The younger film directors were revolting against what they called le cinéma de papa, just as later the young chefs were rejecting la cuisine de maman. But with time, most revolutions turn out to have been evolutions, a fact some revolutionists admit. Truffaut quickly came to revere Jean Renoir, while Bocuse acknowledged that most of his recipes were adaptations of Alfred Guérot, “one of the great chefs, the most comprehensive chefs, of the first half of this century.”
This doesn’t mean that damage hasn’t been done. Anyone who’s eaten through the last few decades in France knows that at the day-to-day level the quality of cooking has fallen, that you never know when you will be suddenly ambushed by pretentiousness, and that generally you will eat much better in Italy. Elizabeth David recorded in 1980, “the melancholy fact that during these [last] fifteen years I have eaten far worse meals, and more expensively—a bad meal is always expensive—than I would have believed possible in any civilized country.” It is, then, a more general postwar decline, to do with loss of technique in the kitchen and changing social habits (fewer native French in the dining rooms, more uncomplaining foreigners) as well as with culinary fashion. But the oppressive orthodoxies of nouvelle cuisine concentrate and epitomize much that has gone wrong. And the matter is made worse because our expectations of a French meal remain so high. Such expectations are both genuinely based—on the sight of the rich landscape, the weather, the quality of produce in the markets—and artificially massaged by chauvinistic propaganda about the French art de vivre.
Elizabeth David first wrote about the Hôtel du Midi, in Lamastre, in 1958. Even then it seemed to her like a throwback: a modest, old-fashioned provincial hotel in an unfashionable part of France where the restaurant rightly got two Michelin stars. She found prime ingredients, skilled cooking, and reasonable pension terms. Her article, in British Vogue—unique for that publication in that it contains not a single recipe, merely a description of what she ate—acquired a certain cult status. British gastronomes have been heading to Lamastre ever since: The last-ever governor of Hong Kong, whose gratified embonpoint caused Beijing to nickname him “Fat Pang,” went there on his honeymoon. My only excuse for not having been before was that Lamastre isn’t on the way to anywhere (technically, it’s on the way from Tournon to Le Cheylard, or from Valence to Le Puy, but there isn’t much through traffic). Also, I had a lurking fear that the place might not live up to its description, that the docking of one of its Michelin stars a couple of decades ago was indicative of a decline, that the old actor was beginning to lose his lines.
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