At the entrance to many a restaurant in France, you'll find a window or two plastered with the decals of the guides in which it appears—Michelin, Time Out, Zagat, Gault-Millau, etc., but now there's an important new label to keep your eyes peeled for when you're scanning these credentials: Maitre Restaurateur. According to a decree by Renaud Dutreil, French minister of small businesses, only restaurants that prepare at least eighty percent of what they serve on their own premises will have the right to post this label.
If you're naively wondering how a restaurant could do otherwise, it may interest you to know that the point of this new label is to distinguish restaurants where the cook cooks from those where someone in the kitchen simply plates or reheats industrially made starters and main courses and sends them out as his or her own work. Amazingly, only some twenty thousand of the hundred thousand restaurants in France are estimated to qualify for the new label, which is being encouraged by a tax credit.
The point of this new initiative, of course, is to encourage authentic French cooking made from scratch. Though it's still brand new, this new label looks likely to carry major clout in France as people learn what it signifies—a dogged attempt to preserve the authenticity of real French food in an age when huge industrial catering companies can deliver pre-prepared, microwavable main courses to a restaurant's kitchen doorstep after the "chef" has placed an order from one of the companies surprisingly sophisticated catalogues.
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