Michael Steinberger, writing for the New York Times:
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.
Fascinating to think about — the impact of globalization on French food.
I’m particularly pleased to read about Japanese chefs training and then remaining in France. As a devotee of Iron Chef in my youth, I heard many stories of young Japanese chefs training in the kitchens of Paris!