Why it's hard to get a really good meal in Paris restaurants

This is a hard post to write, like telling an old lover that yes yes you’ll always be my first love, but you simply lack the power to thrill anymore.  It’s about Paris, that wonderful city that used to be the capital of Western cuisine but where nowadays it is rather hard to find a great meal.  Paris restaurants simply don’t thrill me much anymore.

Paris evokes too many clichés, but I don’t care about that, as I have a long and irrational love affair with the city.  On my first visit to Paris, when I was 18, we ate in cafés what we labeled “French hot dogs”, which were two thin sausages stuffed into half a baguette, covered with shredded cheese and toasted.  I was much more picky in my food choices then, but this rocked, and it made me realize that the French simply did food better.  Even hot dogs.  I moved on from there to discover coq au vin and other classics.  This was my first foreign trip, and you never forget your first love.  I’ve been back, and often have been happy there, but it’s getting harder.

A few months ago, I rented a short-term apartment in Paris and spent time there doing some really serious hanging out, getting to know the city again, as it’s been a while.  There are so many things I like about Paris, but one thing that let me down on this trip was the food.  The cheeses and the eclairs and such are still brilliant, but it’s the average restaurant meal that brought me down.

Good-looking plate, yes.  Monkfish with boullaisbase sauce.  And yet, the flavor was rather lacking.

I’m hardly the first person to point out that French cuisine is hardly at the top of the food chain anymore, just consider articles here, here, or perhaps here, here, and hey even here and also here.  Still, I always rationalized those stories with the excuse that French food is the same as it’s always been, just not so trendy now.  Scores of books have been published on the topic on a declining France (not just the food), their authors known as Les Déclinologues (their opponents known as Les Francoptimistes.  I’ll let you figure out the translations).

In one of these books, Au Revoir to All That, author Michael Steinberger describes one of the last makers of Camembert to use utterly old-fashioned methods, making his cheese rounds by hand.  The guy is only two hours from Paris—why aren’t the three-star restaurants beating down his door to get his cheese?  In New York, the top restaurants would be competing for his goods, and he would inspire other people to chuck their jobs and make artisanal cheese careers themselves.  The French cheesemaker just shrugs.  “Not here,” he replies dolefully.

For some time, food trends from Spain have been driving new restaurants into serving small plates and experimental dishes, and now the trend may be shifting towards Scandinavian food, with chefs going out to forage their own ingredients.  The restaurant capital of Europe has shifted to London, not Paris.

The French weren’t much interested in these developments.  They’ve been content knowing their classic dishes will stay classic.  They don’t go for much innovation, and are content to eat what their grandparents ate.  This is not just limited to new dishes; they don’t go for new flavors either.  The world has long since discovered ingredients such as chilis, lemongrass, cumin, and lime juice, but the French haven’t.  I’ve always been astonished by the relatively low number of non-French restaurants in Paris, which should be quite an international city.  I’ve known several French people who have never tried Vietnamese food, even though the country is a former colony and there are plenty of Viets in France and Viet food rocks.  There just aren’t many Viet restaurants.  French food was so good, the thought went, why change it or get new food?

A typical French sauce.  You know that egg yolks and butter and not much else are involved.

The problem, I discovered this summer in Paris, is that you can’t depend on getting a good French meal in Paris anymore.  My meals mostly consisted of two courses, an appetizer and a main course (entrée and plat) and almost always one of them was good but the other one forgettable, even regrettable.  I’m comparing this to trips to places like Spain, Portugal, Taiwan, even Hungary and Croatia and others where I am often blown away by the food.

The skill level is still high in French kitchens–I was never served something not cooked almost perfectly.  Everything was done correctly.  The problem is they’re just not so flavorful or exciting or varied.  Appetizers are simple things like eggs with mayo, croquette of something, or a plate of smoked salmon, all good but not enough to entice a plane ride.  Main dishes are largely a plain cooked piece of some protein with a canonical butter-based sauce on the side, and some uninspired starch thrown in.  Perfectly acceptable, but nothing high quality, nothing to elevate the flavor.  Can we do more here?

This is your main course, plain piece of fish with a butter-based sauce.  Small green salad, plain rice.  Nothing wrong here, but not so exciting.

Their prevalent dishes aren’t always the complicated things like cassoulet or beef bourguignon.  They tend to be things like steak with fries, things that have been so copied in diners around the world that they hardly seem French anymore.  They aren’t complicated, and they’re so often mediocre.  The most common order in a Parisian bistro is choucroute, which is sauerkraut with sausage, German food.

The French, based on all the reading we’ve all done by the fawning and faving authors, have a reputation for going to the market in the morning and dreaming up a menu that afternoon, what they call cuisine du marché.  Everything is supposed to be fresh and local. But their food sourcing has changed dramatically, and frozen food, even dishes made elsewhere, are now the norm.  Your roast chicken doesn’t come from some local small farm anymore, and your fish was frozen for perhaps a long time before it hit your plate.  In 2013, it was revealed that around 70 percent of French restaurants serve at least some dishes produced offsite.  The government had to step in and force restaurants to reveal whether their food is made in-house “fait maison“.

It’s not just tourists like me who don’t see the point anymore.  France is McDonald’s second most profitable country in the world (after the USA, of course).  They’re so profitable that Burger King has joined them, resulting in unconfirmed waits of an hour and a half on opening days.  These days, one out of every two sandwiches sold in France is a hamburger.  The French spent half their restaurant money in chains.  According to this report, 15% of French people are now obese, and 32.3% are overweight.

You could just stick to wine and cheese and not go very wrong.

Read enough stories like this one, about how French food is not what it used to be, and you’ll see a pattern: the authors remember some long-ago visits to France when the food blew them away and oh why can’t it be that way now?  I plead guilty as well.  Refer back to the second paragraph, above.  It could be that today’s realities can’t live up to the golden memories of yesteryear.  It could be that we’re more sophisticated and worldly now and we need more than just a butter-based sauce on the side to spur our delight.  We all have traveled more now and tasted more things and we wonder why the French don’t keep up.

Other irritants abound.  Do the French have something against vegetables?  Not even on the side of main plates do they appear, much less in any starring role.  Many cafés are seriously understaffed, to keep payroll costs down.  There is no such thing as doggy bags.  You want to take something home, bring your own container and pack it up yourself.  If you’re vegetarian, keep kosher, or have allergies, the French mostly could care less.

Come now Paris, we think, you’re just now discovering falafel?  And ramen?  And you’ve never tasted kale before?  A few gourmet coffee bars are opening there, because despite inventing the café (named after coffee), most places can’t make a decent cup, which is probably why the French traditionally drown their coffee in sugar.  No such thing as a pourover here, and it’s considered gauche to have milk in your coffee after breakfast time.

France has changed.  People don’t take two-hour lunches anymore, and they seem so slow to realize that butter and cream alone are not enough for flavor.  The ingredients aren’t so fresh anymore and they can’t always speak for themselves.

Even their markets are shrinking.  My second day in Paris, a Saturday in July, I went to the Rue Mouffetard, a famous market street, and then to a well-known market called Enfants Rouges.  Disappointment, both.  Mouffetard was very lightly populated and Enfants Rouges near totally deserted.  For both, I was convinced for a while I had gone to the wrong place, or had mistakenly gone on a day they are closed, but no.

The famous Salade Niçoise.  Oh, pretty, but see any flavor in that egg, or the tuna?  Not much.

There have been periods of innovation in French cuisine over the years, but there are barriers.  The demigod chef Georges Escoffier wrote the “Guide Culinaire” of 5,000 recipes in 1903, setting down the gold standard for the culture, and getting away from that has been tough.  The Nouvelle Cuisine movement of the 1970s and 80s was somewhat a reaction to Escoffier, getting away from the cream and using fresh ingredients.  More recently, the bistronomie movement started in the late 90s, when chefs opened small casual places that had no chance of getting Michelin stars, to be different.  But this was also a reaction to changing economic times and habits.

Nowadays, the fast-food chains Courte Paille and Cojean try to make French style fast food, similar to the “fast-casual” places that seem to be the norm in the USA.  Paris has food trucks, but not many.  The most popular one serves burgers, a truck called “Le Camion Qui Fume” that is cited by damn near every food article about France (and now, this one).  The other trucks mentioned are always tacos.  Kebab stands are everywhere.

The only foreign food seemingly integrated in Paris is North African, specifically Moroccan, Algerian, or Tunisian.  Mostly Moroccan, and mostly couscous or a tagine.  Sushi, which used to be rare in France, is everywhere now.  Asian food in general was slow to penetrate compared to other Western areas, but now I see more of everything, especially Chinese food.  There are little Asian restaurants pockets in Paris, such as in Belleville, but not nearly as many as in other major cities and word is their quality is not high.

Yet another plate, good looking, but again protein with a bit of butter, with bland starch.

There’s hope.  One reason McDonald’s does so well here is it doesn’t seem like the ugly chain that it is in the USA.  In France, a McDo is not quite a café, but they resemble them much more.  The food is better there than in the American version and it’s fresher and more locally-sourced.

Their latest trend in Paris is getting away from the rigid haute cuisine experience, even the idea of courses, which the French always called service à la Russe.  Small plates and wine bars are popping up.  There are more open kitchens and some people are actually experimenting.

My most interesting meal during this recent trip was at L’avant Comptoir, on the Left Bank, a place without tables, where you stand at the bar and order from the signs hanging above your head.  Bread and butter are communal; just rip some off.  I ate eggs with mushrooms, salmon marinated in sorrel jus, a salade of potatoes with oyster and seaweed, a single large lobster ravioli floating in lemon bouillon, and a moussaline made from smoked haddock, perhaps the best dish I had in Paris.  Before ordering a second round, I had to wait for the kitchen staff (the open kitchen is right in front of you) to finish stamping themselves with temporary pig tattoos, just for fun.

The haddock moussaline, amazing.

French food isn’t going away, and its rep will continue for some time, but they need to step up their game.  I don’t insist on lemongrass and tacos in Paris, but I want their bistro food to thrill me more.  I’ll always love the bistro experience, but right now in Paris it’s often not worth the money.  A year ago I was in Lisbon, where a good meal is €15 or less, including excellent wine.  It’s more than twice that in Paris, and wine prices are crazy.

What to do?

France and Paris are totally worth going, and you can eat well, but I would highly suggest scouring online sources for recommendations, instead of just wandering around on your own looking for a decent place.  Almost every recommended place I ate was quite good.  Almost every time I choose a place on my own, the experience was what I described above: one course would be good but not exciting, the other course was blah.

Some of my favorite resources to find restaurants in Paris are Paris by Mouth, David Lebovitz’s list, and Tom’s Guide to Paris.  (No, that’s not me.  Different Tom)

Some of my favorite Paris restaurants:

• L’Avant Comptoir.  9 carrefour de l’Odéon, 6e.  Experimental food.
• Chez Janou.  2 rue Roger Verlomme, 3e.  Provençal food.
• Breizh Café.  109 rue Vieille du Temple, 3e.  Very modern take on crepes and cider
• Les Philosophes.  28 rue Vieille du Temple, 4e.  French bistro.  Great wine list.
• Coinstot Vino.  26 bis, Passage des Panoramas 2e.  Modern French, natural wines.
• Le Trumilou.  84 quai de l’Hôtel de Ville 4e.  Classic French bistro fare.
• Gai Moulin Bistro.  10 Rue St. Merri, 4e.  Classic and some modern bistro fare.

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