In the food world, one of the biggest stories of the last 50 years has been the waning of French culinary authority, the end of a 300-year reign.
In the latest annual ranking of “The World’s Fifty Best Restaurants,“ only one French restaurant, Mirazur, appears in the top 10. And its menu reflects modernist (”molecular") gastronomy—a recent trend of using chemistry in the kitchen—rather than anything associated with traditional French cuisine.
Since the 18th century, France had been equated with gastronomic prestige. The focus of its cuisine has been simplicity, developed as a reaction against medieval reliance on spices; instead of possessing a sharp or sugary taste, its dishes contained butter, herbs and sauces based on meat juices to create a rich, smooth flavor.
The first elegant restaurant in America, Delmonico’s, was founded in New York in 1830 with a French chef, Charles Ranhofer, whose food was considered an exemplar of French tastes and standards. Until the end of the 20th century, the most prestigious restaurants around the world were French, from London’s La Mirabelle to San Francisco’s La Bourgogne.
In 1964, the first New York Times “Guide to Dining Out in New York” listed eight restaurants in its top three-star category. Seven were French. Meanwhile, beginning in 1963, Julia Child’s hugely popular television show “The French Chef” taught Americans how to replicate French dishes in their own kitchens.
So what happened?
In my recently published book, “Ten Restaurants that Changed America,” I show how one restaurant, Le Pavillon, came to epitomize the rise and fall of French cuisine.
Food ‘Fit for the Gods’
Four of the 10 restaurants featured in my book offer some version of French food. Delmonico’s described itself as French, but it also offered American game and seafood, while inventing dishes such as Lobster Newberg and Baked Alaska. Antoine’s, a New Orleans restaurant that opened in 1840, now portrays its cuisine as “haute Creole,” but it, too, presented itself as French for most of its history.
Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California—the original inspiration for the current farm-to-table vogue—initially tried to imitate a rural French inn before becoming one of the first restaurants in America to promote local food with high-quality, basic ingredients.
But while these restaurants reflect French influence, only one consistently and deliberately imitated Parisian orthodoxy: New York City’s Le Pavillon.
It began as a pop-up-style eatery called “Le Restaurant Français” at the French Pavilion during the New York World’s Fair of 1939-1940. But the sudden German conquest of France in the late spring of 1940 left the staff with a choice: Return to Nazi-occupied France or stay in the U.S. as refugees.
