Book review: Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France

WE ALL CONSTRUCT THE PLACES we love, as well as respond to them. I spend as much time as I can in a rural part of France and the reasons I love it are eclectic, to put it mildly: limestone landscapes, Romanesque art and architecture, orchids and nightingales... But, like most Francophiles, I'm also deeply invested in the food and wine.

I remember the first time I tasted Marcillac wine in the Aveyron, before it was commonly exported; the first time I ate salade au Roquefort et aux noix; that evening when, after driving all day down the N20, we stopped randomly at a family-run auberge and were served dishes that lived up even to the expectations that reading Elizabeth David had created.

That's a France of the mind, though, a France of memory. The facts of contemporary France are different. Now, every time you visit an historic town, even though you may still find a superb food market in the centre, you must first pass by, on the outskirts, a big and busy McDonald's. Like it or not, McDo is where many French people now choose to eat.

Michael Steinberger, American wine writer for the online magazine Slate, has a bad case of perturbed Francophilia. He nostalgically remembers his first trip to France aged 13 and experiencing "the Great Awakening – the moment at the table that changes entirely one's relationship to food". He had some nice buttery peas in Blois and then went with his parents to a two-star restaurant, Au Chapon Fin, in the Mcon region. "I hadn't yet heard of Baudelaire, but this was my first experience of that particular state of bliss he described as luxe, calme, et volupt (richness, calm and pleasure) and I found it enthralling," he says in the four-square way of American travellers. Ever since, France has become "an emotional touchstone" for him.

Now French cuisine is in crisis – and off Steinberger sets to find out why. Partly, it's because of general French decline, following the "three decades of dreadful governance" under Mitterrand and Chirac, which saw the introduction of the 35-hour week, early retirement, insufferable bureaucracy, growing unemployment, heavy taxation, and the flight of French entrepreneurs abroad. The 19.6 per cent VAT levied on restaurant bills has helped kill many businesses.

Innovation in cooking comes from Spain these days; the Michelin Guide has had a stultifying influence, dictating that the highest aspiration of restaurants should be to unwanted sumptuousness; the market for all but the most prestigious French wines has collapsed, fostered by the appellation controlle system complacently sending forth so many bad bottles; the big-name chefs like Bocuse and Ducasse have become gastronomic impresarios, creating international brands while ceasing actually to cook; bistros and brasseries are closing in their hundreds.

Meanwhile, despite the militant farmer Jos Bov bulldozing a branch in Millau, McDonald's now has 1,100 restaurants in France, feeding 1.3 million people a day. It is France's largest private-sector employer – and France is McDonald's second most profitable market in the world. Because they are classed as takeaways, McDonald's pays only 5.5 per cent VAT, although French people don't use them much in that way. They tend to go in groups, at regular mealtimes.

Steinberger looks hard for better news. He reports on the new restaurant movement called bistronomie, inspired by Christian Constant, which emphasises hands-on cooking in small establishments; he notes that the French gastronomic heritage is now treated with greater respect in Japan than in France itself; he detects the very first stirrings of multicultural influence at the highest level in French cuisine.

But it's hard to be optimistic, especially now there's a recession. Ducasse, Bocuse and other big names, backed by Sarkozy, may now be trying "to persuade Unesco to formally declare French cuisine to be part of the world's cultural patrimony", but perhaps that only confirms that French cuisine is looking ever more to the past.

Still, if Steinberger's favourite Parisian lunchspot of old, Ladure, is no good any more, he says he has found another that's even better: Le Comptoir du Relais. We may have to work a little harder to find the France we love – we may have to some extent create it for ourselves – but it's not quite au revoir just yet.