The Many Faces of French Restaurants by DIANA NG
Just as tacos have become synonymous with Mexican cuisine, and tapas with Spanish food, hearty meats in sauces like duck l’orange and escargot in garlic butter were, for a long time, the face of French food in North America.
food in dim sum baskets, save for the fear of failure and embarrassment.
Legendary chefs like the late Paul Bocuse and Joel Robuchon set the standard for what French cuisine should be, and what diners aspired to splurge on.
“When you leave the table after dinner, you shouldn’t feel like you’re full and ate too much, which might be the secret of enjoying gastronomy,” says Anthony Bertrand, director of Alliance Française and Honorary Consul in Edmonton.
For those who yearn for a more casual dining experience, French dining means cafes, bistros, and brasseries, between which you can often find similar menus all with an eclectic mix of dishes with globally-inspired flavours, and spices far from traditional French flavours. 18
For a cuisine so historic, so well established, so important that it has become the standard for chefs’ training everywhere, that is such a significant contribution to Western cuisine as a whole, there seems to be so little understanding of its defining characteristics and structure, with the categories of French restaurants often muddied and rather meaningless. Nothing prevents a restaurateur from opening Joe’s Bistro and serving British
In addition to misnomers, a blanket misconception about French food is that it’s heavy, where every meal is a multi-course display of excess.
With so many different modern interpretations of French cuisine, it’s a good time to take a look at the roots, evolution and examples of various categories.
