egluttony

The great strength of the French food scene is its center – the huge section of mid-range restaurants providing a very good, sometimes excellent, meal at a reasonable price. This stratum is mostly absent in the US and the UK. In all three countries there are top-class restaurants - places where you can have a sublime experience, eat inventive and interesting food beautifully presented and elegantly served. For this you will pay a lot of money. A very good meal at a top-flight restaurant may occasionally be good value, but it will always be expensive. Operating such an establishment is difficult, but the market always exists where there is a sufficient concentration of people with abundant disposable income. Richer cities, such as New York and London, can support many such places, each offering a different sumptuous experience. Paris though, is one of a few comparable cities with a wealth of excellent dining options for the less well-heeled.

The ideal mid-range restaurant provides pleasant surroundings, linen, a decent wine list and a short menu consisting of a few well-crafted dishes. We aspire to eat well here for $50 a head, with the option of making things more exotic if we choose. The occasion may call for foie gras at €3 supplementary and a good burgundy, but we can always stick to the €28 prix fixe, boisson compris, and depart contented and replete. Paris provides this experience in bewildering abundance, and this makes it the gastronomic capital of the world, not its starred establishments, unique and memorable though these are.

In the US we have plenty of low-end eateries, ranging from the fast-food joints to places where you can sit down and eat a bit better. They usually have a list of well-advertised indifferent wines and sometimes a full bar. The wait staff consists of cheerful amateurs who will readily sing a birthday song on request but know nothing about the food or how it is prepared. The menu is sometimes very long, portions are huge and you get a doggy-bag for what you can’t eat. These places are open all day, they are clean, friendly and they turn tables many times a night. Most are chains, whose offering of dishes designed in corporate headquarters is the same across the country, and the market is clearly huge. Nobody departs disappointed, since every diner knows exactly what to expect and gets it. The problem is that they aren't very good.

Far above that exist more expensive, formal restaurants covering a vast range of quality. Many are good, a very few are spectacular, some represent value for money but none is inexpensive. The center is entirely missing.

The situation in the United Kingdom is actually less satisfactory, because the low-price eatery is usually much worse than its American equivalent and descends as far as the motorway cafeteria: bacon, chips and beans eaten to the accompaniment of diesel fumes and cigarette smoke. Britain is plentifully supplied with excellent restaurants for the affluent, but few for the thrifty knowledgeable diner.

Why this is the case is not obvious. It may be due to the labor market infrastructure. France has a stratum of serious professional waiters who know their craft. Many of these can manage a room of diners single-handedly or with only one assistant, often finishing or serving individual meals at the table-side. Such a person knows his (or her) wine and can make useful suggestions. He is deft, courteous and seldom indulges in conversation beyond taking your order and “L’assiette est très chaud, m’sieur” when it arrives. He would not dream of telling you what his name was, partly to maintain a professional distance but mostly because he has no time for idle backchat. I also suspect that many of these waiters learned their craft at seriously good establishments. The best restaurants with many servers often have a cadre of younger employees in training. Do these matriculate to running their own brasserie dining rooms? They can’t all become maitre d’s.

Perhaps another reason for this gap in the US is that we haven’t a good network of food distribution, but that is becoming less of a reasonable excuse than it was. Maybe mid-range restaurants wouldn’t thrive because we have no market – our thrifty segment all goes to Applebee’s and the Olive Garden. Maybe the segment will develop - it is hard to tell. However, at this time it would be a brave man who would start a bistro with a set menu at $35 dollars for three courses.

Of course, this segment does exist in the US outside the French bistro culture, in excellent ethnic restaurants on both coasts, and some regional cuisine in the south. Unfortunately such places are not plentiful. Our food culture would be vastly stronger and more interesting if this type of restaurants was everywhere – busy every night, but not so busy that you couldn’t reserve a table by calling the same day. Our low-end would either move up, improve or disappear, our high-end would have to work much harder for its elevated prices, and we would all eat much better.

In the meantime we go to Paris, which isn't so bad.