Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [134]
During the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror, the ovens in the kitchens of the great aristocratic households went cold, and their chefs were driven in tumbrels to the guillotine. But a new avenue soon opened to those who managed to escape execution: employment in the kitchens of the hundreds of restaurants opening to the public in Paris. By 1804 Paris counted some 500 eateries. A typical menu at that time included 12 soups, two dozen hors d’oeuvre, between 12 and 30 dishes of beef, veal, mutton, fowl and game, 24 fish dishes, 12 types of pâtisserie (pastries) and 50 desserts.
The first and most important of these new chefs was Marie-Antoine Carême (1784–1833), who set out to establish ‘order and taste’ in French gastronomy and became personal chef to such luminaries as French statesman Talleyrand, England’s Prince Regent and Tsar Alexander I. But to most English speakers, the name Georges-August Escoffier (1846–1935) is more synonymous with haute cuisine. Escoffier, nicknamed ‘the king of chefs and the chef of kings’, was a reformer who simplified or discarded decorations and garnishes, shortened menus and streamlined food preparation in kitchens, having taken his cue from Prosper Montagné, one of the great French chefs of all time and author of Larousse Gastronomique.
The most important development in French gastronomy in the 20th century was the arrival of nouvelle cuisine (new cuisine), a reaction against Escoffier’s grande cuisine (great cuisine). This low-fat style of cooking eliminated many sauces in favour of stock reductions, prepared dishes in such a way as to emphasise the inherent textures and colours of the ingredients, and served them artistically on large plates. Nouvelle cuisine made a big splash in the diet-conscious 1970s and ’80s, when it was also known as cuisine minceur (lean cuisine), and its proponents, including chefs Paul Bocuse, Jean and Pierre Troisgros and Michel Guérard, became the new saints of the grazing faithful from Paris to Perth.
By the turn of the millennium, however, this revolutionary new style of cooking had fallen out of favour and new genres and styles were being developed and explored. First came the concept of fooding, formed by combining the English words ‘food’ and ‘feeling’ and used to describe the art of appreciating not only the contents of your plate but also what’s going on around you – ambience, décor, ‘scene’. Before long it was the word in the mouths of branché (trendy) Parisians and within a year an annual Semaine du Fooding (Fooding Week) was established. Fooding guide books were written, a fooding dictionary published and Le Nouvel Observateur started calling its annual restaurant review ‘Le Guide Fooding’.
But this ‘fusion confusion’ just wasn’t enough and within a few more years journalists at the now defunct lifestyle magazine Zurban were again slicing and dicing words. Their new creation was the term bistronomie, a neologism combining ‘bistro’ and ‘gastronomy’ to describe a new phenomenon that was taking Paris by storm. ‘A group of us were meeting to determine the prizes for Fooding Week,’ said research editor Sébastien Demorand. ‘We wanted a word to describe a restaurant that combined the conviviality and relaxation of a bistrot with the cuisine of a ‘grand restaurant’.’ Today the neo-bistro, usually a small, relatively informal venue serving outstanding cuisine under the tutelage of a talented (and often