Extraordinaire! : France Has a Taste for U.S. Cuisine

At the turn of the century, French travelers to the United States were astounded at how bad American food could be. It struck them as tasteless and unhealthful. And they had nothing but scorn for the way Americans ate so much of it so quickly.

The French turned their noses up at the huge breakfasts, found the steaks overdone and tough, despaired of so much cooking out of cans, fidgeted at the lack of wine in restaurants and complained about waiters setting glasses of ice water down on the tables. The ice water, in the French view, surely accounted for the bad teeth of Americans and, when combined with hot rolls, probably accounted for their dyspepsia as well.

The travelers knew that the situation was hopeless when they came upon young girls who had studied logarithms at school but not cooking.

‘A Bad National Cuisine’

“It is strange,” wrote educator and economist Eugene d’Eichthal in 1906, “that the Americans with their spirit of invention and progress in so many fields should be content with such a bad national cuisine.”

As Jacques Portes, a professor at the University of Paris, concluded with dry understatement in a recent historical article, “None of them (the travelers) really feared that American cooking would spread to France.”

But they were wrong. Although it has taken many decades, American cooking has finally spread to Paris.

And it has arrived in a way that would take the breath away from early doubters. These days, when the young, educated French want to show that they are, as the French say, “plugged in,” they dine in American restaurants. There are about a dozen in Paris now.

American Sunday Brunch

The signs of interest in American food are all about. A recent best-selling book reported that young French people who are BCBG--the initials for bon chic, bon genre , the trendy expression for “good style, right class”--go to American restaurants on Sundays for brunch.

A new store has opened selling such American specialties as California wines, Louisiana pecans and condiments from the gourmet products of the New York firm Silver Palate.

On a less sophisticated level, fast-food hamburger shops abound in Paris and, in fact, most cities of France.

The French Assn. of American Studies devoted an issue of its little-known quarterly review earlier this year to American cuisine and surprised everyone by selling out the issue in a few weeks. A publisher plans to reissue it soon as a book.

“This phenomenon of the popularity of the American restaurant in Paris,” said Claude-Jean Bertrand, co-editor of the issue and a professor of American studies at the University of Paris at Nanterre, “is part of the curiosity that most French people, especially young people, now have about the United States.”

Most French have a fascination for all things American these days, and it is not surprising that this fascination would finally overcome the old distaste for American food. However, the new interest must not be exaggerated.

‘Not Terrible-Terrible’

The French gurus of gastronomic taste still do not rate American cuisine highly. The Gault-Millau guide, for example, finds the atmosphere at Joe Allen, one of the oldest of the American restaurants in Paris, “superb” and very nouillorquaise (the French way of writing “New Yorkese”). But the most that the guide book can say about the cooking is “not terrible-terrible.”

Yet the intensity of the new attraction of American restaurants is undeniable. This can probably best be seen at Marshal’s, a restaurant that opened six months ago not far from two of the most fashionable streets in Paris, the Avenue des Champs-Elysees and the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honore.

Marshal’s is crowded every day with well-dressed young French professionals, many able to speak English to their American waiters. According to its owner, Marshal Backlar, a 50-year-old former film and television producer in Los Angeles, the clients include French business and advertising executives, film directors and actors, fashion designers and models, journalists, artists and politicians.

Trendy California Restaurants

Marshal’s is obviously patterned after trendy California restaurants: It boasts open spaces, tall plants, off-white walls, canvas director chairs, a wood grill, a stone bar, a few subdued and abstract paintings. Its menu features such dishes as Boston Mussel Chowder, Caesar Salad, New York Dry-Aged Shell Steak, Fresh Trout with California Chili Butter and Pecan Pie. It also has a long list of California wines.

“I wanted a restaurant that would not have the regimentation and formalities of a traditional French restaurant,” Backlar said recently. “I wanted a restaurant that would turn on the chic, branche (plugged-in), locomotive (pace-setting) French, and that has happened.”

A younger French clientele crowds into the Joe Allen restaurant in a neighborhood not far from the popular Georges Pompidou art center. Dressed casually but neatly, many fit what is known in Paris as Science-Po --a preppy style set by students, recent graduates or young professors at the Institute of Political Studies, the prestigious university-level school in Paris that graduated both President Francois Mitterrand and Premier Jacques Chirac.

Joe Allen, part of a small chain with restaurants in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and London, serves such standard American fare as spare ribs and crab cakes, offers free juke box music with American tunes and brims with American movie and museum posters. Not only are there bottles of ketchup on the table but pitchers of ice water as well.

‘Snobbish, Plugged-In Period’

The restaurant is so popular on weekend evenings that French couples can be seen waiting outside on the street for a table inside.

Jean Louis Chevrot, a Science-Po student, smiling a little bit at his motivation, said recently, “I first went there because I liked the atmosphere of a New York-style bar. It corresponded to my snobbish, plugged-in period. When you go to Joe Allen, you go to find America, not for the cooking.”

Nothing could be more exotic for the French, so used to only coffee and a croissant for breakfast, than the American brunch. On a recent Sunday, every table at Conway’s New York Bar and Restaurant was taken just half an hour after its doors opened at noon. For a little more than $10, Conway’s, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary, offers a brunch that includes orange juice, two eggs, three pancakes, maple syrup, two slices of bacon and a Bloody Mary.

Most of the customers were French.

Ketchup on Pancakes

“You can tell that the guy at the next table is French,” said an American teen-ager. “He’s putting ketchup on his pancakes.”

The interest in American cuisine took a natural turn a year ago. Jean Pierre Bourbeillon, while working in market research in Boston for seven years, had conducted a study on the prospects for selling chocolate chip cookies in France. The results of his study impressed him so much that Bourbeillon returned to France with his New Zealand wife and opened the General Store, the first shop in Paris specializing in American foods.

Bourbeillon’s customers are equally divided between resident Americans nostalgic for American food and French eager to try such exotic American products as clam chowder, cranberries, pecans, corn chips, country chutney, California wine, pancake mix and, of course, chocolate chip cookies.

An incessant boom in fast-food outlets--mainly selling hamburgers, French fries and milkshakes--has accompanied the fad for American cuisine. There are now almost 1,000 such places in Paris, 10 times more than the city had a scant six years ago.

In 1985, fast food restaurants did almost half a billion dollars worth of business in France. While some, such as Burger King and McDonalds, are American-owned, most of the outlets are French-run businesses.

Fast Food Phenomenon

Bertrand links the fast food phenomenon only slightly to the phenomenon of French curiosity about American cuisine.

“It does belong a little,” he said. “And an anti-American would say that the popularity of these fast food shops is an example of American cultural imperialism.

“But the truth is that they are popular because cheaper French restaurants are so bad. Fast food is inexpensive, fast and quite good,” he said.

“It could be that the French were attracted to fast food in the first place because it was American. But now they couldn’t care less.”

Editorial assistant Alice Sedar in Paris contributed to this article.