French food is the worst in the world

There are certain things that are so shocking they can only be said by close friends. And as the British have been in a close friendship – an entente cordiale – with the French since 1904, I am here to say it to our neighbours across the Channel: I’m sorry, mes amis, but your food is the worst in the world.

Such a claim needs evidence. So let’s start with that essential emblem of aspirational French cooking: the menu degustation. Over the years, as a travel hack, I have learned to shudder when I see this phrase – ‘tasting menu’ – on le carte of any restaurant, but particularly a striving restaurant in the French regions. Why? Because I know what it means: several long painful hours of elaborate dining faff as the middling chef horribly overreaches himself and relentlessly strains, foams, quenelles, macaroons, and basically destroys 98 tiny dishes of quite decent ingredients, then signs the menu and adds a photo, which is the last thing you see as you faint from terminal indigestion.

The French regions are also the place to go to experience that second fatal sin of French cooking. Repetitiveness. Anyone who has done a trip to Perigord or Ariege or the Jura knows the feeling. The first day you sit down and they dish up some local speciality like foie gras or weird sticky potato or pickled duck colon and you think ooh, this is nice, the seventeenth time they serve this, on the eighteenth day, you get an almost violent desire for a curry, any curry, pickled duck colon curry, whatever – which is, of course, unavailable for 300km. Indeed, there should be a German compound noun, perhaps dating from the Occupation, for this quintessential French holidaying experience, the heartsick-yearning-for-literally-anything-but-the-regional-speciality.

Nor does a Michelin star help you avoid this. I’ve had so many grim experiences with Michelin star restaurants in France that I’ve learned to see them as a bad sign: indicating pretension, pointless flummery, and a very hefty price, which gets worse the more stars are displayed. One of the most famous British restaurant reviews of the last decade, Jay Rayner’s withering demolition of Le Cinq in Paris, where his three-starred meal cost €600 (in 2017), is memorable not just because it is well-written, but because it is so piercingly true.

And yet, I hear you angrily cry at me over your crudites, that’s your fault for going to all these posho places, you should try the local authentic brasseries, which do the three-course menu du jour, that’s where you always find sound, old-school, yummy French food.

Maybe that was true, once; it is no longer. These days the food in provincial French bistros is commonly so bad the French have introduced a law to make it better, but it hasn’t worked. The frozen boeuf bourguignon is still despatched from its Ile de France factory at dawn then trucked into the Normandy bistro in the morning, and microwaved at lunchtime, and served to culinarily clueless and therefore uncomplaining people, i.e. the Dutch. The actual locals either stay at home and eat pizza or they go out to McDonalds (there are more McDonalds in France, per head, than anywhere in Europe).

What, then, about the new stuff: the innovative young cooks changing French cooking from the inside? You may learn about these people in more naive media, but I am here to tell hardened Spectator readers that these people largely don’t exist. Or if these innovators do exist, they are frequently rubbish.

Take the horrors of the new and Complicated French Salad – please take it, because I don’t want it. I had one of these just yesterday in the French Basque Country: it was a mixture of ham, melon, crusty bread spread with goat’s cheese, and tomato – sounds OK, right? Except they also added, lettuce, onion, unpeeled slices of hard carrot, something like quinoa, sunflower seeds, peppers, another hard rindy cheese (in case the carrots weren’t bad enough) and then they poured over all this a sweet/sticky vinaigrette of honey, oil and mustard and they called it The Delicious Owls or something equally stupid and served it in a weirdly deep bowl making it impossible to eat.

Of course, I didn’t want to eat it. Because it was a disgusting collision of flavours, and it looked like a failed, drunken vegan had stumbled onto my table, puked in my bowl and then said bon appetit. Why has French food got so bad? I’ve been thinking about this a lot the last few days, not least because I’ve just come from a gastro-tour of the Welsh Marches where the food was ten times better: more interesting, tasty, honest – basically more delicious.

I’ve decided there are multiple reasons. One is this: we’ve all caught up. French food used to stand supreme, now you can find equally good or much better food in many other countries (see also French wine).

Another problem is the Great French Culinary Tradition. This crimps French food in different ways. If you grow up in France, you may get to thinking you must be a good cook by sheer ancestry, but that’s as mad as Italians thinking they can naturally sing opera, or the average Brit presuming they can play professional football. Thus you get a lot of bad, self-deluding cooks. At the same time, the Great French Tradition of cooking means people are simultaneously reluctant to truly innovate, and when they do it goes horribly wrong (see: the Complicated French Salad).

Put another way, France is really good at conserving things, but they tend to do this by codes, laws, and traditions, which is excellent for preserving town centres (we could really learn from them), but not so good if you want a living, thriving language (looking at you, Academie Francaise) and it is potentially fatal for a cuisine, which must evolve. This state of affairs isn’t going to get any better, either – because the French have just Unesco-listed their cuisine, which means if you try and add spice to a souffle you now get locked up on Devil’s Island. France, often a magical country, is becoming a museum country, with a museum language, and now it has museum food in the museum caff.

Does this mean French food is, objectively, the very worst in the world in terms of absolute taste? No. I know this because I have eaten in Cuba and also Germany. But the trouble is the French bang on about their food like it is something marvellous and unique and really it isn’t, not anymore, not remotely, which makes it the most disappointing food in the world. And thus, in one view, the worst.

But let’s end on a more positive note. Reading this you might be thinking there is no decent meal to be had in France. That isn’t so. There is one French meal the French have yet to screw up. Yes, I’m talking about the classic crumbly croissant, with fine confiture and good café au lait. That remains as simply delicious as ever. These days, to eat well in France, you should have breakfast three times a day.