A rich, lively book about the upheaval in French gastronomy, set against the backdrop of France’s diminished fortunes as a nation.

France is in a rut, and so is French cuisine. Twenty-five years ago it was hard to have a bad meal there; today it’s difficult to find a good one. An unmistakable whiff of decline emanates from its kitchens, and many believe that London, Spain, and New York are more exciting places to eat. Parisian bistros and brasseries are disappearing at an alarming rate; large segments of France’s wine industry are in crisis; many artisanal products are threatened with extinction. But astonishingly, business is good for McDonald’s: France has become its second-most profitable market in the world.

How this happened and what is being done to revive the gastronomic arts in France are the questions at the heart of this book. Steinberger meets top chefs, winemakers, farmers, bakers, and other artisans, interviews the head of McDonald’s Europe, marches down a Paris boulevard with "alter-globalization" activist José Bové, and breaks bread with the editorial director of the very powerful and secretive Michelin Guide. The result is a striking portrait of a cuisine and a country in transition.

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From Au Revoir to All That:

By 2007, [McDonald's] had more than a thousand restaurants in France and was the country’s largest private-sector employer. France, in turn, had become its second-most-profitable market in the world.

Food had always been a tool of French statecraft; now, though, it was a source of French humiliation. In July 2005, it was reported that French president Jacques Chirac, criticizing the British during a meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, had harrumphed, “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.” In the not-so-distant past, Chirac, simply by virtue of being France’s president, would have been seen as eminently qualified to pass judgment on another country’s cuisine—and, of course, in disparaging British cooking, he merely would have been stating the obvious. Coming in the summer of 2005, Chirac’s comment revealed him to be a man divorced from reality. Was he not aware that London was now a great food city? Just four months earlier, Gourmet magazine had declared London to be “the best place to eat in the world right now” and devoted an entire issue to its gustatory pleasures. As the ridicule rained down on Chirac, his faux pas assumed metaphoric significance: Where once the mere mention of food by a French leader would have elicited thoughts of Gallic refinement and achievement, its invocation now served to underscore the depths of France’s decline. They’ve even lost their edge in the kitchen.

French cooking had certainly lost its power to seduce. Several days after Chirac’s gibe made headlines, members of the International Olympic Committee, despite having been wined and dined for months by French officials selected London over Paris as host city for the 2012 Summer Games—fish and chips over foie gras.

There were other indignities, less noted but no less telling. In October 2006, New York’s French Culinary Institute marked the opening of its new International Culinary Center with a two-day extravaganza featuring panel discussions, cooking demonstrations, and gala meals. The FCI was one of America’s foremost cooking schools, but it was also a wellspring of French cultural influence—a culinary consulate of sorts. Its faculty included Jacques Pépin, André Soltner, and Alain Sailhac, three expatriated French chefs who had helped unleash America’s food revolution. To assure a suitably splashy debut for its new facilities, the FCI brought ten eminent foreign chefs to New York. Amazingly, though, the list was headed not by a Frenchman but by three Spaniards: Adrià, Juan Mari Arzak, and Martín Berasategui. Not only that: the other seven chefs were Spanish, too. The French Culinary Institute threw itself a party and didn’t invite a single chef from France.

Excerpted from Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger Copyright © 2009 by Michael Steinberger. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Introduction
A Potted History of French Cuisine
Aux Armes, Cuisiniers!
France in Crisis
The Pain from Spain
Star-Crossed
The Last Gentleman of Europe
Fast-Food Nation
The Raw and the Cooked
“Without Wine, It Would Be a Desert”
King of the World
The New French Revolution
“Better Than the Original”
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Index

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Michael Steinberger is Slate’s longtime wine columnist and a regular contributor to Saveur and the Financial Times. His work also appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the Economist, Food & Wine, and the Wine Spectator. He was the Hong Kong correspondent for Maclean’s, and has written about finance, culture, sports, and politics for a variety of leading international media. He lives in Delaware with his wife and two children.

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