by Adam Gopnik
The ongoing insularity of French food, however defensive it may make a Francophile, is the real target of the Fooding movement. Their program is largely negative; what we don’t want is more of this, or This. What they do want is… whatever else there may be.
Doing some research in the French papers, I discovered the same puzzlement that I had had about Le Fooding. One magazine interviewer commented to Cammas and Rubin, “I don’t see what, exactly, in Le Fooding is revolutionary or even original—you’re searching for good little restaurants that aren’t too expensive. Where’s the novelty in that?” For that matter, a similar complaint about the conservatism of French cooking was at the heart of the nouvelle-cuisine revolution back in the seventies; its version of the Fooding guide was the Gault Millau guide of Henri Gault and Christian Millau.
Nor were the cooks who were being touted by Le Fooding for challenging the paradigm in any real way revolutionary. Le Comptoir, La Régalade—perfectly nice places, but not wildly imaginative. And, anyway, it seemed to me, back in Paris for July, that the new crisis in cooking looked about the same as the old—wonderful food, wonderful rooms, all passé by New York or London standards—and, surely, if the same crisis continues for decades it is no longer a crisis but merely a condition. It was a cheering thought. The real absence in France was not of good food but of what might be called think food—places like elBulli, or like Fergus Henderson’s St. John, where the food is devoted to an idea, whether of molecular transformations or of whole-beast eating. And, past a certain point, I realized that the absence of think food was not an absence that truly, in my heart, I regretted. Not everything has to evolve. There are enough ideas in life without having them all on your plate.
* * *
Nonetheless, I decided to continue my research. Another member of the Fooding team, Marine Bidaud, met me for lunch at L’Ami Jean, on a quiet side street near the Eiffel Tower. Where Zoé had been an embodiment of fifties French beauty, elegant and tense, Marine was more in the line of the young Bardot. She coolly explained that her values derived from her upbringing in the South of France, where her family still gathered around the table, and that she loved L’Ami Jean because it put her in mind of that tradition. She turned out to be an ex–art historian, who had done research on, among other things, Courbet’s great gynecological picture The Origin of the World. I picked at the charcuterie as we spoke. (I mention the glamour of the Fooding officials only because it is so atypical of the old French dispensation. Gourmands in the past were always middle-aged men with napkins tucked under their chins, or perhaps insolent thirty-somethings, like Gault and Millau, and never beautiful young women—or men either, for that matter. I pressed Alexandre about the astonishing glamour of the Fooding-istes, and he admitted that it was somewhat purposeful to have a staff that gave eating a more alluring aura than was always the norm in France.)
Stéphane Jégo, the chef at L’Ami Jean, had a black eye that day—the prize of a rugby fight—but his food was wonderful, varied and intelligent, and full of southwestern folk charm: slow-cooked veal shin, tender without being mushy and comforting without being dull; the usual foie gras, but here more buttery than bland; and the best rice-pudding dessert I have ever had, complete with black-cherry confit. I hadn’t had a better meal in Paris in a long time. But was it a new frontier? Could you build a revolution on rice pudding, even great rice pudding? “We need to change, we need to move,” Marine said, but the movement seemed to be movement within the same familiar thing.
Change we can eat… The Western world has been filled with food-reform movements in the past twenty years. Slow food, the Edible Schoolyard, the various vegetarian and ethical movements sprung by the likes of Peter Singer—in no other time would a highly regarded young novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer view a book about the anti–animal eating movement as a necessary extension of his oeuvre, the way a novelist in the sixties might have felt obliged to write a book about the antiwar movement. This proves, depending on your point of view, either that the reform of food has become essential to the reform of life or that, failing in the reform of life, we reform our food instead. Yet all these movements—vegan and whole beast, localist and seasonalist—share a sense that the industrialized, Americanized food economy is destructive of small-scale, European, traditional, farm-based eating.
What distinguishes Le Fooding, I was beginning to understand, was that it is, in effect, against an overly European, tradition-minded approach to food. Slow is the last thing it wants French cooking to be, French cooking being slow enough already. The goal of the Fooding movement is to break down French snobbery, in the form of its hidebound, hypersensitive discrimination, while the goal of the slow-food movement, though not put quite this way, is to build up American hidebound hyperdiscrimination. Fooding is a form of culinary futurism: it wants the table to move as fast as modern life. (And, indeed, the Italian futurists were obsessed with food, and wrote their own cookbook.) The Fooding guide is open to pizzerias; Alexandre says that it is even open to fast food, in the right time and the right place. Although McDonald’s and the like are not included in the guide, Alexandre has admitted to a certain affection for the Chipotle Mexican Grill, and can recall a welcome meal at a McDonald’s in the Carpathian Mountains.
When I pressed Alexandre about the difference between the nouvelle-cuisine revolution in the seventies and the Fooding revolution, he had no difficulty defining it. “Nouvelle cuisine manifested itself in terms of rules,” he said. “Its practitioners rejected the old rules but had rules of their own: instead of too much butter, no butter at all. They replaced the norms with other norms. We’re for liberty, for the end of categories—a good meal is a rich experience, of any sort. They said no butter. We say no rules! No rules save excellence.” He looked grave. “And another thing. Nouvelle cuisine was largely cut off from the changes in the society going on around it. It was a palace revolution. We want a cuisine of this time that is in harmony with this time. The philosophy of food in France has always bent toward the right, sometimes the extreme right—Christian Millau and Henri Gault both came from right-wing backgrounds. I find that the posture of Le Fooding can be replayed in politics, but in a different key. Not Sarkozy, but Cohn-Bendit. A new openness. An end to false boundaries between peoples, as between brasseries, bistros, grand restaurants, and the like. All that matters is talent.”
In America and England, you are what you think about eating. Tell me where you stand on Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden and (with the exception of a handful of “Crunchy Cons” and another handful of grumpy left-wing nostalgists for whiskey and cigarettes) I can tell what the rest of your politics are. People who are in favor of a new approach to food—even if that approach involves a return to heritage breeds and discarded farming methods—are in favor of a new approach to social life. But in France the philosophy of food does not break on such neat party lines. In France, the diehards for the traditional national cuisine tend to write for leftish magazines and newspapers, like Marianne and Libération, while those most open to innovation from the exotic tend to be found in the pages of the center-right Le Point and Le Figaro. An organic garden at the Elysée Palace might be a sign of surging nationalism, or of pluralist internationalism… it would be hard to know which in advance. Alexandre, who says that he now regrets his vote for the centrist François Bayrou in the last presidential election, cannot, as a rule, count on a reliable base of supporters, which may be why Le Fooding constantly needs to whip up new enthusiasts at its events. The politics of food in France cut haphazardly and unpredictably across party lines and allegiances; tell me what you think about eating, and I will tell you only that you are French.
And yet there was enough intuitive enthusiasm to bring a handful of those new-old French cooks to P.S. 1, for Le Fooding d’Amour. Organized by a new executive at Le Fooding named Anna Polonsky, a young Anouk Aimée as rendered by Modigliani, it had induced Yves Camdeborde and Stéphane Jégo, the twin princes of the French movement,
to make the trip, and several fashionable New York cooks—among them Lee Hanson, of Minetta Tavern, and David Chang, of Momofuku—came, too. There was a belly dancer, and wandering musicians, and long lines at the food tables; Stéphane Jégo’s slow-cooked lamb, braised for twenty-four hours, was, like his Paris veal shin, particularly memorable, as, in another way, were the mini burgers from Minetta.
I sought out Yves Camdeborde, and he spoke intently about his commitment to Fooding as a movement. “If we don’t do this, we’re against the wall,” he began. “The Michelin Guide approach is dead. I worked at the grandes maisons, at the Crillon. They look at the rug, and they measure the chandeliers. We’ll go right into a wall if we continue this way. What can it mean? Two stars? Three stars? Who cares?” His tone was not angry, or indignant. He simply looked over at the tables of the American chefs, passing out mini burgers as lines grew ever longer. “It’s more than a bistro movement. People say, Bistro, bistro, bistro. But what I do is not bistro—it’s aubergiste.” He looked at me keenly, to make sure I followed the distinction: an auberge is a rural inn. “I’m a kind of urban aubergiste. It’s a cuisine of complexity and high quality—high cooking without pretension. Slow food—slow food is about defending the traditions, the terroirs, the quality of products. It’s about producers. This movement is about consumers: about remaking the clientele. It’s a way of increasing the spontaneity of things.”
As Camdeborde said that, I suddenly saw the right analogy: Le Fooding was to cooking what the New Wave was to French cinema. The hidden goal was to Americanize French food without becoming American, just as the New Wave, back in the fifties and sixties, was about taking in Hollywood virtues without being Hollywoodized—taking in some of the energy and optimism and informality that the French still associate with American movies while reimagining them as something distinctly French. It had a similar cast of characters, with Cammas as André Bazin, the propagandist; Rubin as the anathematized Eric Rohmer; Jégo as Truffaut, the humanist-revolutionary; and Camdeborde as Godard, the serious radical. Like the New Wave filmmakers, these chefs had a vague sense of what they wanted, combined with a vigorous determination to achieve it, whatever the hell it was. Both were movements to remake French audiences in the light of American attitudes—to refashion their expectations as much as to create a new kind of object. The idea was that we had to change taste in order to change art. Appreciating old movies in a new way was as much a part of the legacy of the New Wave as making new ones. Eating with a new attitude was as important to Le Fooding as actually eating something new. The creative act in cooking was to change the style of criticism.
The morning after the Fooding event in Queens, I submitted this analogy to Alexandre during a walk, and he allowed that there might be something in it. He was shining with delight at the success of the launch, and was already making plans for new campaigns in France and America. He told me that he had begun work on a bande dessinée—France is a place where the adult comic book is a major vehicle for communicating information and emotion—that would expose the history of clandestine right-wing propaganda in French food writing. (It’s true that French food writing has tended to be reactionary; the most famous French food writer of the past century, Robert Courtine, was revealed to have been an active anti-Semitic collaborator with the Vichy regime.) Alexandre goes further. Even Brillat-Savarin’s far more liberal and famous definition of gastronomy’s aim—to regulate and fix limits for appetite—is, he thinks, touched by a panicky need for control. “Think how we would feel if we used the same words for the study of sex!” he exclaimed. “To regulate and fix the limits of it! Our role is to work against that tradition: to open minds, to reveal history, to change views. It should be a movement of the young.”
The most recent Fooding guide is in a way the most provocative. Nearly all the Michelin three-star restaurants have been dropped completely, there are passages in English, and, most important, a couple of new chefs have been identified who can fairly be called revolutionary: Adeline Grattard, of Yam’Tcha, on the Rue Sauval, who has invented a Sino-French fusion cuisine rooted largely in steaming and teas; and, still more revolutionary, Gregory Marchand, a young Frenchman who trained in New York and London—an unthinkable notion twenty years ago—and whose restaurant, on the Rue du Nil, is actually called Frenchie. The next Fooding event in New York, promised for September, would be, instead of once again a Franco-American conversation, a match, even a confrontation, between San Francisco and New York chefs. “We don’t want to be narrowly identified as a ‘Franco-Français’ movement, just bringing French chefs to America,” Anna confided recently. “Then we might as well be part of the French cultural ministry.”
Alexandre is particularly glad to be coming back to New York. “I grew up watching American movies,” he said the morning after the Fooding event in Queens. “America still feels so young to me. I love New York. I still see things like Momofuku that are entirely of New York. Can we make that kind of place in France?” He mused for a moment, and then brightened.
“Do you know a film I love?” he asked. “Tarzan’s New York Adventure. Do you know it? With Johnny Weissmuller? And that scene when he leaps from the Brooklyn Bridge?” His hand moved through the air, Tarzan jumping from the bridge. “I love that moment. It’s an important moment for me. It seems so, so romantic.”
16. E-MAIL TO ELIZABETH PENNELL: Salmon, Broccoli, Repentance
Dear Mrs. Pennell:
Tonight I shall make my repentance meal, my remorse meal: salmon and broccoli with brown rice. It’s the one meal I do when I am feeling guilty about all else I’ve been doing. For of course, despite all my brave talk about the relativity of taste, for all that I can reference the whirligig of fashion and the inevitability of alterations in likings, the truth is that I am as much a captive of my time’s tastes and taboos as anyone. I make cream sauces, but I feel rotten about them afterward. Guilt rises in my craw as I contemplate a beefsteak, whatever brave things I may say about the scavenger ethic, and so I believe in the holy-healthy trinity of wild salmon and organic broccoli and brown rice. It is a plate that tastes like forgotten virtue. It is the right dinner for a moment of shame.
And all this remorse, this penitence, this doubt, is directed, or occasioned, anyway, by what now seems to be my misguided romance with you, Elizabeth. The bad habit of the strategist is to go one bridge too far, and the worst vice of the overeducated is to read one book too many. It is a form of hubris: wiser to find something good, enjoy it, and not contaminate it by searching too much further. Do not discover Carlyle’s politics, or Scott Fitzgerald’s parenting, or Philip Larkin’s taste in porn. It will screw you up to no good purpose, and diminish the writer without adding to your understanding. I know this, and should have quit while I was ahead.
You see, I found the book you wrote upon your return to Philadelphia in 1904. It was full of life. Like me, you have and keep a warm appreciation of the beauty of old Philadelphia—its grid, so neatly laid out in inward-looking streets and squares with none of the relentlessness (nor the dynamism) of New York’s less perfectly ordered plan. The Schuylkill city’s spaciousness, its slight air of eighteenth-century clarity and red-brick virtue. You love all that, too, and I read all that with pleasure.
And then I found within your book a line of stark, vigorous bigotry directed not just at the undeserving but at—well, directly at me, or, rather, at my not-so-distant great-grandparents, who were among the Russian Jews who had since your youth taken over the center city of Philadelphia. And what possessed you was not mere social bigotry, but real animus. “I cannot understand, and no one can explain to me, why the Russian Jew has been allowed to push his way in [to the city],” you write. “I have heard all about his virtues; nobody need remind me of them; I know that he is carrying off everything at the University so that rich Jews can begin to think in turn that they should in return make it a gift or a bequest, as no rich Jew has yet, I believe. I know that the young Philadelphian must give up his sports a
nd his gaieties if he is to compete with the young Russian Jew who never allows himself any recreation on the road to success—I might add the fact that the Russian Jew has mastered, in a very short time, the possibilities of bankruptcy and arson.”
What particularly offends you is the presence of Russian Jews, like my great-grandparents, on the legendary inner, tree-named streets of the city, Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine. “The tragedy is that the Russian Jew should have descended upon just this section, should now, not so much dispute it with him [the old Philadelphians] as oust him from it—the Russian Jew, a Jew by religion but not by race, who has been found impossible in every country on the continent of Europe onto which he has drifted, so impossible that when that country is Holland that the Jews who have been there for centuries collect among themselves the money to send him post-haste on to England and America….” More, and then more, the old and usual ugliness, and with the usual much-rehearsed and patently insincere exceptions: The old, original Jews of Philadelphia were all right in their place.
This is, of course, in one way the standard anti-Semitism of your place and time and circumstance. Henry James shared it, and for the same reasons, and expressed it in almost exactly the same way: the Jews who had filled the Lower East Side seemed to him as remote from his ideas of Americanness as the Russian Jews on Spruce Street seem to you. I know that. I can tell myself what is true, that this bigotry was the bigotry of your people and your time, to be found in Henry Adams, too, and for the same reason: like Henry James, he had grown up in one America, and found himself in what seemed to be another one, very different and disconcerting. These are the standard-issue attitudes of the Old Americans of the East Coast cities confronted with the new immigrants, and they go on to this day, when the Old Americans are often the descendants of the original obnoxious immigrants.
