Au Revoir to All That

Fortunately Michael Steinberger, wine columnist for the website Slate, is a deft writer with an often amusing turn of phrase. Otherwise, Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France would be a very trying read.

Steinberger’s thesis is that the food and wine in France aren’t what they once were, and that their decline is a reflection of the country’s more generalized cultural, economic and diplomatic malaise. In a brief and predictable diagnosis, he attributes France’s current woes to its having missed out on the deregulatory, greed-is-good Reagan/Thatcher era, the wreckage of which is, of course, still smoldering around us today. The failure of both François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac to implement effective economic reforms has indeed cost France dearly, but the “Anglo-Saxon” world, which had a three-decade party with borrowed money, is hardly an inspiring alternative to French timidity, especially since France is holding up rather better than either the United States or Britain at the moment.

Having hastily set the scene, Steinberger goes on to offer a recapitulation of what everyone already knows, which is that, yes, the food and wine in France, in the mid-range price points, aren’t what they were in the past. And it’s true that the country’s horrific bureaucracy has made it nearly impossible to run a profitable restaurant or respond to tectonic changes in the world’s wine-consuming habits—the French, in particular, missed the boat on the cépage and brand-driven wine-consumption patterns in Britain and the United States.

Unfortunately for Steinberger, however, the log-jams that created these problems in France have already started to move. The government has finally reduced the TVA (value added tax) on restaurant meals from 19.6% to 5.5%—until now only fast-food places profited from the lower tax rate, to the disadvantage of real bistrots and restaurants. These days a new generation of French chefs is well and truly reclaiming from Spain the crown of contemporary culinary innovation.

To be sure, the old adage that you can’t get a bad meal in France is risible today. On the other hand, if the international culinary landscape has become flat, fried and frozen, as Ronald McDonald’s leering face looms everywhere from Boston and Barcelona to Bombay, Bangkok and Brisbane, the food and wine in France are still vastly better than what’s found in other wealthy industrial countries. Steinberger’s misfortune is that his book has been published at the very moment that a broad reawakening is once again making France a thrilling destination for gastronomes and vinophiles.

Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France by Michael Steinberger (Bloomsbury USA)

Originally published in the July/August 2009 issue of France Today