Why Don't the French Cook Like They Used To?

How the Michelin guide crippled France's restaurants.

By Mike Steinberger

"We have to cut it. We have to kill it. We have to burn it." It was nine
o'clock on a warm, hazy morning in May 2007. Paris was still half-asleep,
the café was a picture of tranquility, and Luc Dubanchet was issuing a
battle cry. The bellicose talk was directed not at another nation, nor at
international terrorists, but at an enemy that he seemed to believe was
nearly as dangerous: the Michelin Guide.

Dubanchet was the founder of a publication called Omnivore that sought to
call attention to the most innovative French chefs. To hear him tell it,
the Michelin Guide had become a dead weight for French cuisine. It
discouraged creativity, demanded a level of opulence that made fine dining
appealing and accessible only to rich fogeys, and was unacceptably opaque
about its reviewing methods. Dubanchet said that he had started Omnivore in
part to combat "the Michelin way of thinking about food, and the Michelin
way of building restaurants, and the Michelin way of not explaining." It
wouldn't be easy, he acknowledged; he and his colleagues were up against a
pillar of French cultural life. But as the slight, bespectacled
thirty-five-year-old sipped his coffee and looked out across the Place de
la Bastille, cradle of an earlier revolution, he expressed steely
confidence. "I want war," he said. "I want to tear down the Michelin
system."

(more at:

<http://www.slate.com/id/2221245/> )

also from *slate*: how mcdonald's conquered france:

<http://www.slate.com/id/2221246>

your pal,
blake