After discovering the pleasure of eating good food in France, Steinberger’s deception at the current culinary scene in France matches the high respect he has for French gastronomy. In this brilliant and entertaining book, he explains the origin and causes of the rise and fall of French cuisine.
In the first pages of the book, the author whets our appetite with the description of one of Chef Emile Jung’s signature dishes served at Au Crocodile, a Michelin three-star restaurant in the city of Strasbourg, in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. In his version of Baeckeofe, a traditional Alsatian stew, he replaced the meat with an entire lobe of duck liver cooked in a sealed terrine.
“The seal was broken at the table, and as soon as the gorgeous pink-gray liver was lifted out of its crypt and the first, pungent whiff of black truffles came our way, I knew our palates were about to experience rapture,” writes Steinberger.
A few pages away, the author describes Laduree’s iconic praline mille-feuilles, which consists of almond pralines, praline cream, caramelized pastry dough and crispy hazelnuts. “Of all the things that I routinely ate in France, it was the praline mille-feuille that made me the happiest.”

From the 1960s onwards, French cuisine began its descent into mediocrity while France entered a period of stagnation — even Paris is turning into a museum. Steinberg quotes Adam Gopnik who was one of the first to write about the crisis in French cooking:
“Gopnik, then serving as the New Yorker magazine’s Paris correspondent, suggested that French cuisine had lost its sizzle: It has become rigid, sentimental, impossibly expensive and dull. The ‘muse of cooking,’ as he put it, had moved on to New York, San Francisco, Sydney and London,” writes Steinberger.
Neither the Left under President Francois Mitterrand nor the Right led by President Jacques Chirac was able to stop the country’s continuous decline. This descent into mediocrity is particularly visible in the literary, musical and art scene. And, if Paris has managed to remain, with great difficulty, the capital of fashion, most of its “haute-couture houses” employ foreign designers like Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, Stella McCartney for Chloe and John Galliano for Dior. Consequently, the political establishment was stunned when the French showed their discontent by choosing Jean Marie Le Penn, the leader of an Extreme Right Party as one of the two candidates in the final round of the presidential elections in 2002. Nicolas Sarkozy who succeeded President Chirac in 2008 vowed to implement the long awaited reforms. Although his two predecessors were known for their love of good food, it was Sarkozy who finally put an end to the unpopular 19,6 VAT surcharge on restaurant bills compared to 5,5 VAT on fast food.
Thanks to its low cost, McDonald’s counted more than a thousand restaurants in France by 2007, which had become its second-most-profitable market in the world. France, which had 200,000 cafes in 1960, was down to 40,000 in 2008. Bistros and brasseries are also disappearing. Even prized cheeses are no longer made because no one has the knowledge or the desire to continue making them.
Steinberger doesn’t fail to mention Chirac’s unfortunate criticism of British food to German chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, and Russian president, Vladimir Putin, during a meeting in 2005:
“One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad,” quipped Jacques Chirac. The French president proved how much he ignored the truth. London was now a city with great food and superb restaurants, which had even been selected over Paris by the International Olympic Committee to host the Summer Games of 2012.
Most five-star hotels around the world were closing their French restaurants whose expensive, heavy and complicated cuisine was no longer in demand. Even French chefs, mostly temperamental with an insufferable complex of superiority, were not sought after. Worse of all, “the younger French seemed indifferent to what they ate and to the country’s gastronomic heritage,” writes Steinberger who quotes an excerpt from Bernard Picolet’s interview with Britain’s independent newspaper:
“Younger French people today don’t understand or care about food. They are happy to gobble a sandwich or chips rather than go to a restaurant. They will spend a lot of money going to a nightclub but not to eat a good meal. They have the most sophisticated kinds of mobile telephone but they have no idea what a courgette is. They know all about the Internet but they didn’t know where to start to eat a fish.”
Even restaurants choose to ignore customers’ justified complaints rather than face the truth and strive to become better. On a recent visit, the Fermette de Marbeuf, a well-known restaurant near the Champs Elysees known for its superb 1900 original décor and good food despite its lack of Michelin stars, served the worst food I have ever had in France. Some of the dishes were simply un-eatable and were immediately returned. We guessed rightly that the chef and the owners of the restaurant were both absent, which was unfortunate for us poor consumers. The waiters could hardly repress a laugh. Even worse, nobody cares — the French phrase being: “le je m’en foutisme.” No wonder McDonald’s has been doing so well in France!
In the afterword, Steinberger once again mentions Gopnik who pointed to the example of the talented football player, Zinedine Zidane, and suggested there must be a boy “growing up in the slums of Marseilles who one day would achieve the same for French Cuisine. Once again, Gopnik has touched a sensitive nerve of French politics. France in 2010 is multi-ethnic; it has a large population of nonnative French who are still marginalized and who have not been properly integrated in French society. The French must accept that the next Escoffier, Bocuse or Ducasse might be of Arab descent.
Judging France through its cooking, “Au Revoir To All That” is witty, well researched and accurate. This book is not only about the rise and fall of French cuisine; it is also an interesting analysis of what has gone wrong in France. It is a must read for Francophiles and the French, especially those involved in the food sector. But will this book ever be translated in French? Even if it is not, it is well worth learning English to read it.