How the French View American Food From Wimpy 039 s to Whoopies

How the French See American Food stuff: From Wimpy&#039;s to Whoopies 	 Last summer my husband and I drove down from our mountain-side vacation perch, a centuries-old stone shepherd’s cabin in the backwoods of Provence where ne’er a tourist does venture. We’d planned to grab a pizza at the only Podunk town around. What did we find on the menu this year instead? Remarkably, spareribs. Not that the spareribs were remarkable—then again I’m spoiled, having grown up in San Diego on the barbecue featured in Top Gun—but rather the fact they were on the menu at all. The Malbouffe Burger Decades For most of the time I’ve lived in France, American foodstuff has been synonymous with malbouffe, which translates roughly as “bad chow,” the kind of thing we Americans think of getting at a greasy spoon. Ask the French what Americans eat and they reply without hesitation: Hamburrgeurr. Years and years ago I heard a radio broadcast about American food. The main guest, a French writer, talked about his only trip to the US, back in the 1960s. He proceeded to explain how he drove the length of Route 66 eating only hamburgers which, he insisted, were enough to dissuade him from ever returning. I couldn’t believe my ears. Was he really the best the journalists could come up with? Then in 1999, a French agronomist and activist, José Bové, made headlines by leading a group of farmers to willfully “dismantle” a McDonald’s under construction. The two events prompted me to try to understand the image of American meals in France. My conclusion is this: most traditional American cuisine is only served in the home, and how many foreign visitors have the chance to sit in on Thanksgiving dinner? Instead they eat out, and I now believe that the specificity of American restaurant cuisine, as opposed to roadside cafés, is its ever-changing and therefore unidentifiable nature. Unlike French restaurant menus where often the same classics are given different spins by different chefs over and over again until there’s no mistaking it, American menus appear to compete for originality, making it tough to put a finger on what really is American cuisine. The result is that only easily recognizable foods are remembered. And sought out. As one of my favorite French poets, Jean Cocteau, put it, artists love to know (connaître) while tourists love to recognize (reconnaître). The morning after finding barbecue on the menu in Provence, I heard another French radio broadcast that convinced me the old Route 66 fogey of earlier years fell into the latter category. The journalist was interviewing Jacques Borel, a French billionaire, one of whose early enterprises consisted of opening Wimpy burger restaurants in France in the 1960s. For a love of burgers The first burger chain to hit France, Borel streamlined the business, serving made-to-order hamburgers using only quality French beef at tables organized to reduce waitress travel from 15 to 9 km per shift. Customers chose their condiments and juke box music directly at table. The restaurants were a huge hit. “So,” the radio reporter badgered, “you actually speculated on what customers were looking for?” “No,” Borel retorted, “I respected what customers were looking for!”  I have a strong suspicion our French writer/tourist from the earlier interview was frequenting Wimpy’s before he ever got his fix on Route 66. And Bové? He too is of the Wimpy generation. Does he really hate hamburgers? Not particularly. His act of sabotage was a protest against American sanctions against the European Union for refusing to import American beef that was shot up with dangerous growth hormones. Did it stop the onslaught of McDonald’s? No. McDonald’s continued to open restaurants at a faster rate in France than anywhere else in the world. But now McDonalds, like Wimpy’s before it, uses French beef, which applies much stricter health standards. Moreover, there’s a new generation of burgers out there… The Gourmet Burger Turnaround Last summer, my friend Paule Caillat, a French foodie whose company Promenades Gourmandes offers French cooking lessons in English, invited me to a barbecue to test a new concept that another American friend of hers was launching: a gourmet burger food stuff truck in Paris. I knew it would never get off the ground. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not because the French don’t like burgers. Borel proved that long ago with Wimpy’s and if Bové felt compelled to blow up a McDonalds it was to slow their rapid growth in response to demand. Moreover, the gourmet “American sandwiches” (as my French mother-in-law referred to them) at the test barbecue were divine, using only the finest French beef, oozing melted Fourme d’Alembert blue cheese and dripping with a thick syrupy reduction of port wine. An exquisite combination for a burger. What I knew wouldn’t work was the foodstuff truck concept. Not that meals trucks don’t exist in France. Outside Paris, you sometimes find pizza or French fry trucks in the odd parking lot. Even in Paris foodstuff trucks will sometimes wrangle permits (or not) and sell Merguez (spicy North African lamb sausage) and fries at fun events like major union demonstrations or Bastille day fireworks when the streets are closed off. But running a full time food items truck in Paris involved administrative obstacles it seemed not even Hercules could hurdle. I was wrong. Despite the fact there’s nowhere to park a food items truck in Paris and the fact no one had done it before (as good a reason as any in France to prevent someone from doing it), the Californian Kristin Frederick used her diploma from the high-flying cooking school l’Ecole Ferrandi, her experience as a chef in some of the best restaurant kitchens in France and California, and her go-get’um gumption to overcome what were surely bewildered French administrators. A year after that first burger barbecue, Le Camion qui Fume ("the smoking truck", a joke on a famous restaurant "the smoking dog") is running two trucks and their main problem now is managing the traffic-blocking crowds lining up for a taste. Moreover, others have followed her example and started foods trucks. Crazy for cupcakes The turnaround involves more than just burgers. Every French bakery sells chocolate chip cookies. The Grande Epicerie, the gourmet food items store at the chic Left Bank Bon Marché department store began selling cupcakes a few years ago. Just around the corner from it, a boutique devoted exclusively to beautifully decorated mini cupcakes opened. They do weddings. Cupcakes for French weddings. Recently I picked up a French meals magazine and flipped through page after page of recipes for cookies, cupcakes, crumbles and most surprising of all… whoopies. I’ve never even tried a whoopie and here were 7 pages devoted exclusively to recipes for them. Go to the cookbook section of any French bookstore and what’s on display? You got it. Cookie, cupcake and whoopy cookbooks. Same in the kitchen stores, entire sections devoted to cupcake molds and papers. And cafés now offer brunch on Sundays, serving pancakes as desert. Where is it all leading? Burgers are apparently here to stay, but the rest may just be a fad. When I first moved to Paris years ago, there was to my chagrin only one Mexican restaurant worth mentioning. A few years later there were dozens. Now we’re back down to a handful. We'll just wait and see. In the meantime, if you ask Kristin at Le Camion qui Fume, she’ll tell you the plan is to open more meals trucks, this time focusing on… gourmet ribs. If you loved this report and you would like to acquire more facts with regards to gas grill burner replacement parts kindly stop by the site.