• Tweet
• Sharebar

• Tweet

IT was a proud day for French cuisine when the authorities announced plans to distinguish chefs who upheld tradition by designating them as “master restaurateurs”.

Pride, however, has turned to embarrassment amid claims that the scheme has not so much highlighted how many authentic restaurants France boasts, as how few.

Instead of demonstrating the commitment to locally grown ingredients in gastronomic recipes, it has merely underlined the spread of factory food, such as spray-on flavours and vacuum-packed sauces, according to critics.

The government said it hoped to award the Maitre Restaurateur label to 20,000 restaurants, brasseries and bistros when it began the project in 2007.

They were to get the title for using mostly fresh produce, for refusing pre-cooked, industrial dishes and for greeting customers “in a friendly, welcoming, polite, warm manner”.

Three years later, only 300 have obtained the label, according to figures released at the Paris Food Fair.

Officials say they hope the figure will rise to 3000 by 2012, but even that appears optimistic given the trends sweeping through French restaurant kitchens.

“It’s understatement to say that it has not been a triumph,” said Claude Izard, chairman of Cuisineries Gourmandes, an association that defends traditional cooking.

He said some restaurants did not want the Maitre Restaurateur label because it involved red tape and inspections by teams of civil servants.

Others were ineligible because of their reliance on factory-made blanquettes de veau, gateau au chocolat or aromes de truffe, which they merely heated in their kitchens.

“You can get everything you want from the agro-alimentary industry now – sauces, patisseries, cakes anything,” Mr Izard said. “But we are fighting against that evolution because it could destroy our heritage. When I make a duck sauce, I make it with the bones of a duck and it tastes nothing like an industrial sauce.”

The influence of factory food on Gallic gastronomy was in evidence at the Salon de la Restauration in Paris last week, where food companies demonstrated the pre-cooked products that they said could save time and money in restaurants.

There were vacuum-packed courgettes peeled and cut to look like pasta, “ready-to-assemble” chocolate tarts with the pastry in one plastic packet and the chocolate in another, and packaged cremes brulees.

Francois Blouin, director of Food Service Vision, a restaurant consultancy, said many industrial products available to restaurants were of quality. He said they enabled chefs to respect health and safety regulations while keeping labour costs down.

Francis Attrazik, chairman of the French National Restaurant Federation, said however that the spread of pre-cooked dishes was a worry. “As a Frenchman, I think it is important to promote the true professionals who make the effort to respect our cuisine.”

Courtesy, The Times