French Cuisine’s Changing Grammar
By Emily Monaco
The change to coursed meals came about after tables grew so crowded that there was no room for wineglasses. Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash.
The French gastronomic meal, as defined on UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage, is a festive repast enjoyed around a beautiful table and boasting a fixed structure: aperitif, starter, main, cheese, dessert, and digestif. It’s a convivial meal, but it’s also highly systematized: as much about who is around the table as what is on it and the way in which it is served.
“The plate, and gastronomy, above all in France, is an incredible mirror of society,” says French culinary journalist Emmanuel Rubin.
It’s an echo, decades later, of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss calling a culture’s cuisine “a language into which it subconsciously translates its structure.” But the “grammar” of the French meal is not so immovable and stalwart. To wit: Not only did this structure get its start a mere two centuries ago as service à la russe, or Russian-style service, which supplanted the pre-existing service à la française, but France’s culinary codes are at the brink of yet another revolution.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
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Before the 18th century, French culinary codes were all about les arts de la table. When concocting menus, chefs lent equal weight to the flavor and appearance of offerings: their plating, their arrangement, their relationship with one another. According to Jean‐Pierre Poulain’s 2002 book, Sociologies de l’alimentation, this sort of service was “rigorously codified,” and French service stood out from its European counterparts of the time by its sheer complexity.
“The idea was to place all of the dishes on the table in several sequences,” explains Patrick Rambourg, a French historian specialized in cuisine and gastronomy, noting that “with a banquet, that could be dozens of dishes.”
In the 18th century, however, French-style service came under heavy criticism, notably by egalitarian Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This was in part due to the demands of the service, according to Rambourg; notably that each guest “had to have his own staff.” The table, so bedecked with dishes, had no space for a glass.
But the fact that a thirsty diner needed his own valet (and that said valet was free to cut wine with water as he saw fit) was not the only reason that this sort of meal had grown “unwieldy.”
“French-style service, even though we tried to modernize it, wasn’t in agreement with the evolution of society anymore,” says Rambourg. It was at odds with the egalitarian politics that would spur the French Revolution and the establishment of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789; it was also unnecessary with the growing popularity of the restaurant, invented in the 1760s.
And so, France began to embrace a new structure: that of a progression of dishes served one after the other. Service à la russe “emptied the table,” Rambourg says. He asserts there was “a real debate” over the loss of French-style service, and even a period during which a “mixed service” was popular, with cold dishes arranged on the table and hot dishes served in sequence.
“For centuries, French cooks believed that French cuisine included the way in which it was presented on the table,” Rambourg says, noting that critics at the time, such as Antonin Carême, perhaps France’s first celebrity chef and a pâtissier who believed that pastry and architecture were merely two poles of the same art, bemoaned the “simplicity” of the new trend, demanding the “decorative side” return. For Poulain, this “decorative” side is part of what distinguishes the French approach to gastronomy, which he defines as “an aestheticizing of cuisine and table manners.” And while he acknowledges that “all cultures present forms of aestheticizing food,” he also asserts that “rare are those who have pushed it to the degree of sophistication reached by French gastronomy.”
With the democratization of a more egalitarian mindset, so too did a service in courses continue to grow in popularity in France. But despite what critics feared, this new structure provided no dearth of opportunities for sophistication and flourishes. These are still evident in luxury restaurants that send around a gilded cheese trolley or offer trou normand, an interstitial, high-alcohol sorbet that allows one to continue eating the next courses long after having reached satiety, not to mention in the parade of forks, knives, and glasses that to this day keep etiquette teachers gainfully employed.
“It’s pretty flagrant to see, over the course of the 19th century, a ‘bourgeoise’ table covered in dishes and glasses and flatware,” says Rambourg. “And that’s because, progressively, we abandoned service à la française to instead move towards a service that left more room on the table.”
This new service had room for such flourishes, but the structure itself was embraced across social classes. Visitors to France 50 years ago would have undoubtedly encountered the entrée-plat-dessert format in any setting, and on a random weeknight evening, a working-class family might be eating, for example, a pork terrine followed by a roast chicken, a green salad, an assortment of cheeses, and, finally, a homemade or store-bought dessert.
This structure, Rambourg notes, “is still the model of the French meal, whether at home, in office cafeterias, in midrange restaurants, at truck stops, but also in gastronomic restaurants.”
Thanks in part to its ubiquity, the regimented nature of this structure seemed to be untouchable. Until now.
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France is currently experiencing another mealtime revolution. Not only has the pre-cheese green salad of Rambourg’s childhood all but disappeared from French households, but the appetizer and even the cheese course itself are also being “sacrificed” in some homes: Former President Nicolas Sarkozy, much to the chagrin of the French people, notably excised the fromage from his lunchtime routine while in office in 2012.
Much like the supplanting of French-style service three centuries ago, this revolution didn’t happen overnight. To a certain extent, it’s a natural progression linked to the evolution of France’s work-life balance. As recently as the 1990s, it was common for families to leave their respective places of work and schooling to head home for a two-hour, three-course lunch. These days, according to one 2011 study from social protection group Malakoff Méderic, French people are devoting a mere 22 minutes to their lunch break. And the same trend holds true at dinner.
“Today, most French people don’t eat at the table,” says Rubin. “They eat in front of the TV, on the couch.”
It’s a reflection, he says, of the globalization – and, yes, the Americanization – of French culture, evidenced, too, in a new health-conscious attitude.
“You can’t stuff yourself morning, noon, and night,” he says. “People don’t want to anymore.”
In addition to international influences, some of the changes in the structure of the French meal can be attributed to food production processes themselves.
Not only did industrialization begin wending its way through French terroir as early as the 1950s, with chemically stabilized baguettes moulées supplanting the sourdough-leavened breads of yore, and pasteurized cheeses replacing some raw milk varieties, but it spread to restaurants as well.
“When I first arrived in Paris, like 10 years ago, the food here was absolutely terrible,” says Delling-Williams. Indeed, the landscape, at the time, was dotted with restaurants serving ho-hum, industrially produced versions of the classics France had once been famous for, in an attempt to stay true to the Russian-style meals.
Modernist “bistronomic” establishments, meanwhile, had a goal of simplification. These bistros, which had been slowly rising in popularity since Yves Camdeborde opened La Régalade in 1992, did away with much of the pomp and circumstance that had long surrounded the French restaurant experience: Gone were the linens, the glassware, the flatware, the pretty French porcelain, the bow-tied waiters.
“Maybe there was a certain sincerity to it,” Rubin says of these bistros that, he says, “broke the code” of French cuisine. “It had become too bourgeois. Too passé. I don’t know.”
The rise of bistronomy was laudable in highlighting quality French ingredients, and its relative simplicity as compared to the highly stylized French meal of the past was perhaps an indicator of what was to come.
Today, the French apps like Deliveroo and Uber Eats are seeing a surge in popularity, even pre-pandemic. When the French do cook, they’re taking influences from abroad, preparing meals that don’t fit into the grammar of appetizer, main, cheese, dessert: stir fries, pasta dishes, burgers. Hearty dishes demanding baguette to wipe down the plate are relegated to the occasional Sunday; bread consumption is down by a third since 1950, according to Ouest France. Street food has triumphed in a culture that once forbade eating and walking; what Rubin calls “tapasization,” the prevalence of shared small plates, has infiltrated menus once governed by stern walls dividing appetizers and mains.
Edward Delling-Williams, an English chef and owner of restaurant Le Grand Bain, has been based in Paris for over a decade. He has noticed this evolution on the Parisian dining scene, where the bistros and brasseries of yore have become supplanted by a “modernist version of everything,” a homogenization he attributes, in large part, to social media.
“It’s just sped everything up, kind of,” he says, noting that chefs can easily take their influences from colleagues around the globe without having to step foot outside their homes. Today, it’s not uncommon to find, in Paris, the same Mediterranean small plates found at Ottolenghi in London; the same lacto-ferments found at Noma in Copenhagen; the same Insta-worthy cookies found at Levain in New York.
The influences of globalization are apparent, even, in the modernist brevity found on Paris' menus, now far more focused on local, top-quality ingredients than on the techniques French cuisine was long known for: fricassee, en croûte de sel, flambé.
“We’ve moved away from writing out the mains in pompous turns of phrase, in two or three lines,” says Rubin. “Now it’s ‘flash food.’ ‘Hake, sorrel, grenadine.’ You can’t understand it.”
Rubin bemoans the way in which this change may, bit by bit, lead the traditions surrounding the French meal to deteriorate.
“It’s kind of a paradox,” he says. “When the French meal was classed by UNESCO, it was a bit of an empty recognition. Because we know this meal doesn’t exist. Or rather, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
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That said, if you look a little closer, you’ll see that France intrinsically relies on its meal structure in some of the most surprising ways.
Walking down any street in Paris—or, for that matter, in any of France’s smaller cities and some of its larger villages—it’s clear that France has embraced cuisine from abroad, but the French do not necessarily consume these foods in as natives of these cultures and countries do. Like Japanese yoshoku turning a Western-style fried cutlet into katsu, a dish served with rice and ponzu sauce, the French have embraced foreign dishes by applying their own structure to them.
Rambourg cites evidence of this as early as the 19th century, when an association called the Jardin d’acclimatisation would host a banquet each year to introduce products from abroad.
“It was during the empire,” he says, noting that France still had a colonial presence in parts of Africa and Asia. During these times of discovery, he says, food was always presented “in the context of the French meal.” In recent years, this has led, for example, to hamburgers being served with a fork and knife, or appetizers and desserts like a raw cabbage salad, dim sum, sesame nougat or steamed glutinous rice and coconut balls imposed on Chinese menus that might not otherwise include them.
“I think, in our country, we have a hard time just having a main,” says Rambourg. “For most of us, even if we’re eating Japanese food, we want a meal that’s, more or less, structured in the French way.”
Many flavors and dishes from abroad have a complex history with France, such as the couscous that arrived by way of its colonial channels, or bagels, which came to France via New York and not by way of Poland’s Ashkenazi Jewish population, who, by and large, avoided post-Occupation France. Today, the difference is that the presence of these foods and flavors on French menus does not require the restaurant to exist as an attempt at an ethnic or cultural monolith.
Delling-Williams embraced foreign flavors with no small amount of self-awareness when he first began cooking at Paris’ Au Passage. A self-professed fan of Thai food, he explains that, often, he would go out and eat a dish, only to be inspired to transform the flavors into “something that would be more familiar to Europeans to eat.” He recalls, for example, enjoying one restaurant dish that combined cabbage, peanuts and a sweet fish sauce. From these influences, he constructed a dish of pan-fried Brussels sprouts with a lemon-butter emulsion, homemade ricotta and crushed hazelnut praline.
“Everyone was like, that’s so amazing!” he recalls. “And essentially all I’d done was taken this Thai salad and used different ingredients.”
Chefs like Kei Kobayashi, the first Japanese chef to earn three Michelin stars in France, or 2011 Top Chef France finalist Franco-Korean Pierre Sang Boyer work in similar ways, infusing their French cuisine with shiso or kimchi or sesame. And at Mi-Kwabo, Guyanese-born Chef Elis Bond marries pan-African flavors and ingredients with techniques and a structure that remain resolutely French, fusing bananas from Côte d’Ivoire with Algerian harissa and local Challans duck; revamping the notion of dining family style into a multitude of smaller plates.
“For the appetizer, there might be three plates for one person,” he says. “So, you get the convivial side of things, but differently.”
Bond doesn’t see his approach as creating distance with the cuisines of Africa, but rather as a way of reframing them for a French diner. For Bond, this is the best way to help locals “talk about this cuisine another way.”
Others on France's modern dining scene are trying to revitalize the classic dishes and atmospheres of yore, like Daniel Rose of La Bourse et la Vie and Chez la Vieille, Jean-François Piège of La Poule au Pot, or, at a far lower price point, the team behind Bouillon Pigalle. But Delling-Williams dubs this approach “a flashback.” These restaurants fill a need stemming from the expectations, specifically, of tourists.
According to Gouzy, the trend of overly simple, terroir-driven food is nevertheless on its way out, and the French culinary spectacle may be poised to return—with a twist.
At his Pantagruel, Gouzy relies on French technique, French flavors and, yes, that age-old art de la table: French linens, French glassware, tableside carving, professional waitstaff. After only a year open (and only a handful of months in operation, due to Covid lockdowns), the restaurant received its first Michelin star in January.
The food at Pantagruel is fresh, inventive, creative. Gouzy leans hard into both France's wealth of regional delicacies and what he perceives as Parisian terroir, happily toying with tongue-in-cheek iterations of the kébab that has become a popular street food since arriving in France with waves of Turkish immigration in the 1980s, or the shiso and sesame so beloved by many of the Japanese chefs who have reinterpreted classic French cuisine on the local dining scene (to much acclaim from diners and the Michelin guide). But instead of fetishizing this food or fixing it in amber, he absorbs it into his own culinary philosophy: one that embraces classical techniques—crafting mother sauces, pan-cooking at high temperatures – and, of course, the structure of the French meal itself.
“We have millions—millions!—of dishes depending on the regions,” says Gouzy. “And we’re influenced by neighboring countries, and by immigration, which enriches our cuisine even more. So really, I don’t know why we’d need to identify with anything else.”
In his restaurant, Gouzy loves a spectacle, flambéing crêpes and bruléeing leek amuses-bouches tableside; servers synchronize to remove cloches and invite diners to see what's concealed underneath. He is committed to the return of tablecloths, of glassware and modern porcelain, all made in France.
“It’s not pompous; it’s just comfortable,” he says. “It’s part of our identity, and we need to lean into it.”
“France has evolved. We have to modernize, but we can’t forget where we come from,” he says. “And we can’t just rely on our ancestors. We have to be competitive for them, too, I think.”
Perhaps the time has come to help make French dining stand out once more: not as a monolith nor as a bastion of false nostalgia, but as a multicultural marriage of history and foreign influence.
“People are saying, well, we're losing this old, traditional style of French cuisine,” says Delling-Williams. “But you're only talking about French cuisine of a certain era, that was defined by certain books and certain people. But French cuisine—just like all cuisines, just like language—has evolved. And it's taken a long time to get there.”
