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The recent review of Thai cuisine in this space
was met with such a effusive swell of apathy that a
review of French food seemed the inevitable encore.
French cuisine being our idea of the queen of
foreign dining and so influential on the diet of
strip mall dwellers--witness the role of croissants
in fast food joints--it's high time we passed
judgement. It's been said that the secret history of the
world is that the French would take over places and
then the British would conquer them in order to be
able to get something decent to eat. But that was
said by another and hence lesser writer, so why
should I bother to metion him. This is a fairly
competitive field, you know and I have to be
ruthless. Unless, of course, Ruth comes crawling
back on hands and knees. Which used to be a lot of
fun, but I digress. Actually there seem to be three kinds of French
restaurant in Southern California. The traditional
kind features vellum menus with punchline prices,
the kind of atmosphere that suggests you should be
impressed with yourself for just being there, and a
cuisine based on smothering everything under heavy
sauces loaded with cholesterol and subtleties (or
perhaps it was subtitles--it's hard to read these
calligraphy menus.) They usually have names
involving proper names and odd words like "Ce'st",
"Chez" and "Bleu". (Example: Chuck E. Chez) Then there are the newer places specializing in
Nouvelle Cuisine which, like so many "New"
things--be they Journalism, Politics, Nixon, Wave,
or York--is a total flop. Old hat is old hat, spell
it Nouveau Chapeau if you please. If you took the
New Math and never learned a cuisine from a cosine
you know what I mean, albeit in a vague and
fragmentary sort of way. These places have the same
names as the perfumes you're always seeing copies
of. There are also a legion of foreign French
restaurants that do some sort of Franco-American
fusion, perhaps beans and francs. They are called
things like "Le Petit Francais" and offer "cuisine
tridundante" such as "French Dip Sandwich avec Au
Jus Sauce." The first type is the funniest, because the
actually speak French and lay on all the
traditional national color, such as hysterical
chefs and surly waiters. They will look down their
Gallic noses at you and suggest that you order
escargot. Just try to get any French toast or
French fries from the these guys, much less the
famous postcards, kisses, or ticklers. They will
sneer at your pronunciation (or spelling) of
idiotic words like "ratouile", "boillabaise", or
"bourgenon." They also smirk at more common French
words like "ooupon". Don't be intimidated by this (or by any
representative of a culture given to talking
through their nose, fighting with their feet, and
making love with their mouths). A little-known fact
about the French tongue is that it cannot be
pronounced correctly by anyone. This affords
Frenchmen cheap amusement and a sense of
superiority otherwise almost impossible for them to
come by, while their own patently absurd
pronunciation goes uncorrected because most people
feel unqualified to tell them they are garbling
their own language. You might as well tell the
Italians they don't know how to run their own
government. There are other secrets of the French tongue,
but they are totally inappropriate to a decorous
restaurant review, as witness the lurid conclusions
to which your febrile mind has already jumped. This
column is for the education of the consumer, I
should remind you--not the entertainment of the
febrile-minded. There was no sneering at the REVOLT table, of
course. The heaping helpings I received had
platoons of subservient waiters helping with the
heaping, their service excellent, if not
excrutiatingly obsequious. Aside from my personal
animal magnetism, I attribute this to the fact that
they seemed to think I was reveiwing for a major
dining card publication. It was a mysterious
misapprehension, which I finally traced to the
business cards I'd printed up and handed around
when I arrived. I've found in the past that this
sort of thoughtful preparation saves a lot of time,
embarrassment, and tedious necessities such as
paying the bill. Escargot, which I assumed to be flotsam or some
other form of ex-cargo, turns out to be snails.
Well, outre IS a French word--probably meaning
something like "Totally gross". There's a bit of
mystery as to where the snails come from. Do they
just snatch them off downspouts, garden fresh, or
raise them on little slime ranches? They keep us in
the dark on such matters, which is probably just as
well. Most of us already know know they use pigs to
hunt for truffles (especially the clerks at Nordy's
candy counter after my recent understandable fracas
there) but even a pigs won't fetch a snail for you.
Even a lawyer would hesitate. So we didn't sample
the truffles that showed up on the desert cart,
chocolate coated so as, no doubt, to cover up the
pigtooth prints. eFortunately the threatened snails
never appeared, though I noticed a cockroach
nipping along the wall at one place. Enough to
knock a few stars off their rating, but at least
nothing to leave a trail of slime down your throat
and munch up the leaves of your nasturtiums. Not
even the French would fry a roach to get attention.
Snails and frog legs are about as freaky-deaky as
they care to stoop. Though God only knows what's in
some of those sauces. |
