Le Fooding challenges the old guard of French cuisine

During my recent trip to Paris, I noticed that the cover of the Paris-based Le Fooding guide jumps out on a newsstand among all the other papers and magazines. Its bright colors and bold text stand out like a hip, spring break T-shirt. The restaurant guide was created as an alternative to the more than a century old and also French Michelin Guide that’s simple red cover looks more like spring break at the Great Smoky Mountains than the beach.

Le Fooding is a mixture of the words “food” and “feeling” that food writer Alexandre Cammas first coined a decade ago to rhyme with fueling in an article. Cammas and food writer Emmanuel Rubin hosted a small food centered get together, which soon grew and led to large outdoor festivals with chefs interacting directly with diners. The publication began as an occasional newspaper insert and now has consulting and public relations agency spinoffs. The Le Fooding guide often lifts casual and fusion eateries for praise while ignoring the more grand restaurants of Paris.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Cammas clarified that the term meant: “to eat and drink with feeling — to recognize that one eats with the nose, the eyes, and the mouth, with everything that makes us human.”  

The article explained that Le Fooding is the opposite of the slow food trend that’s currently in vogue in America. Le Fooding is moving forward away from the tradition of our grandfathers that we as Americans are trying to return toward. French chef Yves Camdeborde further clarified that the slow food movement works on the producer side to defend historic methods, while Le Fooding is about the consumer progressing. In the article, Cammas said, “Our role is to work against that tradition: to open minds, to reveal history, to change views. It should be a movement of the young.”  

Cammas separates his movement from the nouvelle cuisine of Paul Bocuse and other French chefs in the mid 20th century when food trends shifted to lighter, more naturally prepared foods by saying that the nouvelle cuisine was about replacing old rules with new ones while Le Fooding departs from the rules.  

"We wanted cooks who cooked with the whole of their selves and souls, not technicians of the table. French cuisine was caught in a museum culture: the dictatorship of a fossilized idea of gastronomy,” Cammas said.  

Coq au vin embodies the traditional in French cuisine.

In my few days in France, I mostly found the perfectly preserved French culinary culture that I expected. I didn’t find the departure from classics like coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon. Everywhere I visited was traditional, maybe passé but more than passable for my short visit. The restaurants were places where people lingered. Checks were only brought after being requested. Wait staff didn’t seem to care how quickly a table turns.  

These foods that Cammas may find Jurassic just seemed right to me. And in most every brasserie I visited, it seemed to resonate with the French diners as well.  

Cammas faults me partly for France’s culinary stalling. He blames tourists for allowing French food to stand still. He said in The New Yorker, “this dictatorship has been enforced by tourism: you have tourists packing in to experience gastronomy in a kind of perpetual museum of edification.” He said Le Fooding wanted to escape the expected.  

If the French want to move beyond good bread lathered with foie gras, I have to believe that they are moving in the wrong direction.

Emmanuel Rubin who co-founded Le Fooding with Cammas sold his share to Cammas in 2008. Rubin said in the New York Times that he became disinterested as Le Fooding became too affected by money and events and said that, “it’s become a caricature of itself.” Cammas countered that “Rubin wanted Le Fooding to end, to die a romantic death.”  

This is a good metaphor for the general French persona. They would rather fail in a dramatic and literary fashion than be uneventfully successful. Most Parisans seem to be passionately disaffected. Almost every restaurant had a covered patio where, in the cold of January, Parisans would smoke and argue and debate and seemed to never reach a conclusion or an agreement. It seemed like an accord was not the goal but rather they were arguing to have something to do with their mouths between draws of their cigarette.  

If my French and math are right, neither of which are strong suits, I dined at exactly one restaurant listed in the Le Fooding guide.  

A man slices sausage on a hand-powered meat slicer.

Le Garde- Robe, a wine bar in Paris’ 1st arrondissement, seemed to be a typical wine bar. Cheese and charcuterie were served on a rustic wooden plank with an equally provincial knife serving as the utensil.  

Sausages hung above the bar and a plastic wrapped hoof of some sort sat behind our table. Le Fooding, which shows a picture on its website of the receipt as proof that its writer paid for his own meal, said in it’s quick English blurb below the French review that, “Not too long ago, this cave-à-manger was a bit of a mess, but now things are back on track with a renewed deco and menu, and mostly natural vino.”  

Cured sausages hang ready to be paired with wine.

I was completely unaware it was on Le Fooding guide as I ate there. Although it had a younger and more hip clientele than most places it didn’t strike me as being a huge departure from what I would expect in a Parisian wine bar.  

The meat and cheese plate seemed to be in the same style that was served at more traditional French bistros.

Maybe the idea of a wine bar away from the brasserie should have been enough to excite me and evoke feeling but it wasn’t a meal I hadn’t had at most corner bistros. Of course the cheese and charcuterie were better but they weren’t facially different. I don’t feel like any rules were broken or ignored. It was accessible though. The staff was friendly and knowledgeable and assumed that we as Americans knew nothing about preserved meats, cheeses and wines, which maybe could be a fair assumption. Maybe the hipness comes from the natural wines that were poured that lack any legal and absolute difference from any other wines, but maybe just come with a little more attitude and a mindset toward not messing with the wine using chemicals or winery tricks.  

My perceptions could be invalid though. Who should a culture’s cuisine exist for? Should French chefs and cooks work for their countrymen or the occasional visitor who wants to experience something immortalized in movies for centuries? I think the French chefs should cook exciting food for their neighbors but that doesn’t mean disregarding tradition completely for visitors the more habitual French eaters.  

In a country where people’s political views are as apparent as the newspaper under their arm on the Metro, the French’s view toward food seems to be the most complicated political view of them all. Although Le Fooding may indeed be the new guard in French dining, the old guard is still around. Their American counterparts go on vacation at the Great Smokey Mountains and they’d like a confit de canard with foie gras, s'il vous plait.
-Nicholas Jain