Dining in France - Part 1 (Restaurants)

The French take an enormous amount of pride in their Food and French cooking is generally excellent. For Americans, the more controversial aspects of the French dining experience are the hours when food is served and the pace of the meal. In this blog entry, I will focus on eating at a restaurant (as opposed to a Bistro, Bar or Brasserie, which also may serve meals) because it is where we generally found the best food for the best price. In a later blog, I will talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of eating in a French home.

At a restaurant, the hours when food is served are limited and the pace is generally relaxed. Lunch in a restaurant generally requires slightly less than two hours and dinner generally requires about three hours. Restaurants are generally open from noon until 2 pm and from 7:30 pm until whenever the last diner finishes.

When we first arrived in France, I frequently found myself impatiently trying to catch the waiter's eye to get the next course of food served or to get the bill. Like many Americans, I suspected that the waiters were purposely ignoring me and giving better service to their French patrons. Now that we have been in France for a few months I rarely find myself impatient for the bill. I more frequently find that I am surprised that it is midnight and we have not finished yet.

Outside of the tourist areas of Paris, it is rare to see a table turnover during the evening. This may seem crazy to Americans who are used to wolfing down a meal in less than an hour to make the table available for the next seating. Of course, many restaurants will be closed on Sundays.

If you want a meal between 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. outside of an urban tourist area, good luck. When I was bicycling through the Loire Valley and wanted to ride my bike back to my bed & breakfast before dark, this created problems. On one of my bike trips I resorted to McDonalds out of desperation for a meal on a Sunday before dark. Even at 5 p.m., I had difficulty convincing the staff of a McDonalds to fire up their grill to cook me a hamburger.

Before you enter a French restaurant be aware that there are several French words that sound the same as a word in English, but mean something very different. "Menu" does not refer a booklet of the food choices, but refers to an inclusive multi-course meal. If you ask for the Menu, they will assume that you want the standard inclusive multi-course meal. They will not know that you are asking for the booklet listing the food options, which is "La Carte." In smaller restaurants, it is typically for the food options to be written on a chalkboard that is on the wall or moved from table to table.

We have found that almost all French restaurants have a "Menu" or "Formule" option, and many restaurants have multiple menu options depending on the number of courses that you want to eat. The menu options are generally local, fresh, excellent and a good value. If you are traveling with children, be aware that most restaurants, even very nice restaurants, have a "menu enfant," which generally consists of a drink, main course, and dessert at a very reasonable price. A child will typically be served their main course very quickly and long before the adults are served.

While we are on similar sounding words, let me mention a few more:

• "Salade" by itself refers to lettuce. If you order a burger with "salade" don't expect to get a green salad on the side. Expect that there will be one piece of lettuce on your burger.
• "Filet mignon" refers to pork rather than a tender cut of beef.
• "L’Entrée" refers to the small food plate before the main course. It is not the main course. In some restaurants you will also receive a complementary "amuse bouche" before the entree to wake up your taste buds. If you have ordered wine, this is probably when the first bottle of wine will be served.
• "Le plat" - Nope! This does not refer to your plate. This is the main course. Sometimes you will receive both a fish course and a meat course. Note that you will probably be asked if you want a different bottle of wine served with the main course.

L'Apéritif - The first thing that you are likely to be asked by the server after you have been allowed time to get comfortable is whether you want an apertif. If you are feeling French, order some champagne. If you order a mixed drink be aware that the French version of a cocktail (such as a martini) may be very different than the American version of something with the same name. We generally skip the apertif and order "une carafe d'eau" (a carafe of tap water) when we we are asked what we want to drink. (The tap water is perfectly safe to drink in France and we have never been charged for tap water.) Sometimes, if we are feeling rich, we might order a bottle of "l'eau avec gaz" or l'eau pétillante (fizzy water).

We also let the waiter know that we will be ordering wine once we figure out what we are eating. Choosing a wine in France is not easy. We have found relatively few familiar wines on French wine lists. Generally, we have asked the server's advice on what might go well with our meal. The servers seem uniformly pleased to be asked for their advice and seem happy to have an extended discussion of the options. In the end, we have enjoyed trying the local wines that are not well-known in the United States (such as the Gamay wines of the Anjou region where we live). For the most part, the local wines seem to pair well with the local food specialties.

A typical French restaurant meal consists of three courses: l’entrée, le plat, and le dessert. At lunch (petite dejuner) it is normal to pay 13-15 Euros for a three-course meal. For dinner (dejuner), it is normal to pay a little more. Wine, of course, is extra. In fancier restaurants you may be served additional courses including a salad course after the main course, or a cheese course immediately before the sweet dessert.

In my family, which hails from the western United States (Idaho), it is not uncommon to serve coffee with the meal, and in the eastern United States it is common to have coffee with dessert. However, no matter how hard we try, we have never been able to get a French restaurant to serve coffee until after dessert. There is one slight exception to this rule, some restaurants have a dessert labeled "cafe gourmand"
Coffee

Doggie Bags

Getting the Check

In a French restaurant you will have to ask for the check, but the process can not be rushed. When we first arrived in Paris, I found the process of trying to get the bill for the meal to be a frustrating and exhausting experience. I would vainly try to get the server's attention and sometimes pantomine that I wanted the check, but nothing that I did seemed to speed up the process. All that I succeeded in doing was to raise my own stress level, to annoy the server and to embarrass our neighbors. In general, you will never get your check until everybody at the table has finished their meal and any post-dinner drinks. In small restaurants, you may need to get up from the table and go to the bar or cash register to ask for "l'addition s'il vous plait" and pay the bill.

Tipping

The servers in a French restaurant are generally either the owners of the restaurant, or receive a decent salary. Servers do not depend on tips for their income and a large tip is generally not expected. We received a variety of different advice on tipping in France but generally it seems to be agreed that you should generally tip 50 centines to 3 Euros per person and that you should not tip more than 5%. In some parts of France, it seems most common to leave no tip although many restaurants will have a tip jar near the cash register for loose change.

Other Tips

• Speak softly - Americans are notorious for being loud. Although the tables in a French restaurant are likely to be close together, you will rarely overhear the French people at the next table because they are courteous enough to speak quietly. The French would prefer not to overhear your conversation so speak quietly. 
• Smoke - Smoking in a restaurant is still common in France. It is difficult to completely eliminat the chance that you will be seated by a smoker, but if you don't like smoke, don't site outside because that is where the smokers tend to congregate.
• You won't get a bread plate. It is OK to put your bread on the table.

The Wealth of France

Versailles

France has been a wealthy country for centuries. The evidence of France's past wealth is everywhere. As you ride through the countryside it seems that there is a chateau around every corner.  In every city there seem to be amazing cathedrals and mansions. All of this causes me to wonder: "how did France accumulate so much wealth?" Does France have an unusually large amount of mineral resources? Has France avoided the wars that have impoverished other countries?

Clock at Versailles Palace

Surprisingly, France does not appear to have an unusually large amount of mineral resources and it seems to have more than its share of wars - war with the Romans, wars with the Visigoths, wars with the Celts, the Hundred Years War, internal religious wars, the French Revolution (which was sort of an ongoing civil war), Napoleon's wars with most of Europe, multiple wars with Germany, and colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Not only was France almost constantly at war, but it was on the losing end of many of these wars.

France had a colonial empire in the 18th and 19th centuries, including large portions of North America, but unlike Spain, Portugal and England, there is very little evidence of colonial wealth today.

Where did the wealth come from? Certainly France has some very productive agricultural land, but many parts of the country do not have rich soil. Nonetheless, the French use this rocky soil to grow one of their most valuable crops - wine. France has also managed to market its fashion and art culture, but the most common evidence of wealth does not seem to come from these sources.

Mansion in Toulouse

Perhaps France does not have more wealth than other countries but the wealth was unevenly distributed, which allowed the construction of massive cathedrals and chateaux, but left the masses in poverty. While this was probably true in the past, today the wealth of France seems to be remarkably evenly distributed. I've been taking language classes with illegal refugees and immigrants and the French system makes sure that even these uninvited newcomers live better than the working poor in the United States.

One of many chateaux in the Loire Valley

The current wealth of France is less obvious than the Palace of Versailles and the Loire Valley Chateaux (culture, great food, etc.), but nonetheless real. It is difficult to measure the intangibles. Perhaps the best measure of a country's wealth is the number of foreigners who choose to live here. Not only does France have a flood of refugees from Africa and the Middle East seeking a better life in France, but the country is full of Americans, British, Canadians, Swedes, Germans and many other nationalities who have chosen to make France their home. There must be something right about a place that attracts such a wide spectrum of people.

Fixer-Upper Chateau for sale

Ultimately, I don't have a good answer to the question of why France appears to have so much wealth, but I do know that they have made a conscious choice to distribute the wealth more evenly than in the United States, and it seems to be working.  While there are the usual complaints about the inefficiency of government and high taxes, in general, people seem pretty proud of their government and the economic system of France.

Mansion in Paris

Is the Path Less Traveled Always the Best Choice?

The less traveled path beside the less traveled Le Loir River TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Robert Frost (1874–1963).  Mountain Interval.  1920. Yesterday I finished preparing our tax returns and as a reward to myself I decided to take a bike ride. Although the sky was overcast and threatening rain (which seems to be normal for this region of France), I had Bronwyn drop me off in a small town near Le Mans on the less traveled river Le Loir (which is a tributary of the more famous La Loire River). I had not planned out a detailed route, but I knew that Le Loir drained into the Sarthe River, which drained into the Maine River, which passed within 500 meters of our house so all I needed to do was follow the river downstream. I was immediately confronted with a choice: I could take the tow path beside the river, or I could take the paved roads that paralleled the river. I took the path less traveled, and despite my love of Robert Frost's poem, as I pedaled through a cold rain, I spent a lot of time thinking that less traveled road is not always the best choice. It was muddy and slippery, and I nearly took a swim a couple of times on the narrow bridges over streams entering the river. Until a rain shower washed most of the mud off of me, I was covered in mud. I certainly could have made better time on the paved roads. When I got home, I was cold, wet and sore. However, after a good nights sleep, I think that maybe Robert Frost was right because I ended up seeing (through my mud splattered glasses) a lot of interesting villages, small chateaux and farms. For example, it is fascinating to me that most French orchards, unlike traditional American orchards, consist of small espaliered trees (which are trained to spread their branches like vines, making it easy to harvest the apples without machines).  Perhaps the bike trip and poem are metaphors for my time in France. Difficult at times, but in hindsight a great experience.

Espaliered apple trees along Le Loir River.