Julian Barnes. It was the sort of unpretentious family establishment used by commercial travelers and those like myself about to put their car on the overnight motorail to Boulogne. The kind of friendly, reliable place that leaves no special memory.
This one did. I was sitting there in genial anticipation of my final French meal of the trip when something awful happened: They brought me an amuse-gueule. Then it made my spirits sink. You think this is what you ought to do?
You think this is what I expect? You think people will have a lower opinion of you if you fail to offer a dinky je ne sais quoi in a flaky-pastry whatsit? My doomy response may have been excessive but was not, in retrospect, inaccurate.
The French, for all their reputation as anarchic individualists and committed regionalists, have also been ruthless centralizers and dogged followers of fashion. There is nothing wrong, or oddβor, for that matter, nouvelleβabout nouvelle cuisine. The first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary may date only from , but the phrase itself is as old as the midth century.
A fair comparison might be made between nouvelle cuisine and the slightly earlier nouvelle vague. But with time, most revolutions turn out to have been evolutions, a fact some revolutionists admit. But the oppressive orthodoxies of nouvelle cuisine concentrate and epitomize much that has gone wrong. And the matter is made worse because our expectations of a French meal remain so high.
