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.Of all the things that I routinely ate in France, it was the praline mille feuille that made me the happiest.But returning to Ladurée, after a year’s absence, I walked into a restaurant whose pilot light had been extinguished.The first sign of trouble was the lack of familiar faces: The endearingly gruff waitresses who had given the restaurant so much of its character had been replaced by bumbling androids.Worse, the menu had changed, and many of the old standbys, including the salade niçoise, were gone (so, too, the Morgon), replaced by a clutch of unappetizing dishes.The perpetrators of this calamity had the good sense to leave the praline mille feuille untouched, but I had to assume that it would soon be headed for history’s flour bin.While Ladurée was an adored institution, it had no standing in the gastronomic world—no famous chef, no Michelin stars, no widely mimicked dishes.Even so, I now began to wonder if the French really were starting to screw things up—if French cuisine was genuinely in trouble.You might say it was the moment the snails fell from my eyes.A few days after my dismaying visit to Ladurée, I was in the Mâcon area, this time with my wife and a friend of ours.As the three of us kicked around ideas for dinner late one afternoon, I felt pangs of curiosity.Did it still exist? If so, was it still any good? I quickly began leafing through the Michelin Guide, found Thoissey, and there it was: Au Chapon Fin.It was now reduced to one star, but the fact that it still had any was mildly encouraging.Several hours later, we were en route to Thoissey.By then, however, my initial enthusiasm had given way to trepidation.For the dedicated feeder, the urge to relive the tasting pleasures of the past is constant and frequently overwhelming.But restaurants change and so do palates; trying to recreate memorable moments at the table is often a recipe for heartache (and possibly also heartburn).And here I was, exactly two decades later, hoping to find Chapon Fin just as I had left it.Well, the parking lot hadn’t changed a bit—it was as expansive as I remembered it, and most of the spaces were still shaded by trees.Sadly, that was the high point of the visit.One glance at the dining room told the tale.The grandeur that had left such a mark on me had given way to decrepitude.Those thick, regal tablecloths were now thin, scuffed sheets.The carpet was threadbare.The plates appeared ready to crack from exhaustion.The staff brightened things a bit.The service was cheerful and solicitous—perhaps overly so—but they were doing their best to compensate for the food, which was every bit as haggard as the room.The evening passed in a crestfallen blur.What the hell was going on here?En route back to Paris, my wife and I stopped in the somniferous village of Saulieu, at the northern edge of Burgundy, to eat at La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant owned by Bernard Loiseau.He was the peripatetic clown prince of French cuisine, whose empire included the three-star mother ship, three bistros in Paris, a line of frozen dinners, and a listing on the Paris stock exchange.Loiseau’s brand-building reflected his desire to emulate the venerated chef Paul Bocuse, but it was later learned that it was also a matter of survival: Business in Saulieu had become a struggle, and Loiseau was desperate for other sources of revenue.The night we had dinner in Saulieu, the food was tired and so was he.It was another discouraging meal in what had become a thoroughly dispiriting trip.Maybe the muse really had moved on.IN 2003, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story declaring that Spain had supplanted France as the culinary world’s lodestar.The article, written by Arthur Lubow, heralded the emergence of la nueva cocina, an experimental, provocative style of cooking that was reinventing Spanish cuisine and causing the entire food world to take note.El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià, the most acclaimed and controversial of Spain’s new-wave chefs, was the focus of the article and graced the magazine’s cover.Lubow contrasted Spain’s gastronomic vitality with the French food scene, which he described as ossified and rudderless.“French innovation,” he wrote, “has congealed into complacency.as chefs scan the globe for new ideas, France is no longer the place they look.” For a Francophile, the quote with which he concluded the article was deflating.The Spanish food critic Rafael García Santos told Lubow, “It’s a great shame what has happened in France, because we love the French people and we learned there.Twenty years ago, everybody went to France.Today they go there to learn what not to do.”But by then France had become a bad example in all sorts of ways.Since the late 1970s, its economy had been stagnant, afflicted with anemic growth and chronically high unemployment.True, France had a generous welfare state, but that was no substitute for creating jobs and opportunity.By the mid-2000s, hundreds of thousands of French (among them many talented chefs) had moved abroad in search of better lives, unwilling to remain in a sclerotic, disillusioned country.France’s economic torpor was matched by its diminished political clout; although prescient in hindsight, its effort to prevent the Iraq war in 2003 struck even many French as a vainglorious blunder that served only to underscore the country’s weakness.A sense of decay was now pervasive.For centuries, France had produced as much great writing, music, and art as any nation, but that was no longer true.French literature seemed moribund, ditto the once-mighty French film industry.Paris had been eclipsed as a center of the fine-art trade by London and New York.It was still a fashion capital, but British and American designers now seemed to generate the most buzz.In opera and theater, too, Paris had become a relative backwater.French intellectual life was suffering: The country’s vaunted university system had sunk into mediocrity.Even the Sorbonne was now second-rate—no match, certainly, for Harvard and Yale.Nothing in the cultural sphere was spared—not even food.The cultural extended into the kitchens of France, and it wasn’t just haute cuisine that was in trouble.France had two hundred thousand cafés in 1960; by 2008, it was down to forty thousand, and hundreds, maybe thousands were being lost every year.Bistros and brasseries were also dying at an alarming clip.Prized cheeses were going extinct because there was no one with the knowledge or desire to continue making them; even Camembert, France’s most celebrated cheese, was now threatened.The country’s wine industry was in a cataclysmic state: Declining sales had left thousands of producers facing financial ruin.Destitute vintners were turning to violence to draw attention to their plight; others had committed suicide.Many blamed foreign competition for their woes, but there was a bigger problem closer to home: Per capita wine consumption in France had dropped by an astonishing 50 percent since the late 1960s and was continuing to tumble.This wasn’t the only way in which the French seemed to be turning their backs on the country’s rich culinary heritage
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