Les vrais états généraux de la restauration

On rue89 Xavier Denamur brings up some ideas to reunite restaurant owners with an increasingly disillusioned clientele. Seeing the lack of guarantees as to food quality as being the central issue Denamur tackled the widespread abuse of the term fait maison, which generally indicates a dish made entirely by the restaurant to their own recipe.

Until fairly recently it was taken for granted by the French public that their restaurateurs were possessed of real talents. Unfortunately numerous reports have shattered any such illusions, restaurant kitchens now being perceived as little more than assembly lines reheating entire dishes. Legislating the use of the term and, along the same lines governing the use of the term boulangerie, the introduction of a new title, that of artisan restaurateur, would clearly indicate when a meal has been entirely prepared from scratch on the premises. The move comes to restore confidence in the restaurant kitchen as a place of craftsmanship and skill.

Specialising in what they call ‘catering solutions’ industrial manufacturers claim tens of thousands of customers. An estimated 70-80% of French restaurants offer a menu at least partially composed of industrial mass-produced fare and the result is less than apetising. These restaurants are little more than specialists in reheating and serving ready made meals, everything from ingredients to entire dishes delivered tinned, frozen or vacuum-packed.

The use of the unregulated « home-made » terminology on menus does not realistically reflect customer expectations: A dish flaunted as being home-made can be entirely composed of industrial products, or not even prepared in the restaurant itself, the components only being assembled on the premises.

Denamur takes for his example the humble, supposedly home-made, apricot tart. This can be thrown together using a precooked preshaped pastry shell, a factory produced cream purchased in bulk and tinned apricot halves in syrup. In the same vein a tinned stew can be called home-made because a slice of lard has been added to the pot.

The main problem is that there is nothing obliging a restaurateur to indicate where industrial confection is used on the menu.

The proposition for product transparency à la carte is simple. Explicity marking when a dish comes from a factory or is cooked on the premises from fresh and raw produce will restore consumer faith in the nation’s restaurants, rejuvenating the industry’s standing and ultimately create employment.

The only opposition to the argument for transparency comes from those who benefit from keeping consumers in the dark. These large industrial manufacturers take blatant advantage of their customers, cheating them by exploiting the idea that in restaurants are real chefs and craftsmen. These catering solution specialists generate unmeasurable harm to the restaurateurs who put in all the hard work demanded of their craft and have learned that craft through decades of experience.

The truth is that French restauration today suffers more than it benefits from this opacity. Shifting general attitudes within the trade in favour of transparency could be a real boost for small and medium independent restaurants. If there are still no serious efforts to engage with such a principle, when the new contrat de l’avenir is signed on the 28th of April 2011, the independent restaurateur will be further vilified by the media and abandoned by yet more of their customers.

The use of these catering solutions prepared elsewhere than the restaurant kitchen, while not illegal, is comprehensively fraudulent. Given the option there is a marked majority of consumers who would prefer the food they eat to be prepared on the premises. The omission of a meal’s origin is completely duplicitous and plays on a reasonable expectation the consumer has of a certain level of quality.

Not only can they be made in a factory and reheated in a microwave, they’re not even cheaper. Along the same lines as other recently released investigations (les pieds dans le plat Canal+ and Restaurants: Microwave Gastronomy on France2) the latest report on the industry, published April 2011 by Capital Magazine, showed yet again that factory ready-made meals are not sold cheaper than dishes cooked with care and skill.

An agreement to identify the nature of ingredients used as well as the location where a dish has been cooked seems only natural for a country boasting the love the French profess to when it comes to their food. Working with fresh raw produce is craftsmanship all of its own and should be valued as such.

Protecting the use fait maison can been done simply without misleading customers or complicating anyone’s life. The use of the term should be reserved uniquely for those who prepare and cook their food on the premises from fresh raw produce in the same spirit as the legislation that was established for bakeries. A logo to indicate an artisan restaurateur could be placed in the window or on the menu to distinguish between real restaurants from microwave chefs. Whether the difference can be tasted consumers are entitled to know what they are being served on a plate.

Given the increasing importance of additives in our daily food establishments not eligible for the artisan restaurateur title should ask their suppliers for detailed information on their produce. This information could then be made available on request and indicate the complete composition of any dish in the same way a supermarket does.

Such a legislation would restore fair competition in an industry where opacity is the rule and Denamur calls for increased powers to be granted to the Directorate General for Competition, Consumption and Fraud (DGRCCF) to implement and enforce the strategy.

It is difficult to imagine that millions of customers in our nation’s restaurants would ever be opposed to such a simple and obvious measure, yet in his closing lines Denamur wonders at the reluctance of current political representatives to legislate on the issue.

Xavier Denamur gives some solutions in two videos:

http://www.monquotidienautrement.com/temps-libre/xavier-denamur-cultive-son-jardin

http://www.france5.fr/c-notre-affaire/?page=player&id_rubrique=251 his interview starts at 19 minutes 42 secondes

A.H.

On the 26th of February Daniel Bernard published an article in Marianne regarding the poor state of the nation’s gastronomic heritage. At the end of the article Marianne called for legislation to be passed which would require all restaurants to clearly identify which of their dishes have not been prepared on the premises. Since such a measure is our raison d’être here at Vegr we’ve translated and adapted Marianne’s call to arms into English. Original article available here.

Since 1998 the law reserves the term ‘boulangerie’ for those professionals who choose their own raw ingredients, knead their own dough and whose bread is fermented, formed into its final shape and cooked on the premises of sale. This method of transparency ensured the sustainability of an economic activity severely threatened at the time by large-scale distributors and industrial bakers. It’s a simply effective method of informing the general public on the provenance of their daily bread, one presently denied us when it comes to restaurants. To know that a bakery is a true boulangerie it suffices to look at the signage above their door, their use of the term ensures they don’t merely heat up frozen baguettes and croissants. The love the French once had for little restaurants, bistros and brasseries has developed into disaffection, an indifference to broken promises of quality.

The lowering of VAT across the catering section, which could only ever have lowered the bill by cents, was immensely profitable to the empirically-minded chain restaurants. These benefitted from prime locations to sell frozen French fries by the bushel and crèmes brûlées by the kilo. The French don’t even need to travel any more to be served what is deemed to be ‘tourist food’. Neither is this industrial carnage exclusive to larger cities- wholesalers currently deliver to every little village in France serving regional specialties.

What French restauration needs right now, the vital ingredient they most lack in the present day, is the trust of its customers. Their confidence in the service provided and in the meals they are served. Whatever new measure is introduced to stimulate this cannot be yet another ‘quality-assured’ logo as it would only be one among very many already in existence. The new measure should take into account public health and introduce awareness of exactly how the meal has been put together: Every restaurant should be required by law to clearly indicate which of the dishes have not been cooked on the premises and prepared from fresh raw produce. Frozen factory made ready-meals would then be explicitly revealed leaving the customer with more knowledge about what choice they have on the menu, leading them to understand exactly what is in their food.

The critics of such a regulation will undoubtedly start crying that customers, on knowing the industrial and chemical origins of their food, will inevitably just leave restaurants for dead altogether. Practically speaking the desired measure should incite France’s restaurant-going public to refuse to settle for low-grade culinary deceit. The entire production chain that ends with the consumer dining in the restaurant would be revitalised: the farming sector could be better compensated for the production of higher quality ingredients; seasonal products and dishes would then be cheaper; these would then be more affordable to the consumer and lead to generally happier diners. In Italy the requirement of indicating all frozen products has done nothing to hurt industry in the slightest and there is no reason to suspect France is any different.

French cuisine today is the last area of domestic produce where fraudulence is still tolerated when it comes to quality. The contents of our plates are in the hands of lobbyists and their French ministers who tend the law heavily in their own interests. Are we really to believe that these are the people best left to decide on the ingredients of what ends up on our dinner plates?

A.H.

Translated and adapted from an article by Daniel Bernard in Marianne, Saturday 26 February. Original available here.

There’s a classic formula in French restaurants we’ve all come across. Starter + Main Course = €14. Give or take. A dessert is easily added for a few euros and a little espresso for a few euros more. There is undoubtedly a Gallic fondness for an expensive lunch and recently the Paris-based news magazine Marianne stuck its foot squarely in the kitchen door of  a few Paris restaurants. They rooted in their bins making some interesting if depressing findings along the way..

Not only has traditional restauration in France been steadily losing clients but, perhaps even more worryingly, their skilled employees have been deserting the profession in droves. This is also one of those rare occasions when the official statistics happen to support what professionals in the trade have been saying over the last ten years.

There is no pride in thawing and reheating a meal, it’s downright embarrassing to everyone involved, staff and customers alike. Of course these little kitchen secrets are nothing new and have been exposed time and time again. Even so it’s a practice constantly denied by many restauranteurs in fear of losing their few remaining customers. One distributor advised the investigating journalists posing as restaurant-owners « If your main courses are 13€ you should be selling your moelleux (chocolate cake with a gooey centre) for 6 to 7 euros. If your main dishes are at €20 you can customise the desert a little and sell it on for 11€ ». The price per unit of the chocolate cake was €0.90 all tax included.

One restaurant’s bins in the fashionable Marché-St-Honoré area turned up the packaging of a New York style Cheesecake. The frozen, pre-cut confectionary was billed on their menu at €6.50 a serving. Further dumpster diving in the area turned up factory produced packaging for roast lamb, scallops, salmon. All these dishes were already portioned into single portions and included the accompanying sauces. The packaging proved that these restaurants were producing meals of the utmost mediocrity when it came to taste without ever going quite as far as to be inedible. On top of which the high prices would place them outside the reach of most average sized budgets.

Joel Oustry, restaurateur of the old school variety gets to the Rungis market twice a week at three in the morning to buy all of his fruit and veg. « The trick, » he said, « is buying as well as you can ». He described how it was impossible to lower prices in the current climate when all the taxes and council charges were taken into account.

Another restaurateur, Gilles Bénard of the Quedubon in the Buttes-Chaumont holds that the lunch hour doesn’t actually make him any money at all. From his point of view it is only during dinner time when dishes featuring various bio-organic products are ordered hence doubling his business.

Xavier Denamur denounces the whole system. He starts with the intense agricultural system responsible for producing low-grade ingredients through to the low wages paid to unskilled workers in the catering sector. These consequently lack any motivation to acquaint themselves better with a worthwhile profession.

It is, of course, the fast-food chains who stand to benefit from the disappearance of real traditional French cuisine. For the time being it certainly seems as though the high prices are here to stay but all may not be quite as hopeless as it seems. Just as bakeries need to make and cook their bread on the premises in order to use the word ‘boulangerie’ it is without a doubt in the best interests of the catering industry if a similar requirement is introduced. A label on all restaurant menus indicating that a dish has been prepared from scratch and using fresh, raw produce seems like the obvious choice. Until such a time comes it might just be worth skipping that dodgy chocolate cake.

A.H.

How the cut in VAT put nothing better on your plate or back in your wallet

When the French government slashed VAT for eat-in (sur-place) meals from 19.5% to 5.5% in 2009 they did so with huge amounts of publicity and self-flattery. It was considered as quite a feat; approval had to be granted first from the European Parliament who set all the rates for member states and lobbyists had been campaigning for such a cut since 1992. One year after the implementation of the plan it is worth asking ourselves as customers; how much less are we really paying?

The intentions of the tax cut were to provide employers with a much needed financial windfall. In return for a small drop in prices employers in the sector were to provide a stimulus package to their employees, create more jobs and re-invest in their businesses so they could weather the economic downturn.

The most important of the effects of the tax break is naturally the drop in prices. To the everyday paying customer the tax break was supposed to deliver a higher quality of service in relation to what we paid. A survey by the INSEE, a non-governmental institute, reveals that prices actually only dropped 0.9% in cafés and restaurants in the one year period since the implementation of the tax-cut. When hotels were included, also in the same survey, overall prices showed an increase of 0.1%. Despite this evidence, alongside plenty of anecdotal evidence from the public, the French government continues to place the average price decrease at 2.5%.

In the capital many of the larger Parisian brasserie-style restaurants failed to put down prices at all. They’re easy enough to recognise; they’ll often have multilingual menus and immense dining halls and they’re also the ones more likely to be serving frozen ready-made meals from the equivalent of a catering mail-order catalogue. It is easy to dismiss them as ‘tourist-traps’ but it is with these restaurants in mind when we ask ourselves whether our ratio of quality service to price has materialised over the last 12 months.

There is a good deal of trouble to be had in untangling the murky beaurocratic waters at work here, and once you’ve done so the picture does not look at all promising. Restaurants were later given the option of opting out of the minimum wage-increase, the jobs increase failed to materialise yet the tax-cut measure enjoys continued support by a French government desperate to improve disastrously dwindling approval ratings.

The trouble is that the official statistics, proving the tactic to be more successful than initially planned, are openly misleading when compared to the figures issued by non-governmental counterparts. Considering the foundation of French cuisine is traditionally based around locally sourced business practices the tax cut does nothing to bring clear solutions to the difficulties faced by small restaurateurs who continue to provide a quality service. Ultimately it is up to us the customers to decide whether we feel we are getting better value for money in the restaurants we frequent and whether we can provide practical assistance in assuring the longevity of real French cuisine.

A.H

The strong social appeal of the minimum wage has lost much currency in recent years. Having once been seen as the resort of the adolescent first-time employees or the low-skilled it is now largely a nuisance to both employers and employees either as a glass ceiling or as an unnecessary expense. In the UK and the USA companies in the catering, leisure and cleaning sectors are the most likely to employ workers at or just above the minimum wage. In France, however, working in the catering industry is traditionally seen far more as a worthwhile career decision, ultimately a vocation rather than the final resort of the desperately unemployed. But careers in the restauration business in France are under the same integral threat as are the basic fresh products and local sourcing customs that have traditionally provided the financial backbone to French Cuisine.

« One of the problems here is that everyone working here is a foreigner, » says Jack, an English waiter. « Among the kitchen staff and the waiters we all earn the same minimum-wage pay-packet. The owner and his wife are the managers, they let the employees know they’re lucky to have a job. None of us really know what it is we’re entitled to and we’re afraid to ask. »

Jack’s café-restaurant is in the Latin Quarter and their main source of revenue is the steady stream of tourists who come to visit Notre Dame, the Sorbonne and the place St-Michel. He takes great pride in his work as a waiter and hopes to continue working in the French catering sector in the future.

« I empathise with my employers because all of us working here understand and share the difficulties that are implied in running a busy restaurant but at the same time as wanting to be professional our paycheques are often incomplete. This puts us into a difficult position because we don’t compromise in our dedication to the job when extra hours are asked of us or when we’re given socially difficult split shifts. »

>Olivia, waitress in a café next to the Pompidou Centre agrees with Jack on this.

« They give us split shifts, often it’ll be a four hour shift then a six hour shift with two hours in the middle, but when it’s quiet we’ll be asked to leave earlier and make up the time before our next shift. We don’t get breaks during these shifts as there’s not enough staff to cover and when we eat it has to be done on our own time. This means I physically spend more time in work than I have free time per week but am only paid for 39 hours! »

Olivia has also had problems with her employers paying her the full wage she is owed.

« When I talk to one of the managers about it they tell me to talk to another, when I talk to him I’m told i have to talk to the office about it. When I ring the office they’ll tell me they know nothing about it and I need to talk to my manager about it. It’s exasperating but there’s nothing else I can do. Very few of my friends who work in restaurants in Paris have the good fortune to work in places where they pay you well and expect you to to perform well, we mostly get all of the expectations with none of the rewards. And jobs in good places are hard to find because nobody ever leaves them, they know how lucky they are. Our customers don’t realise that the restauration business in France only recognises May 1st as a jour ferier. the rest of time, Sundays, Bank Holidays and even Christmas day or New Years Eve we’re still working for the same wage than if we were working on an ordinary week-day. »

Jake, who works as a manager in the 11th tells me that he’s often troubled by his employers’ lack of desire to hire competent people, “they prefer hiring people they can anchor to a minimum-wage contract without being fully aware of what they’re signing. With a CDI contract, when the employee walks away from it they get nothing, no social welfare and no pay-off from the employer. We have a guy now who’s basically a commis chef working on his own in the kitchen during busy periods. It’s a nightmare because he’s not even a commis, which is pretty much the lowest chef you can get, but a kitchen assistant who’s been hired to give the other chefs a night off. He’s paid the same as the guy who washes the dishes and it takes twice as long to serve our clients when he works on his own. He’s doing it because he wants the experience and when he walks away from it he can say on his cv he’s been at that position even though he’s never had any of the training.”

The situation for minimum wage workers is just as dead-end as you would expect it, even in a socialist country like France. When the government negotiated a stimulus package with the catering industry in return for slashing the VAT it was negotiated that there would be an pre-tax bonus given to certain valued employees in the sector (calculated as those earning over a specified amount), that the minimum-wage would be raised by €0.06 and that employers would recognise more official holidays and in addition a mutuelle or private health scheme all employees would be entitled to. Nobody interviewed for this article has heard anything about these measures, nor do they expect to. They all tell me exactly the same thing, summed up best by Olivia:

“Nobody could honestly expect anyone who hires most of their staff on the minimum-wage to do anything but the utmost minimum to keep them interested in doing a better job. We work hard here because we take pride in what we do and not because we’re paid to do a good job.”

A.H.

To friends and fellow food-lovers, from here and the world over

Having been added to UNESCO’s “Intangible Cultural Heritage” protection list, French cuisine is widely regarded as being at the apex of gastronomic grace and style. What’s more, we feel part of it here: this is a heritage we can order, eat and drink; we can steal time from busy lives to share it with our loved ones.

It is odd to think of French cuisine as being in any danger of disappearing. Naturally we associate the expense of fine cooking as being necessary to the production and service of a high-quality meal! Not with high-sodium, factory-produced ready meals designed to dupe our stomachs and empty our wallets. Yet restaurants producing good, fresh, home-made food from from scratch are steadily disappearing, skilled chefs and waiters replaced with slave-wage automatons, small restaurateurs forced into closing their restaurants.

We should choose restaurants who pay and treat their employees well, who source locally and as bio-organically as possible and who reinvest profits to better the service to their customers.  Before you sit down at a restaurant, ask if their meals are entirely home made and prepared from fresh produce*. Keep in mind, 80% of restaurants use industrial, factory-produced meals.

There is plenty we can do alongside our hosts about the perilous state of French cuisine today. Avoid being duped by what’s served to you on a plate: sign up to vegr.fr now and find out more about what you can do to support [the restoration of] real cuisine in France. This is the country of 260 cheeses and around 27,000 wineries! It’s a global fight to protect a global heritage that belongs to us all. The moment you set foot in this country and carry away with you memories of shared moments over dinner, and when you rekindle those memories by visiting French restaurants at home, that heritage is part of you and belongs to you. Make no mistake about it: this is your fight too.

Alex Hoskins
Subscriber and collaborator, vegr.fr

*Est-ce-que ce plat est cuisiné sur place à base de produits bruts et frais?

Texte en couverture des menus des restaurants Les Philosophes, La chaise au plafond et du Petit fer à cheval à Paris 4

What Les vrais états genéraux de la restauration en France is and what it means to you.

It’s an important part of our history, where there is a tradition of cuisine (even if it’s bad!). Paradoxically the desire to eat out seems to have been weakened in recent times.*

There are lots of us expatriates in France at the moment. There ought to be well over 50,000 of us in this country, and that’s just the anglophones. We love, for the most part, the French and the French language, and again for the most part, their defiantly anti-authoritarian ways which can seem to be a refreshing reversal of what we’re used to at home. Living here introduces us to the hour or two long coffee, booksellers who, seemingly without exception, will openly chain-smoke in their shops, the boulangerie and other small institutions, the Haussmanian boulevard and the bank holiday five-day weekend. They’ve got one of the toughest and most elaborate bureaucratic systems in the world and produced a dazzling array of the continent’s most influential writers and thinkers. But all this time us expats have played an important role in French society. We’re part of a small secret society existing through the ages, recognising each other through slight linguistic tropes, the cover of a book bought from one of the excellent English language bookshops. And the ex-patriates are only the ones who finally made it back or ended up staying, after all, France attracted just over 74.2 million tourists in 2009 and Paris is widely accepted as being the most-visited city in the world.

But there is now a major crisis in French cuisine that has been going on for some time. For the unwary customer frozen factory produced foods are increasingly being served in restaurants throughout the country. Waiters, barmen and kitchen staff, instead of being trained professionals in their chosen fields, are being progressively replaced with wage-slave automatons. The list of abuse is endless; social and fiscal fraud, complete lack of food traceability. It’s a dispiriting state of affairs.

The trouble is that getting to information couched in bureau-political doublespeak is not only disconcerting but deliberately intended to lead us down the garden path. This is where vegr.fr comes in.

The articles on this website are intended to keep you informed of what is happening in the world of restauranteering in France and of what the catering sector in France really thinks as it happens. We intend to support and encourage to the fullest extent possible an openly democratic debate of what ends up on our plates, to simply lay out for the restaurant-loving public exactly what decisions are taken behind closed doors to determine the future of our favourite eateries.

This is how you can get involved:

• Sign up to vegr.fr and get others to so as well
• Help us to expand our English language section by offering to translate or contribute an article
• Tell others about us on your blog, your website or your facebook page
• Help us maintain our independence by making a donation and becoming a subscriber

It is all the more important that we as expatriates and visitors to this country we love directly protect the culture and continue to maintain the core values of French cuisine that has so much contributed to the bettering of our own quality of life.

*

‘La table fait partie de notre histoire, en France, … où la cuisine et une tradition (même la mauvaise!) … Mais paradoxalement, l’envie d’aller au restaurant semble avoir failbli depuis quelque temps.’ Macha Meril, Souvenirs Gratinés d’une Restauratrice. Les Petites Vagues Editions.

Lire cet article en français
The French are famous the world over for their cooking as well as their appreciation of gastronomic delights. But what happens when the ingredients and cooking processes are brought into line with the 21st century, outsourced, modified and industrialised? During a broadcast on France Inter Service presented by Olivia Gesbert, food and nutrition journalist Colette Roos, (aka Les dessous de l’assiette) introduced the issue of industrialisation facing French traditional restaurant cooking today and the difficulties facing restaurateurs who wish to offer their customers “homemade” (maison) dishes on their menus. The programme illustrated the problem by taking a symbol of great French cooking, the Tarte Tatin, listen to Roos talk about it here, and revealing rather startling truths. In the anglophone world the media frenzy does not last long when a chef of say, Gordon Ramsay’s stature is unveiled to having outsourced his cooking, earlier this year he remained completely unapologetic. In France however the debate rages for a very different reason: Whatever price we pay for food in a restaurant, factory prepared food diminishes the roles of chef, waiter and restaurateur and if there can’t be restrictions on what can be labeled, sold and served as traditionally homemade to unsuspecting consumers there should at least be a clear definition of what ‘fait maison’ constitutes.

You can help change this state of affairs in demanding more transparency in tracing the history of the food on your plate. Join our association and make your voice heard in assisting the restoration of this nation’s gastronomy.

Included below are some examples of Tart Tatin offered by some ‘traditional’ restaurateurs in the centre of Paris that were served at a tasting by Roos before her appearance on France Inter.

Here’s a recipe for tart Tatin. It’s not a complicated dish needing only time, preparation and cooking time approx. 2hrs.

PIERRE BECO’S TARTE TATIN
Ingredients :
400g shortcrust pastry (additional recipe here)
5 to 6 kg desert apples (Royal Gala if possible)
500g confectionary sugar
200g butter

Recipe :

Peel, core and halve apples.
Melt the butter in a Tatin mould (preferably copper-bottomed).
Add the sugar until you’ve made a make a brown caramel brown, be careful not to burn.
Arrange apples in pan to form circles plugging any gaps with small slices of apple.
This time place a thin second layer on top.
Cook over low heat for about 40 to 50 minutes covering the apples with a sheet of aluminum foil.
Remove the foil and reduce for about 5 to 10 minutes until the caramel is soaked into the apple – so that it’s almost dry – again be careful not to burn.
Take off the heat and add the butter around the apples, roll the dough place on top of the apples, pack it down lightly and prick with a fork.
Bake in an oven at 220 degrees for about 20 minutes.
When the tatin is cooked, unmold and serve with a little crème fraîche on the side.