In the 16th century, François Rabelais created Gargantua, an earthy, gluttonous giant famous for his idleness and for his love of “eating well,” an expression that encompasses the art of receiving guests and preparing a meal for them. French cuisine is both a historic practice and a tradition rooted in the art of “eating well.” France views gastronomy as nothing short of a “national treasure.”
By the Middle Ages, France’s great cooks had defined the country’s culinary landscape. Taillevent, whose name now graces a great Parisian restaurant, and Sidoine Benoît, who invented the recipe for Caen-style tripe, are just two of the fathers of French gastronomy.
In the late 18th century, Antoine Parmentier promoted the culinary use of the potato and the art of making fine bread. Other figures who shaped France’s great culinary reputation include: Alexandre Dumas (senior); Antoine Beauvilliers, the inventor of the restaurant and author of L’Art du Cuisinier (1814); Auguste Escoffier; and Joseph Favre (1849-1903), who authored the Dictionnaire Universel de la Cuisine in the 1880s and founded the Académie Culinaire de France in 1883. A beacon for the culinary elite, the Académie is the oldest association of chefs and pastry makers in the world.
Four categories of restaurants exist in France:
> Fine dining, France’s area of excellence. Fine restaurants offer customers high-quality cuisine, distinctive wines, a warm welcome, attentive service, and a comfortable ambiance;
> Theme restaurants focus on a particular dimension of food, often a cultural one. Most have a highly distinctive logo.
> Fast-food restaurants serve food for on- or off-premise consumption, served in disposable packaging (fries, hamburgers, pizza, sandwiches, desserts, etc.). This category also includes icecream parlors and tea rooms.
> Institutional food service is common in three sectors: education (school/university cafeterias), health and social work (hospital cafeterias, retirement homes, and prisons/jails), and the workplace (public and private sector). Plus...