I was at a French restaurant last night, and as I munched on veal kidneys, a thought occurred to me.
Throughout 90% of the world, if I was the guest of the very highest of the high - at a state banquet, for instance - the food would mostly be French, right? As I count off in my head the nations of the world, I figure that for the most important occasions, they’d feed me French cuisine. The big exception, of course, would be China, though I imagine that the Emperor of Japan might feed me something vaguely Japanese, and you might get Italian food in the court of Berlusconi.
Other than Chinese, are there any national cuisines that have as much prestige at the highest level as French?
(To be more specific - are there any national cuisines other than French and Chinese that have a variety of suitable refinement and prestige that they would be served by a high-level, conservative [in terms of protocol] dignitary to a foreign guest in their country of origin at the very finest - both in terms of price and prestige - of eating establishments?)
The key thing I was thinking of here, oddly, is Central and South America. I’ve been to some very classy Mexican restaurants (stone bowls!), and Nicaraguan cuisine is a big favorite of mine. But if I was a guest of their governments or dined in their finest hotels, what would I get?
Also of revelence, though I forgot it until just now:
I was recently reading Live and Let Die, which is actually not a very good book (none of the Bond novels are; they’re so caustically 50s). There is a scene where James Bond visits America and is given the royal treatment by Felix Leiter, and he is greeted with the following American feast at the St. Regis hotel:
“Soft-shell crabs with tartare sauce, flat beef Hamburgers, medium-rare, from the charcoal grill, french-fried potatoes, broccoli, mixed salad with thousand-island dressing, ice-cream with melted butterscotch and as good a Liebfraumilch as you can get in America.”
I question the premise of your question even though I love French food. I don’t think they serve true French food at state dinners all over the world especially in the U.S. Really good French food is hard to prepare and takes special ingredients so that makes it appealing from a luxury standpoint but not everyone enjoys it either.
Variations on Italian food are probably much more common than French (and I am not talking just about pizza and spaghetti; they have loads of distinct regional styles with upscale appeal). My ex-wife ships high-end gourmet foods to the White House for state dinners. Their choices are always moderately high end but not the absolute most expensive and quite varied from the top Irish cheeses to exotic Italian pastas depending on the event.
My guess is that at a state banquet in most countries they will be trying to show off the local cuisine, not French cuisine. But I’ve only been to one – it was in Beijing, and, yes, the food was Chinese.
I, too, question the premise of the OP. But at expensive restaurants the world over, you’re going to see Steak Houses on the list. Still, almost every region has it’s prestige cuisine within its own country, and you’re going to find expensive Japanese, Italian, Thai, Mexican, etc. restaurants in those respective countries.
It was mostly seafood, including some very strange stuff that I’d never seen before. But no vegetables and no rice – you don’t get those at Chinese banquets where they are trying to impress you.
Something vaguely Japanese? :dubious: A Japanese state dinner will probably consist of a large number of extremely carefully-presented (and expensive) morsels of Japanese food. It would be hard to overstate the importance and complexity of food culture in Japan, and the obsession with place of origin, quality and authenticity.
Your premise is partially true, however, in Ireland and some other European countries where the style and techniques of haute cuisine were imported from France, and the local food traditions were seen as “peasant food”. All the top-quality restaurants (the kind that get Michelin stars) are in the French idiom or strongly influenced by it. Most of the top chefs trained in France. More recently, however, there has been a tendency to rehabilitate local food traditions and especially to highlight them at showcase events such as state dinners.
I would tend to say that the majority of countries on the planet would be mortally offended if you were to tell them that French cuisine, even the top end, was in any way superior or more highly developed than theirs. And with good reason. This is an IMHO issue, but really, French isn’t by any means the best. Good, yes, and they have a particular place in developing haute cuisine, which was to some extent a reaction to circumstances. They have had a very good publicity machine, much like they have for their wines. Good yes, absolutely the best, no. Awarding of Michelin stars is probably not the best metric to go by on a world scale.
A state dinner is like any catering exercise, a matter of logistics. It is simply not possible to present a restaurant quality meal to a large group that all eat at exactly the same time. The menu is designed so that it is possible to mass produce the meals and serve them at the same moment without problems. The possible preparation methods are significantly limited, and will favour, as much as possible, components that can be prepared well in advance, and meals that are not time sensitive in preparation or delivery. As has been noted above, state occasions will typically look towards a menu that highlights local ingredients and styles. The likelhood of arriving at a Spanish state function and being presented with a French dish is zero. Mostly because the Spanish are better.
If you look around the world, there are many very highly developed cuisines. To talk about “Chinese” food is about as useful as talking about “European” food. Indian food is astoundingly developed. However what we see in the west is a tiny sliver of a couple of provinces’ styles. Top level Japanese is developed to a degree that defies explanation. Worse, it is very difficult to judge any country’s cuisine by trying restaurants in your own country. Unless you really know what you are looking for you are likely to be very disappointed, and will find it very very hard to find anything that even approximates the food from many other cuisines, even in restaurants that bear those country’s names. Lack of access to the right fresh ingredients, the need to cater for more local tastes, and the simple reality that that immigrant chefs are often not the top chefs from a country conspire to make a B grade approximation.
Almost any culture that had the wealth and an upper class that could afford enough servants has developed a fine cuisine. French haute cuisine simply turned this into restaurant food after the first line employers had a run in with history. Codification and publication of haute cuisine probably makes the French special, in that they became well known, whereas many other culture’s kept the information much more private. Those of us in the second world missed this part of history, and have imported approximations to those cuisines from those that have developed them.
I think that people simply confuse elegant food with French food. Just googling the term “state dinner menu” one comes up with things like this:
State Dinner in Dublin for QEII:
State Dinner in DC for PM Cameron:
State Dinner in DC for Hu Jintao:
State Dinner in Canberra for Obama:
Now, the Queen did host Obama and serve a very French meal, but the notable events listed above show that countries tend to be pretty proud of their own cuisine.
Let me guess- you’re 15 years old, you just went to an expensive restaurant for the first time in your life, and now you fancy yourself a culinary expert. Right?
With Chinese food, I have had the sublime pleasure of being someone’s guest at the Beijing Hotel; it was the greatest culinary experience of my life.
The reason I was thinking French food is because during the 17th and 18th centuries, virtually all of Europe imitated France; this is the reason why large chunks of dialog in War and Peace are in French, and why the Prussians gave out a medal called ‘Pour le Merite.’
As for Japanese food, I have to apologize and withdraw my comments about it; I am toxically allergic to seafood of all stripes, and thus have given Japanese cuisine a wider berth than it probably deserves. I know next to nothing about it.
And, for my own personal experience, having dined in three prestige hotels in the last year (Gresham Hotel Budapest, Hotel Imperial Vienna, Four Seasons Prague); I noticed that only the Imperial had very native cuisine, and even that was half-and-half. The Four Seasons had an explicitly Italian restaurant as its only option, and the Gresham had Italo-Hungarian ‘fusion cuisine.’ I suppose that torpedos my ‘French food is classy food’ hypothesis, but still…
So if I am a guest of, say, the King of Spain or the President of Poland, whaddathey gonna feed me?
This reads: “My name is Scholar Beardpig and I have never met an Italian in my life.”
Berlusconi (were he still in power) would eschew Bunga Bunga parties in the afterlife rather than serve you French food. No “might” about it - no fucking way would any Italian premier serve French food.
Meanwhile in Indonesia, Barack Obama was served “Nasi Goreng, Bakso, Krupuk, Emping”.
Or maybe has been living in a cave for the past 30 years. (And reading James Bond novels, in which you can always tell which chapters Flemming wrote when he was hungry, because that’s where somehow feels it necessary to list entire menus of the meals which Bond eats.)
People already gave you those answers above. In Spain,you will get Spanish food or interpretations of it suitable for many different kinds of people. Spain has great food of its own with. I would take French food over Polish food any day but I think the idea would be the same except for theme events. French influence was very powerful at one point in certain parts of the world but the culinary trends have evolved at least as fast as technology in the past 20 years and there is a line of local cuisines waiting to be presented at events. There is no reason to look at French food as the ultimate anymore. That is very 1980’s.
