Translation attempt, not authorized or confirmed by @Wendell_Wagner :
“The USA has the most McDonald’s franchise locations of any country, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
The country with the next largest number of McDonald’s restaurants is not France. Moreover, the country with the next largest number of McDonald’s restaurants per capita is not France.”
Verification: According to this website, the four countries with the most McDonald’s restaurants are the US (15,000), Japan (5000), China (4500) and France (2200).
That’s about one McDonald’s for every 22,700 Americans, one for every 24,800 Japanese, one for every 31,300 Chinese, and one for every 31,150 French people.
I’m willing to look at evidence supporting that claim, but on its face it doesn’t seem plausible. I’m guessing that Americans are still the top McDonald’s consumers, both in total sales revenue and sales revenue per capita.
I know, but I still don’t understand exactly what that claim means. It’s clearly not true that France has the most McDonald’s restaurants after the US, either in total or per capita, and so it seems unlikely that the French are spending the most money on McDonald’s after the US, either in total or per capita. I could be wrong, natch.
The French don’t have an equivalent of Denny’s. At least Paris doesn’t . (Breakfast is really not a thing, there). Frog legs and snails were on the menu at, maybe, a third of the cafes and brasseries I ate at in Paris over two weeks. They, along with onion soup are appetizers as common as Brussel sprouts or Caesar salad in the US. I suspect that ratio goes way up in the touristy areas.
55 years ago my high school offered one year of Russian and four years each of French, Spanish and German. (I think a year of Latin was also a possibility, but I’m not sure.) No idea what the actual numbers of students taking each language were, but the German Club was bigger than all the others combined.
Distilled is definitely not French, at least not explicitly so. The only French restaurant in Lexington is Le Deauville, which does all the classics but I’ve only ever been on All You Can Eat Mussel Night. (The French/Creole place you mention, Lady Remoulade, is sadly gone.)
Distilled is what we call “New American”, and I’d argue that we could just as easily call it “French-American”. If you go to an Italian restaurant in America, it’s probably going to be “Italian-American”; same with Chinese or Mexican. Most of them probably aren’t going to look like what you’d find in Italy or China or Mexico. It’s only been in the last decade or two that those hybridized cuisines have been recognized by foodies as legit cuisines of their own worthy of study and admiration, and not just corruptions.
If you go to an explicitly French restaurant in America, it will look a lot like something you’d find in France.
But what we call “New American” is pretty much Americanized versions of French cooking. It might reach a little more broadly than other hybrid cuisines but it still has French techniques and forms at heart.