Paris is know for its falafels

Amber points out that Ezra Klein has, unaccountably, been given a food column in the Washington Post. My views about Klein's food writing have been abundantly well aired on this blog, so I'll leave my reaction at this: ?!?!!. Also, ?!.

It had escaped my attention, though, that Klein's diabolically bad food blog, the Internet Food Association, also includes blogging by Matt Yglesias. In this post, he makes a reasonable point about a Slate column (i.e., the column is pointless and doesn't match its title) and then adds the equally reasonable observation that France is blessed by an "extremely high level of pedestrian food". Yes, certainly true. Pate, bread, cheese, hams, vegetables of very high quality, milk, butter, cheap bistros, surely. But no! Yglesias was actually referring to "Vietnamese restaurants and falafel shops that would be huge sensations in the United States".

What is Yglesias even talking about? First, the falafel and Vietnamese in Paris are fine, but pretty plain. This is what you eat in Paris when, after the sixth round of epoisse in three days washed down with pork rilettes, you realize that if you eat any more French food you might die. But in fact the great weakness of Paris as a food city, if a weakness it has, it that its ethnic offerings are far more narrow than some of its competitors, and mostly not as good. (See, New York, London). Putting aside the two supposed examples Yglesias gives, the Chinese food is execrable. There is little Indian. Little Thai. Little really good sushi, and the median of sushi is lower. I could probably write dozens of pages on this topic and not exhaust the point. But the real point is that all this is irrelevant. Paris is one of the greatest food cities in the world because of French food. As you might imagine.

Moreover, sensations in the United States? Yglesias, as far as I know, lives about half an hour from what is arguably the locus of Vietnamese cooking in America. Paris's Vietnamese restaurants would be sensations in that area in the sense that they would be flops, made sensational by the fact that they were flopped French vietnamese restaurants. And the idea that one gets exceptional falafel in Paris, so exceptional that those are the things you would mention as examples of good food in Paris - it's not really clear to me how to respond to that. He's wrong. It's as if I said one goes to DC for falafels. Put another way, wrong.

EDIT: Also, as to the substantive point of the Slate article, it is true that French food has declined in quality in the past decade. This has nothing, in my view, to do with Michelin, which after all could only concievably cause a decline in the highest of the high (the Michelin-is-hamstringing-France argument goes something like this - France can't have its own Momofuku because of the Michelin Guide's requirement that a 3-star restaurant be opulent, and therefore its higher end cuisine is staid and falling behind America and Spain) but with a decline in French taste.

Having said that, I do think now is not the time to be serving 130 euro main courses.

EDIT 2: I meant 198 euro main courses. In other words, a main course that costs more than an entire meal at Per Se.