Advance Praise for Au Revoir to All That

"Au Revoir to All That is a fascinating and knowledgeable valedictory to the greatest food and wine culture the world has ever known. Michael Steinberger is a great gourmand and a great storyteller, and he will make you care about the fate of camembert and other endangered traditions."—Jay McInerney

"In Au Revoir To All That, Mike Steinberger pulls off the magic trick of throwing a funeral you want to go to: The elegy is unflinching but heartfelt and celebratory; the guests are the most interesting people; the food (and wine) couldn't get any better; and--get this--the deceased shows signs of rising again."—Benjamin Wallace, author of the New York Times bestseller The Billionaire's Vinegar

"When I started going to France in the early seventies, it was difficult to find a lousy meal over there. Now the exact opposite is true. How could a country with such an esthetically magnificent culture go wrong? Steinberger's penetrating report from a declining France resonates because he clearly loves the place and feels a sense of loss. Where did their taste go? I thank him mille fois for digging into the when, wheres, hows, and whys. Anyone with the slightest interest in France will appreciate this book, too.”—Kermit Lynch, author of Adventures on the Wine Route

"Most books on food and wine are misty-eyed memoirs of great meals and happy times. Michael Steinberger's book is different; he is trying to understand the decline and fall of France as the center of the world's great cuisine. In the course of his explorations, Steinberger takes us to the kitchens of great chefs, describes extraordinary food, and evokes fond memories. The result turns out to be intelligent, interesting and complicated. You will have to read the book to get it -- and you will read it with much pleasure."—Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post-American World

"If you've ever wondered why eating in France is so often disapponting, Michael Steinberger can explain. His delicious account draws not just on his amazing gastronomic expertise, but on a sophisticated understanding of French politics and history as well. Three stars: this one really is worth a special trip."—Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy and editor of Slate

Reviews for Au Revoir to All That

"Well worth reading...In genial, engaging prose, Mr. Steinberger makes the case that the ennui in France’s top kitchens reflects French ennui in general. He also manages to resurrect some forgotten heroes and gore some sacred cows, while in the end offering Francophiles a glimmer of hope...a thought-provoking book that also succeeds in entertaining." —Eric Asimov, The New York Times online.

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"It was a puzzlement, really. After all, we were in Paris -- I'd pinched myself enough times to be sure of that. It had been years, but now, ensconced in a cozy corner brasserie, my husband and I were looking forward to one of the great delights we remembered from our previous travels in France: wonderful, cheap food, everywhere you went.

Well, okay, nothing's cheap in Europe anymore; we knew that. But the food. How could the food be so . . . awful?

My onion soup was a pale, watery broth. I swallowed the cheese in one spoonful and eyed the few sad onion slivers floating in the bowl. My husband's grill platter looked greasy and, well, kind of gross. He's like Mikey, so he chewed gamely away on some gristly sausage, but this time Mikey wasn't liking it.

I felt his hunger pains. I mean, the man loves food. And food was what France, as we remembered it, was all about. It was about cassoulets and pot-au-feu and escargots and croque-monsieur and foie gras and so much more. But where were all those dishes? Where, in fact, were any dishes affirming the country's rep as the great culinary stronghold of the Continent? Because it wasn't just one bad meal, you see. In a week, we had maybe one good, never mind great, meal. True, we didn't eat in any three-star restaurants, but we ate in some well-known locales. And you'd have thought we might have stumbled on at least one fantastic feast. Mais non. The food wasn't always bad, but it was reliably mediocre. Uninspired. Blah.

It was enough to make Julia Child roll over in her grave. And to think that her movie self (a.k.a. Meryl Streep) could be leading a whole new generation of Americans down the kitchen-garden path to believing that La France is still the world's food mecca. But it hasn't been that, says Michael Steinberger, for quite some time.

I can't tell you how relieved I was when Steinberger's recent book, "Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France" (Bloomsbury USA), came across my desk not long after we got back from Paris. For weeks, I'd been thinking it was me. After all, my memories of magnificent French repasts were a couple of decades old. Maybe they were too rosy. Maybe my palate had changed. Maybe it was because we hadn't really planned out where to eat, assuming that we'd walk into deliciousness without any effort. Maybe we were just old and out of it.

Even if all those things are a little bit true, reading Steinberger, a wine columnist for Slate magazine (which is owned by the Washington Post Co.) and admitted "food-loving Francophile," reassured me. Because there's more to it than that, he writes. Way more.

Here's the thing. If you're a food expert, you'll know where to go to find tasty food in France. Joe Yonan, who runs The Post's Food section as well as this one, knows his vittles, so when he visited Paris a few weeks after we did, he planned well, used his contacts and had lots of fine meals. But if you're a casual tourist, you need to know: You're not going to find a fabulous meal around every corner. And mostly, the French don't care.

Take a look at these facts: From 200,000 cafes in 1960, France was down to 40,000 -- and dropping -- last year. Bistros and brasseries are likewise disappearing rapidly. Certain kinds of cheeses are dying because no one knows how to make them anymore. The wine industry is in upheaval as the French quaff less of the fruit of the vine. Forget the quaint little French outdoor market; they still exist, but the French now buy 75 percent of their food in supermarkets, just like Americans. And "most ominously," Steinberger writes, "the bedrock of French cuisine -- home cooking, or la cuisine familiale -- was in trouble. The French were doing less cooking than ever at home and spending less time at the table: The average meal in France now sped by in thirty-eight minutes, down from eighty-eight minutes a quarter-century earlier."

Well, no wonder the city seemed to have lost so much of that laid-back feel of folks just sitting around, whiling away the time over wine or coffee. Why numerous eateries stood half-empty at the height of the lunch or dinner hour. Why people were buying those prepackaged lunches from takeout shops and probably heading back to the office. Wine with lunch? Seemed totally passe.

There were still lots of pedestrians munching baguettes as they hurried along the street, but the baguettes themselves? Not always the delicacies they once dependably were. No surprise there, either, says Steinberger. In some places these days, he writes, it's "a struggle to find even a decent loaf of bread."

And the origins of these woes? Oh, there are beaucoup. Steinberger fingers everything from a bloated, micromanaging bureaucracy to the new creative cooking wave out of Spain and England to the rise of the celebrity chef and the tyranny of the Michelin Guide.

And . . . McDonald's. Yes, it's true. I joked that we could eat at the McDo's on the Champs-Elysees one night when we straggled back to our hotel after getting caught in a major thunderstorm, but I hardly thought that the French today actually like the place, that over the past decade they have turned to it "willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers." Such numbers, in fact, that "by 2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world" for the fast-food chain.

In some ways, France is just a victim of the same modern-age malady as every other nation. Millions of French women are working, and they're cooking less, finding it "easier to throw a frozen pizza in the microwave." Convenience foods have invaded -- and conquered -- the marketplace. But it's distressing to read that up-and-coming chefs in France no longer have to know how to "truss chickens, open oysters, or whip up a bearnaise sauce" to earn their license, being tested instead on "their ability to use processed, powdered, frozen, and prepared foods." Who knew? But it explains that gummy omelet we got at breakfast one day. (I know, Julia, I know.)

A lot of "Au Revoir" focuses on the decline of French haute cuisine and the travails of the nation's top restaurateurs and chefs. The author is especially hard on the renowned Paul Bocuse, the man who turned the once stove-bound chef into the globe-trotting celebrity of today -- and emptied countless French kitchens of the people who had made them sizzle. Some, of course, tried to maintain tradition even as things broke down. Steinberger's chapter on the once magnificent, once three-star Taillevent and its late, legendary owner and maitre d', Jean-Claude Vrinat, actually choked me up. I'd eaten there once in the 1980s (on my then-employer's dime), and I'm sure I remember Vrinat hovering over our table to make certain everything was just so.

But just-so is apparently not an overriding concern anymore in the country that once prided itself on its culinary chops and on the superiority of its "terroir," the soil that grew the finest foods in abundance. Did that confidence in France's natural advantages ultimately lead to a sense of complacency?

Steinberger thinks so -- and worse. The biggest challenge to French cuisine, he writes, is that it doesn't bother the French that their country isn't the epicenter of the culinary world anymore. The younger generation is happy to "gobble a sandwich or chips," to quote one pained restaurateur, it doesn't like to spend a lot of money on food and it couldn't care less about France's sterling gastronomic heritage.

Which is not to say that all is lost. A new generation of younger chefs is working to bring the old traditions and old-school cooking back to life and "rekindle a passion for it in others." And certainly the world still has excellent French cooking (there's still Alain Ducasse), though mostly not, alas, in France. In fact, if you want a truly fabulous French dining experience, head for . . . Japan. Yes, that country, reports Steinberger, has "embraced French food with quasi-religious fervor" and now makes it better than the French do.

As for my husband and me, we loved our trip to Paris despite our unhappy meals. You can't beat the City of Light, of course. But on our plane back to Washington, my husband leaned back in his seat and sighed. "I can't wait to get back home," he said, "to have some really good French food."—Zofia Smardz, The Washington Post

“[Steinberger’s] descriptions of treats…are shown in the true voice of a passionate Francophile. Steinberger's love for the country is tangible through his descriptions of the food he eats and remembers eating, and somehow it makes sense that he fell in love with his future wife over a French meal. It's not an adolescent love that Steinberger has for the country, but more like adoration mixed with a dose of reality.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“’Au Revoir to All That: Food, Wine and the End of France,’ by Slate columnist Michael Steinberger, takes it as a fait accompli that the glory years are over; what's debatable now is the speed and reversibility of the decline. Alarmingly, what Steinberger describes is less of a slow ebb and more of a free fall.” —Denver Post.

Grub Street, New York Magazine's food blog.

“An eye-opening, well-researched and amusingly written, reliable guide to the contemporary cooking scene in France, and it's to be hoped that French chefs somewhere will pay attention to Steinberger's neat formulation of the question – ‘Which way forward for French cuisine?’” — San Francisco Chronicle

A "LIT PICK" choice and the second nod from The San Francisco Chronicle

“Dismayed by France’s culinary slip in the ranks, Steinberger attempted to find out what happened and uncovered a multitude of possibilities: globalization, evil corporations, economics, unfathomable bureaucracy, a punitive tax structure, a fundamental break from traditional values in French society, the changing role of chefs, classism and even the Michelin Guide. Steinberger’s findings and theories are thoughtfully presented in his new book… In the hands of a lesser writer, any one of these topics could have been sensationally used to brow-beat the reader into a particular conclusion. However, the real pleasure of this book was how doggedly Steinberger researched all possible answers and then eloquently unveiled the interconnectivity of everything…If you have lamented or questioned the downfall of French cuisine, or just need a good gustatory puzzler to mull over, this is a great read.”—Sauce Magazine.

“For anyone who cares about food, wine, or France, Slate wine columnist Michael Steinberger's new book, Au Revoir To All That: Food, Wine, and the End of France is required reading. Steinberger has done remarkably thorough research to detail just what has gone wrong in French gastronomy. Drawing on astonishing tidbits like the identity of France's largest private sector employer (McDonald's), Steinberger convincingly explains why so many of its greatest chefs have grown complacent, its greatest gastronomic guide so off-track, and its winemakers just plain broke. In spite of all the bad news, the book is a ripping fun read and is even a little optimistic.”—Emily Kaiser, foodandwine.com—posts on Mouthing Off and Tasting Room.

“Informative… [Steinberger’s] fascinating profiles of influential French chefs and restaurateurs include Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, and the late Alain Chapel and Jean-Claude Vrinat of Taillevent in Paris…[an] excellent narrative.”—Pittsburgh Tribune Review.

“Must read.” – The Decider

"A culinary expedition through France hunting for the root of the slow decline of the country’s acclaimed food and wine traditions. Slate wine columnist Steinberger introduces his subject by asking, “Did [the French] no longer care to be the world’s gastronomic beacon?” In 2007, the author traveled to Paris for answers, kicking off his research by interviewing the eminent chef Guy Savoy, then briefly retracing the history of the country’s cuisine, beginning in the 16th century. He elucidates how the years under François Mitterand and Jacques Chirac, rife with economic stagnation, hurt restaurants, while newly rich patrons in Britain and the United States “bankrolled gastronomic revolutions” abroad. Steinberger also conferred with other famous chefs—including Alain Ducasse—and local makers of wine and cheese, asking for their thoughts on the state of culinary affairs. He illustrates how the dawn of the “Michelin [Guide] era” affected the global restaurant world, and met with the company’s current head, Frenchman Jean-Luc Naret, who confided that, contrary to some chefs’ suspicions that factors like nice bathrooms boost scores, “What matters is what’s on the plate.” Though modern French cooking has been the subject of many books, Steinberger’s meticulous research and personal hunger for objective truths bring surprising discoveries to light. A chapter about endangered cheeses, for instance, explains that increased standards of hygiene have meant fewer bacteria in milk, a change that has completely altered the production of Camembert. The author also wonders about the impact of France’s growing ethnic population on traditional restaurants, a question connected to the larger issue of who or what defines modern France and, by extension, its food. An offering of fresh and engaging insights for foodies and Francophiles alike."—Kirkus Reviews

"Provocative.a readable, thoughtful, well-reported critique of the parlous current state of French gastronomy." —Joseph A. Harriss, American Spectator.

"France once embodied the crowning glory of culinary art, but the most serious gastronomes today turn increasingly elsewhere for inspiration. Because French food’s hegemony was simply assumed as little as two decades ago, Steinberger marvels at this precipitous decline in Gallic reputation. His investigation finds manifold causes for this state of affairs. The cult of the celebrity chef has taken too many talents out of French kitchens and into the world of marketing and multiple dining rooms in far-flung cities. Evolving French social conditions and tax laws have also served to nurture the highest-price restaurants and cheap fast-food outlets, driving middle-range restaurants out of business. Simultaneously, French wines have faced competition from successful new enterprises in California, Chile, South Africa, and Australia. In short, France has been so successful in encouraging the rest of the world to admire French food that its students now rival the old masters.—Mark Knoblauch, Booklist