New ways and wars in EU food

Europe Business Review, March, 2000

Australian travellers in the northern summer will find that their favourite European capitals, London and Paris, are beginning to catch up to Sydney and Melbourne in variety of eating-out.

Australia's largest cities have a menu range shaped by two immigrant generations of invasion by ethnic cuisines.

London, Paris and Amsterdam - the ethnic eating capitals of EU have narrower immigration streams than those shaping Australian society and its cafes, takeaways and restaurants.

Ethnic eating in much of urban Australia - where European, Asian and Islamic are the main influences - matches the range in New York - and now exceeds the variety in European capitals.

The latest edition of the Harden Restaurant Guide (www.hardens.com) comments on 1400 of London's 8000 eating-out places. Some of those offering what is called the "modern British" style are ranked "among the worst", according to the guide.

Predictably, Italian and Indian cuisine offer the best ethnic fare in London. San Vincenzo and Cibo are good, but expensive, examples of the former. Curry menus, much favoured by British police officers, footballers and truckdrivers, according to BBC TV series, are much cheaper although Zaika, Salloos and Tamarind are fancy in style and price.

Thai restaurants are flourishing in Thames-side suburbs like Hammersmith and Chiswick. Some London pubs now serve what they claim is "Thai" food.

Good, inexpensive Lebanese Japanese, Turkish, North African, Greek, Indochinese and Central European foods, which are all common in Australia, have not emerged in Britain, although costly imitations are available in expense-account areas of London.

In Paris many French tend to think that ethnic, i.e. foreign, food is superfluous in a nation of legendary provincial and haute cuisine, but French versions of Vietnamese and North African dishes are now spreading beyond immigrant suburbs.

Australians in Paris longing to eat Asian are advised to take the Metro to Tolbiac, a middle-class district which has a street of places serving good dishes from Saigon and Bangkok.

Another aspect of cuisine trends in France is that it has taken the global struggle with the McDonalds syndrome - cheap grills heavy on salt and sugar - to well publicised heights.

Jose Bove, a French sheep farmer became an international celebrity last year when he bulldozed a McDonald's restaurant as a political symbol of a "citizen's revolt" against globalisation. He produces sheep milk for the makers of the uniquely French cheese, Roquefort.

When the European Union banned imports of US beef from cattle reared on hormone injections, America took the case to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which declared that the EU act was illegal under WTO rules.

(A similar situation is brewing in Australia where Tasmanian salmon farmers are opposing imports of Canadian salmon authorised by WTO.)

The EU ignored the verdict and the WTO allowed the US to retaliate with huge tariffs on imports of such French items as Dijon mustard and Roquefort. That doubled the price of the cheese to a prohibitive US$30 for half a kilo.

M. Bove and other farmers retaliated by vandalising a McDonald's. Bove has become something of a national hero. He has been praised by France's highest leaders, including President Jacques Chirac, who declared that he "detests McDonald's food."

M. Bove lives in a 500-year-old stone farmhouse in Larzac, an area of southwest France that is one of the country's favourite gastronomic regions.

The Bove crusade has tapped into larger issues than tariffs on Roquefort. Recently, the French, more than other Europeans, have felt a general annoyance with the reach and power of the American economy coupled with a nostalgia for some aspects of their way of life that seem to be disappearing. Yet every year one of the symbols of change, new McDonald's franchises, spread and flourish in France.

M. Bove was, of course, arrested and then refused bail for three weeks before emerging to enjoy celebrity.

The owner of McDonald's franchise estimated damage at $180,000. McDonald's calmed further protests with statements pointing out that the franchises in France are owned by the French, employ French workers and almost exclusively sell food grown in France.

M. Bove has nothing against Americans. His parents worked at the University of California in research on fruit tree diseases and he learned English there, But he has contempt for American food and points to statistics on the rate of obesity in America - three times that of France. He says America should not be allowed to sell its hormone-enhanced meat to others.

Bove says he has never eaten at McDonald's. He insists, however, he likes hamburgers made on a grill and served with tomatoes and onions from the garden and homemade mayonnaise.

The provincial and chauvinist harassing of the Golden Arches claims they threaten old tastes and values.

They probably do, but market theory suggests that if you cook a better dish a hungry world will beat a path to your door.

The hamburger, American truck-stop style, is not invincible - indeed the rise and rise of "ethnic" cuisine in Sydney and New York, the cities now setting world food trends, suggests that Big Mac could become smaller. Indeed, noodles, satays and nachos may be more of a growth menu.