French food: the end of the road?

THE FOOD CLUB

Remember the multi-cuisine restaurants of yore? Every one of them starred Indian, Continental and Chinese. In the last decade or so, they've all metamorphosed into Indian, Mediterranean and Oriental restaurants.

Speciality restaurants that do regional Indian still laugh all the way to the bank, just as Chinese, Thai and Malaysian restaurants do, but the term Continental belongs to the age of the dodo and the dinosaur. Pierre in New Delhi's Le Meridien and The Oberoi's La Rochelle have both closed their doors.

InterContinental The Grand, New Delhi serves classic (and upmarket) Mediterranean (albeit to a largely Western audience) and the Orient Express at the Taj Palace has gone the same way, though classic French is still its forte. So, is it the end of the road for French food in India?

"Classic French food is becoming more and more niche as time goes on even in France," asserts Chef Francis Luzinier of InterContinental the Grand, New Delhi. "That's partly because people have less and less time to spend three hours over a four-course meal, and partly because the price of ingredients is spiralling out of reach."

I myself would add that the insistence to unsustainable levels of purity have hastened the demise of what is one of the great cuisines of the world.

Luzinier "" and doubtless many other chefs from France "" would strongly oppose selling Hungarian or Thai snails in a French restaurant anywhere in the world, but when the petit gris escargots from Burgundy just aren't enough to go around, what does a restaurateur do?

Italian food in comparison is far more user friendly. You can munch a pizza or order a bowl of pasta and claim to have eaten an Italian meal.

There is even a chain of vegetarian Italian restaurants in Mumbai, Goa, Pune, Bangalore and Delhi, and if most of what they serve would not be familiar to the average Italian, it's still notionally Italian.

Luzinier is not going down without a fight, however. "All western cuisine is based on classic French methods. A darne of fish, a fillet of beef, a cutlet of pork "" all these are French terms which have percolated into the lexicon of cooks throughout the world. Ask an Indian commis how to make a bechamel sauce, and he'll tell you at once, because he's learnt it in cooking school."

A recent dinner that Chef Francis cooked for me had everything to do with French cuisine, yet nothing to do with it. Tartare of mudcrab meat on chilli cucumber salad and jelly may have been the chef's playful way of asserting that French food and Indian spice can have a meeting ground. Duck breast on red cabbage with a gateau of duck leg confit was an unusual pairing of the same ingredient cooked in two different ways.

Chef Francis was following his own philosophy that food should be about flavour first and provenance later. The flavours were decidedly Mediterranean, with accents from Provence.