My experience of German restaurants is very good, Walter. Very good value for money, and HEAPS of food.
The Brits are not perfect, but we're getting there rapidly........
Les Rosbifs reinvented
To those who see the French president as out of step with the pace of modern Europe, Jacques Chirac's jibe about British food is perhaps a case in point.
They've got a slick rail network, a home-grown car industry and magnificent stretches of Napoleonic architecture that escaped the German Luftwaffe's mighty payloads.
We, on the other-hand, have half their unemployment, a global language and, for the next six months at least, the EU presidency. Oh, and the 2012 Olympics.
Rivalries between the French and the British are at least as old as Agincourt, the 15th Century battle in which longbowmen under Henry V beat the French forces, despite being outnumbered.
So when the French President Jacques Chirac cheerfully set about disparaging British culinary habits, his remarks stuck in the collective throat like an errant shard of escargot shell.
Perhaps what has enraged the British most about M Chirac's jibe, apart from the hearty laughs it elicited from his immediate audience, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Russian President Vladimir Putin, is how seemingly unfair it all is.
Twenty years ago, he would have had a point. Ten years ago even, the British culinary cognoscenti might have raised a submissive white napkin in the face of France's vastly superior epicural heritage.
But by common agreement (common, that is, except among the aforementioned statesmen), British cooking has undergone a remarkable reinvention in recent years.
"As far as restaurants go, it's a bit of an old cliché and one that's just not true anymore," says Andy Turvil, editor of the Good Food Guide. The restaurant scene in much of Britain is unrecognisable from two decades ago, he says.
Peter Harden, publisher of Harden's restaurant guides, agrees.
"Most Britons probably eat out in pubs not restaurants," he says. "It used to be true that to go for meal in a pub was a random experience. The steak and kidney pie was just as likely to be watery gravy under a concrete crust."
But that was then...
British restaurants have improved beyond belief, says Mr Harden. Not just at the top end of the market but also in the middling price bracket.
Pukka tucker
The single biggest reason, says Mr Harden, is wealth. The British are better off now and "the first thing people do when they get more money is spend it on food".
Cheap travel has broadened the palate, celebrity chefs have added some glamour to the kitchen and opinion formers no longer herald from the stuffy upper class - an echelon of British society that has never much cared for fine food, says Mr Harden.
It's not just a case of the British patting themselves on the back. In March this year, Conde Nast's Gourmet magazine hailed London as the best place in the world to eat.
M Chirac eats well in the UK
The honour has coincided with a good deal of soul-searching in the corridors of France's haughty catering colleges.
Last year the French government announced the opening of a new cookery university, in what was widely interpreted as a bid to reverse the country's waning international reputation. French chefs are said to have struggled to move on from nouvelle cuisine and fallen behind Spanish, Italian, American and even British rivals.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4654137.stm
