Confident and dominating for centuries, French gastronomy saw its world supremacy openly challenged on August 10, 2003. That day, the Catalan chef Ferran Adria made the cover of the New York TimesMagazine. In a report entitled “The Nueva Nouvelle Cuisine”, the journalist Arthur Lubow asserts: “Spain has become the new France. »
The genius of the restaurant El Bulli, in Roses, in Catalonia, had indeed risen, the previous year, to the head of the 50 Bestthe controversial but publicized ranking of “best restaurants in the world” compiled by the British journal Restaurant Magazine. Then other foreign cooks (the Englishman Heston Blumenthal, the Dane René Redzepi…) also got ahead of the tricolor madmen (it was only the beginning: only three French restaurants appear in the latest list of winners…).
On the screens of Anglo-Saxon countries, chefs like Ken Hom and Stephen Yan introduced the public to the delights of Chinese gastronomy in the early 1980s. popular on all continents. The public is invited by France 5 to follow Julie Andrieu through her program “Fourchette et sac à dos”. “I wanted to show that we didn’t have a monopoly on taste”, says the latter. Fred Chesneau, in “The New Explorers”, displays the same ambition. He will clear the kitchens of Senegal, the Philippines, Taiwan, the Comoros, Lebanon or… Belgium for Canal+: “Travel gives lessons in humility to French cooks. » Long ethnocentric, French television realizes that people also enjoy eating outside France… and that the cuisines of the world can be a recipe, driven by hosts with gourmet taste buds and an open mind.
“Street food conceals thousands of treasures to be eaten with your fingers” – Fred Chesneau, chef and documentary filmmaker
Julie Andrieu and Fred Chesneau have one thing in common: they were both deprived of a family culinary heritage. The first notes that her mother, the actress Nicole Courcel, hating the image of ” housewife “, “made it a point of honor not to cook”. From the age of 17 (she is now 48), she embarked on an initiatory journey on the roads of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Same analysis from Fred Chesneau, 54: “I belong to a generation whose mothers chose not to pass on the enslavement of the kitchen. Not knowing how to prepare the blanquette of the grandmother, it was necessary to take the tangent. »
You have 69.6% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.