Crѐme Chantilly or Lunar Cheesecake

Forever anxious to keep up the impossibly high standards set for me in the Special Harriet Van Horn Issue, your indefatigable Mother Hazelton has recently explored two different aspects of the world of eating: haut kulturny French, and populist American.

American tourism in France must not be doing quite as well as in those balmy days when we had plenty of money to spend there and did not mind the natives’ being rude to us for doing so, as I remember only too well. Now the natives appear to be friendly, but when tea . at the Plaza Athénée is $14 a head and dinner at the Tour d’Argent around $75 before wine, as a recent visitor to Paris told me, Americans are staying away. To woo us back, the French Government Tourist Office, a hotel association, and several other French organizations sent a massive delegation of Frenchmen headed by a minister of tourism and five of France’s most famous chefs: Bocuse, Bise, Chapel, Outhier, and Troisgros. Kneel when you read this, since eating at their Michelin-starred restaurants is so expensive that it boggles the mind. I asked one of the chefs—Chapel, I believe—why this had to be so; he only looked wounded and said it had to be so. The delegation put on an enormous reception at the Hilton for American travel and food writers and for all the Frenchmen in New York. Each chef stood behind his own table with his specialties, in the mediocre version produced by the Hilton staff (inevitable, but sad), and gave autographs. The only pretty table was the one with all the French cheeses, which looked and tasted delectable indeed. They are still the best of their kind in the whole world. Before the food they had shown a film of France and all the enormous and obviously empty new hotels. The whole occasion made it quite clear that French tourism is interested only in the big spenders, the people who eat nothing but starred meals, lunch and dinner, every day.

NH

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Nika Hazelton

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Forever anxious to keep up the impossibly high standards set for me in the Special Harriet Van Horn Issue, your indefatigable Mother Hazelton has recently explored two different aspects of the world of eating: haut kulturny French, and populist American.

American tourism in France must not be doing quite as well as in those balmy days when we had plenty of money to spend there and did not mind the natives’ being rude to us for doing so, as I remember only too well. Now the natives appear to be friendly, but when tea . at the Plaza Athénée is $14 a head and dinner at the Tour d’Argent around $75 before wine, as a recent visitor to Paris told me, Americans are staying away. To woo us back, the French Government Tourist Office, a hotel association, and several other French organizations sent a massive delegation of Frenchmen headed by a minister of tourism and five of France’s most famous chefs: Bocuse, Bise, Chapel, Outhier, and Troisgros. Kneel when you read this, since eating at their Michelin-starred restaurants is so expensive that it boggles the mind. I asked one of the chefs—Chapel, I believe—why this had to be so; he only looked wounded and said it had to be so. The delegation put on an enormous reception at the Hilton for American travel and food writers and for all the Frenchmen in New York. Each chef stood behind his own table with his specialties, in the mediocre version produced by the Hilton staff (inevitable, but sad), and gave autographs. The only pretty table was the one with all the French cheeses, which looked and tasted delectable indeed. They are still the best of their kind in the whole world. Before the food they had shown a film of France and all the enormous and obviously empty new hotels. The whole occasion made it quite clear that French tourism is interested only in the big spenders, the people who eat nothing but starred meals, lunch and dinner, every day.