NANDINI VAIDYANATHAN elaborates as to why there is no street food in France
France is synonymous with gastronomy, which is defined by the dictionary as the art of good eating and by the chefs and customers alike as the quality of experience in every stage – planning menu, choice of ingredients, cooking, plating and serving.There was a time when no meal in France was rushed or eaten on the fly. You walked into a restaurant, you ordered from a menu card, you waited may be with a glass of wine and you were served at your table with primacy given as much to how the food looked on your plate as to how the food was cooked. Quality of experience was the foundation on which gastronomy stood.
This to a large extent explains why France (and most of northern Europe) don’t have the concept of ‘street food’ as it is experienced in most of Asia and US. If you were to ask a chef what street food is, his answer is simple. When you cook fresh food in front of the customer after he places the order, and when customer eats that food standing in front of you, it is called street food. There is no formal sitting place, no fancy crockery and cutlery, and no fanfare in service. It is food just handed over the cart, mostly in disposables. There is no provision for packing and taking.
If you google street food in France, you get about 15 typical foods that are listed here. These are sold in cafes, kiosks, outside supermarkets (cut fruits), stands and food trucks. Many of the foods are not even native to France such as pizzas, burgers, sandwiches, French fries and kebabs. And in most cases they don’t qualify as street food because they are not cooked fresh in front of you and customers shy away from eating, standing outside a food truck. Thus there is no name in French for street food!
Post lockdown, when gourmet restaurants were yet to open, some Michelin Star Chefs invested in fancy food trucks to offer gourmet food but there were no takers and the whole initiative was abandoned
There are two main reasons why you don’t have street food as we know it in India, in France. One is excessive regimentation for hygiene by Service Veterinaire, the arm of French administration which spells out the do’s and don’ts for the entire hospitality sector. These controls are laid in the form of 6 ‘gammes’ or categories as outlined below:
Gammes 1 : A large restaurant which has enough space to handle fresh, canned, frozen, whole and cut-peeled products (the rule is very stringent that fresh uncut, unwashed, unpeeled ingredients cannot come into the SAME kitchen area where it is cooked), which cooks a big menu and serves in formal style. Most specialty restaurants and fine dining places fall in this category.
Gammes 2: A café that can sell only canned food
Gammes 3: A café that can sell only frozen food
Gammes 4: A cafe that can sell only ready-to-cook food
Gammes 5: A café that sells food packed in vacuum containers
Gammes 6: A café that sells dehydrated food.
I must highlight here that originally café was meant only for beverages. Over time they added food in all other categories except Gammes 1.
Apparently, post lockdown, when gourmet restaurants were yet to open, some Michelin Star Chefs invested in fancy food trucks to offer gourmet food but there were no takers and the whole initiative was abandoned.
I am told by very knowledgeable people in the French hospitality industry that the Service Veterinaire takes its job very seriously and that its processes for checking and validating every outlet as per the norms are extremely on point.
The penalty for breaching is very simple. The outlet is shut down on the orders of the French Government, temporarily, indefinitely, or permanently, depending on how serious the breach is.
The second equally important reason for no street food is the culture. Somehow there is a notion that if you are eating on the street, you must be poor! Since the French take their food very seriously, they take the eating experience equally seriously and historically they believe that food eaten on the street is a huge compromise of that experience.
Crépéries are quite popular in France and crépes are the first name that pops up as street food. They come from the region Bretagne in France; they are easy on the wallet and are the French equivalent of a pizza. You can walk into a creperie, order, eat, pay and leave without losing any time.
In India, every city has its own street food. Every ‘mohalla’ (neighborhood) in every city has its own version of street food. It is perhaps fair to say that every street in India has food!
And it is a great social leveler as everybody, from king to pauper, eats and enjoys this food. But what hit me as an Indian traveling in France was the payment method. France is still a cash economy. In India, even a cart vendor has a QR code displayed on his cart!
Seriously, street food is one more reason why I want to live only in India!
