What Do the French Think of Australia's Top Restaurants?

My French in-laws were in Melbourne recently. As a birthday present, we got them a voucher for Attica, Australia's top resto.

We got them this because on their last visit to Oz they hadn't known where to go for good food.(And being French, of course, sourcing good food was priority number one!). They'd gone to fish and chips shops, for instance, hoping for fresh seafood - and then spent hours afterwards peeling batter off fish. My mother-in-law pleaded staff not to batter the scallops to no avail (and much peeling).

My husband Maxime had an additional reason for wanting to arrange things for his parents to do.

'Otherwise, they'll just spend their time going to Coles,' he explained.

So you can imagine his chagrin when he read their email recounting how they'd spent their first day in exciting Melbourne, beginning with breakfast and then shopping 'chez Cooles [sic]'.

In comparison to Coles tubs of mashed potato, and deep fried flake, Maxime and I were quietly confident that their evening at Attica would be a roaring success.

But it wasn't entirely in the bag. Never under-estimate the powers of the Frenchman to criticise. They would have to be the most imaginative, creative critics in the world. What's more, my mother-in-law Jeanne, herself an accomplished cook, says she always orders risotto in top restaurants - because it's so hard to get right. (When I first heard this, I made a mental note never, ever to cook it for her myself). And she was taking a notebook in order to take copious notes throughout the meal. Maxime and I kept our fingers crossed ...

The next day, they gave us their detailed analysis of the night.

'Some people dressed very casually, while other people dressed up.' Why don't they feel the need to show respect to the restaurant and the other diners?'

Because we're barbarians. 'Erm, well -'

'There was a series of small plates - really microportions - of tastes of native herbs. Sebastien was hungry so he ate all the bread. And he asked for more.

In this sentence, Jeanne got to diss the resto AND her husband all in one go - nice work!

'And then there was this sort of undercooked potato thing' Jeanne was completely mystified by this object. The hungi homage had totally passed over her head. Oops.

'But the strangest thing was when I went to the toilet.'

'Ah,' I said, thinking, I'm really not sure I want to hear this,,,

'The waiter led the way and then held the door open for me!'

This was apparently deeply shocking.

'It would NEVER happen in France!'

'Why not?' I aked, confused. I mean, it wasn't as if waiter had asked if she wanted to do a number one or number two.

'Because we don't do this!'

'Why?'

She was astonished I even needed to ask and was at a loss to explain something so obvious.

'It's too intimate.'

Well. I don't find toilet doors very steamy myself, but then I'm not French.

Luckily, Jeanne recovered from having the door to the intimate toilet world touched by the waiter and managed to continue with the meal.

'The dessert was too sweet. Of course, Sebastien wolfed it down.'

Bingo - another double whammy. She was in good form!

But the micro-portions thing stuck in my Australian craw.

'I mean, the French invented nouvelle cuisine!' I complained to Maxime later.

'That was the Parisians,' he said, smugly happy to stick the knife in to those smug Parisians. 'You wouldn't see that in Alsace!'

No, I thought, but you do see a lot of diabetes....

Cricket World Cup 2015: Is Cricket Really French?

Married to a Frenchman, I was unable to spend the day of the Cricket World Cup final as I would have liked – i.e., eyes glued to telly, beer glued to hand. Instead, I was required to participate in a 6 hour lunch and consume my share of 7 bottles of French wine with another French expat and his wife. Yep, a hard gig, I know.

I strongly suspected that our French hosts would not be interested in the match, ‘le criquet’ being unintelligible to the French. For instance, my French in-laws, currently visiting us in Melbourne,  have not been able to make head or tail of it.

‘So when someone hits the wicket, the wicket keeper goes away?’ asked my mother-in-law the other night.

‘Ahhh … not as such,’ I said.

‘And why does everyone shout a lot and go crazy when someone hits the ball into the audience?’ she wondered.

Explaining cricket to the in-laws was probably going to be a task beyond my meagre powers, I realised. My husband Maxime did profess to have a mild interest in the World Cup, however. He sort of learnt cricket by osmosis – through having previously been forced to listen to the Ashes on ABC Grandstand radio as we drove all around Tasmania. By the end of that trip, he was practically channelling Jim Maxwell. And now, Maxime’s view was that the World Cup as an international contest was important … and even if France never got close to ever being in one, a Frenchman could still have a giggle at England getting spanked by Bangladesh. This is why Maxime readily agreed to keep me appraised of the Aussies’ progress in the World Cup final during the meal at our friends’ house via a surreptitiously-held-under–the-table phone.

So it was that just after we and our hosts had sat down to the entrée of chicken terrine and fennel salad, Maxime announced, ‘They got McCullum [the NZ captain]. In the first over!’

Our friends looked up in surprise (and I looked up in delight). Normally at this stage in a lunch, Maxime would say ‘mmmmm’ or maybe ‘the Riesling is excellent.’

‘Do you understand cricket?’ our host Olivier asked Maxime, somewhat suspiciously (wondering if he was a closet Anglophile I imagine).

‘Yes. It wasn’t hard to pick up,’ Maxime said, sounding every inch the insufferably smug frog. (What was nice is that he was being insufferable and smug to other frogs for once. As opposed to me.)

‘Do you understand cricket?’ I asked Olivier.

‘Not at all,’ said Olivier proudly. He’d trumped Maxime by playing the ‘it’s-all-Anglo-Saxon-gobbledigook-so-cultured-French-don’t-care’ card.

But I had an ace up my sleeve waiting for that: ‘Well,’ I said, ’maybe you should be interested in cricket. It turns out that cricket might be French!’

People raised their eyebrows gratifyingly high. So I elaborated: I’d been recently dumbfounded to read in the French version of Wikipedia that the French may have invented cricket. According to the article, the oldest reference to cricket is in a letter of 1478 to the king, no less, about a match of ‘criquet’ in Liettres in the north of France. So cricket must have been bloody important to the French at some stage if they were whinging to the king about not getting their LBW decision (now there’s a third umpire for you!). The English actually planned their first-ever match outside England against France, but they picked a dud year for it. The 1789 tour was a bit of a fizzer. And after 1789, the French got a little side-tracked and replaced cricket with the sport of knocking people’s blocks off with a large blade instead of the traditional ball.

‘Typical English,’ said Olivier with a roll of his eyes as I finished my story. ‘We French have all the good ideas. The Anglo-Saxons just steal them.’ (Right, so NOW he thinks cricket is a good idea, since it might be French.)

I laughed. ‘Anyway, in the Revolution, it seems you lost the habit of playing cricket as well as a lot of heads.’ Then after a bit of reflection I said, ‘Although half the South African team seem to be French.’

‘A lot of Huguenots went to South Africa,’ explained Maxime. Huguenots were protestants escaping persecution in catholic France in the 17^th and 18^th centuries.

‘Right. So now you have Jacques Kallis and Faf du Plessis and de Villiers,’ I said. ‘And Philander seems appropriately French too somehow. But what sort of name is ‘Faf’ anyway? Is it French?’

I subsequently read it’s short for Francois, but Maxime said, ‘It means Fascist in French slang.’

‘Good Lord!’ I said, laughing. 

Ah well, it could be worse. Faf could have been French slang for dick. An astonishing number of words do seem to be slang for dick in French. I sometimes complain that I can’t get a sentence out without Maxime doubling over with laughter, telling me I’ve just said I’d like a piece of dick or something. And unfortunately, when it comes to cricket, there is also the slips cordon, giving Maxime the opportunity to shout things like ‘he was caught in womens’ underwear!’

After much hilarity at the expense of the poor old South Africans, we settled back for main course - Alsatian baker’s stew with beef and potatoes - and knocked over a St. Emillion Bordeaux and an Aloxe-Corton Burgundy. By this stage, the Kiwis were in as much trouble as our digestive systems. It was all going nicely until Boult came in to bat. 

Maxime pondered a bit and then said, ‘Bout means dick in French.’

Let’s just say I will not be taking Maxime to the cricket with me any time soon. Or New Zealand.