If you take it as a given that French restaurants are the best in the world, it only stands to reason that the best restaurant in the world will be in France. 

Don't get your panties in a bunch, I'm not here to dismiss the cuisines of entire countries—only to point out that, like sushi, Mexican street food and pasta, the places where certain foods began are generally where you will find the highest elevation of the art. And Paris, in case you've forgotten, is where the modern restaurant was born in the latter half of the 18th Century.

     Of course, the "best" of anything is a conceit and highly subjective. Measuring a "winner" or "the best" of anything is a nice parlor game, but ultimately a waste of time unless there's a stopwatch involved. Whoever wins these accolades usually comes down to who got fawned over the most in a few influential publications—not who objectively gives diners the best food and drink experience. Anyone who thinks the several hundred voters who weigh in on these awards have actually eaten at the places they vote for as "the best restaurant in the world" (as opposed to forming their opinions based upon reading accounts of the few who have) has rocks in their head.
     "Awards" of this sort are simply a way to give a deceptively false measuring stick to those who don't know much about a subject. Subjectivity disguised as objectivity, all in the name of marketing to those with more money than taste. Same as with wine scores and Oscar nominations. The rich need these adjudications to convince themselves they're doing the right thing, and "The "World's 50 Best Restaurants" is there for them. As Hemingway puts it in "A Moveable Feast":

The rich came led by the pilot fish. A year earlier they never would have come. There was no certainty then.

     Back when El Bulli (right) was garnering these awards (and I was voting on them), I heard from several colleagues who ate there, and what they described was more of a soul-deadening food slog (an edible marathon, if you will) than an actual pleasant experience. A close friend (who also happens to be a chef) told me he stopped counting after 40 courses of (often) indecipherable eats and was looking for the door two hours before the ordeal ended. The trouble was, he said, there was literally no place to go—El Bulli near, Roses, Spain, being, literally, in the middle of nowhere. But Ferran Adrià (like Thomas Keller of The French Laundry before him and Grant Achatz of Alinea and René Redzepi of Noma after), was anointed because, as in Hollywood, a few influential folks decided they were to be on the au courant  bucket list-of-the-moment, and woe be to anyone in the hustings to question these lordly judgments.
     Because of this nonsense, we've been saddled with the tyranny of the tasting menu for twenty-five years of disguised foods and tasteless foams and edible vegetation concoctions designed more for ground cover than actual eating. As far as I can tell, neither molecular cuisine nor eating tree bark and live ants has caught on in the real world— beyond trophy-hunting gastronauts who swoon for the "next big thing" the way the fashion press promotes outlandish threads to grab attention.
 
Shrimp and ants at NOMA

    Which brings us back to France. More particularly, French restaurants and what makes them so special. Let's begin with food that looks like real food, not someone's idea of playing with their food, or trying to turn it into something it isn't. This cooking philosophy alone separates fine French cuisine from the pretenders and gives it a confidence few restaurants in the world can match. 
      For one thing, there's a naturalness to restaurants in France that comes from the French having invented the game. Unlike many who play for the "world's best" stakes, nothing about them ever feels forced, least of all the cooking.  With four-hundred years to get it right, French restaurants display everything from the napery to the stemware with an insouciant aplomb that is the gold standard.
     You don't have to instruct the French how to run a restaurant any more than you must teach a fish how to swim. Or at least that's how it appears when you're in the midst of one of these unforgettable meals, because, to repeat, they've been perfecting things for four hundred years. Everything from the amuse bouche to the petit fours have been carefully honed to put you at ease with being your best self at the table.
     Having been at this gig for a while, I'm perfectly aware that the death of fine French dining, and intensive care service accompanying it, has been announced about every third year for the past thirty. I'm not buying any of it. When you go to France (be it Paris or out in the provinces), the food is just as glorified, the service rituals just as precise and the pomp and circumstance just as beautifully choreographed as it was fifty years ago. The fact that younger diners/writers see this form of civilized dining as a hidebound, time-warp does not detract from its prominence in the country that invented it.
     Whether you're in Tokyo or Copenhagen, the style and performative aspects of big deal meals still takes their cues from the French. Only elaborate Mandarin banquets or the hyper-seasonality of a Japanese kaiseki dinner match the formality and structure of haute cuisine.
    These forms of highly stylized dining follow a path straight up the food chain. There are rules and they are there for a reason, usually having to do with how you will taste and digest what is placed before you. Light before heavy; raw before cooked; simple before complex -- you get the picture.
      You usually begin with something fished directly from the sea. Oysters and other shellfish are a natural match, as is a shrimp cocktail. (A good old-fashioned American steakhouse has more in common, with high falutin' French than people realize.)  Their natural salinity stimulates the appetite without weighing you down. 

     Man's evolution into more cultivated forms of eating is represented by bread, as is the domestication of animals by the butter slathered upon it. If you want to stretch the symbolism even further, look at olive oil and the fermentation of wine and beer as representing mankind's earliest bending of agriculture to his edible wants and needs.

     From there things get more elaborate, depending on whether you want to go the seafood, wild game or domesticated fowl route. Vegetables get their intermezzo by using salad greens as a scrub for the stomach to help digest everything that precedes them. The French think eating a salad at the start of a meal is stupid, and it is. You finish of course with cheese—what Clifton Fadiman called "milk's leap toward immortality"—and then with the most refined of all foods: sugar and flour and all the wonderful things that can be done with them. A great French meal is thus every bit the homage to nature as Japanese kaiseki, albeit with a lot more wine and creme brûlée. 

      As I've written before, French food is about the extraction and intensification of flavor. Unlike Japanese and Italians, a French cook looks at an ingredient (be it asparagus, seafood, or meat) and asks himself: "Self, how can I make this thing taste more like itself." All the simmering, searing, pressing, and sieving in a French kitchen is as far a cry from leaving nature well enough alone as an opera is from the warble of a songbird.

    With this in mind, we set our sights on two iconic Parisian restaurants: one, as old-fashioned as you can get, and the other a more modern take on the cuisine, by one of its most celebrated chefs. Together, they represent the apotheosis of the restaurant arts. They also signify why, no matter what some critics say, the French still rule the roost. Blessedly, there is no chance of encountering Finnish reindeer moss at either of them.

LA TOUR D’ARGENT

     If experience is any measure of perfection, then The Tower of Money should win "best restaurant in the world" every year, because no one has been serving food this fine, for this long, in this grand a setting.
A restaurant in one form or another has been running at this location since before the Three Musketeers were swashing their buckles. What began as an elegant inn near the wine docks of Paris in 1582 soon enough was playing host to everyone from royalty to Cardinal Richelieu. It is claimed that the use of the fork in France began in the late 1500s at an early incarnation of "The Tower of Silver," with Henry IV adopting the utensil to keep his cuffs clean. Apocryphal or not, what is certainly true is that the king bestowed upon the La Tour its crest, which is still there today.
     History, of course, provides the foundation, and the setting continues to provide a "wow" factor unmatched by all but a handful of restaurants in the world. No place but here can you dine with the ghosts of Louis XIV, Winston Churchill, and Sarah Bernhardt, all while seeming to float above Paris on this open door to the city's past—all of it available to anyone with the argent to book a table.
     But the proof is in the cooking, which on our last two visits has been as awesome as the view. It's no secret that the glory had started to fade twenty years ago, and that Michelin, self-appointed the arbiter of all things important in the French food world, had taken notice, and not in a good way.
     A reboot of sorts was announced over five years ago, and by the time we visited in 2019, the kitchen was performing at a Michelin two-star level at the very least. Independent of the view, the service, and the iconic wine program, the cooking and presentation were well-nigh perfect. It was all you want from this cuisine: focused, intense flavors put together with impeccable technique and an almost scientific attention to detail.
 
                  Fréderic Delair carving a canard au sang

    When we returned this past winter, things seemed be have gotten even better. This time we showed up with a party of six. It was a busy lunch, filled with local gourmets and some obvious big business types, but also a smattering of tourists who like us had to keep picking their jaws up off the table as spectacle of Paris and its finest French food was spread before them.
      I have never been to La Tour at night, but for my money, lunch is the way to go. The food is unchanged (lunch specials are offered, but you can order off the dinner menu and we did), and the sight of the Seine stretching beneath you and Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité in the distance are worth the admission all by themselves. I suppose the ideal time to dine here would be arranging for a table at dusk, so you could see the lights of Paris come alive in all their blazing glory. But as I've argued before, lunch has always been the ticket for us when we want to eat and drink ourselves silly in a fine French restaurant.
       There's nothing silly, of course, about the food. This is serious stuff, but there's nothing stuffy about it, despite its pedigree—French service having retired the snootiness-thing decades ago. Meaning, if you show up properly dressed and are well-behaved, they are friendly to a fault.

    Credit for that must lie with owner André Terrail (left), the third generation of the family to be at the helm. (The Terrails have owned the restaurant since 1911.) Since taking over a few years before his father Claude's death in 'o6, Terrail has kept the historical provenance of his venerated birthright intact, upgrading the cuisine while still managing to keep the whole operation true to its roots. No easy feat that. We don't know what the problems were twenty years ago, but on our last two visits, we didn't see any missteps, either on the plate or in the service. And what appeared before us was every bit as stunning as any Michelin 3-star meal we've had in Paris or elsewhere. 

     You take good bread for granted in Paris, but even by those lofty standards, this small baguette was a stunner: perfect in every respect: a twisted baguette of indelible yeastiness, perfumed with evidence of deep fermentation, the outer crunch giving way to ivory-pale, naturally sweet dough within that fought back with just the perfect amount of chew. It and the butter were show-stoppers in their own right, and for a brief minute, they competed with the view for our attention. We could've eaten four of them (and they were offered throughout the meal) but resisted temptation in light of the feast that lay ahead.
        Soon thereafter, scoops of truffle-studded foie gras appeared, deserving of another ovation, and from there on, the hits just kept on coming: a classic quenelles de brochet (right)—good luck finding them anywhere but France these days—then, a slim, firm rectangle of turbot in a syrupy beurre blanc, or the more elaborate sole Cardinale, then followed by a cheese cart commensurate with this country's reputation.
       The star of the show has been, since the 1890s, the world-famous pressed duck (Caneton Challandais), served in two courses, the first with the deepest-colored Béarnaise we've ever seen; the second helping bathed in the richest, midnight-brown, duck blood-wine blanket imaginable (left). Neither sauce did anything to mitigate the richness of the fowl, which is, of course, gilding the lily and the whole point.
     We could go on and on about how fabulous our meal was, but our raves would only serve to make you ravenous for something you cannot have, not for the next ten months, anyway. Yes, the bad news is the restaurant is closed for renovations until February 2023. This saddens us, but not too much since we don't have plans to return until about that time next year. In the meantime, the entry foyer probably could use some sprucing up (since it looks like it hasn't been touched since 1953), and we have confidence Terrail won't monkey with the sixth-floor view, or the skinny little pamphlet he keeps on hand for the casual wine drinker.
     If the measure of a great restaurant is how much it makes you want to return, then La Tour D'Argent has ruled the roost for two hundred years. (Only a masochist ever left El Bulli saying, "I sure can't wait to get back here!") Some things never go out of style and La Tour is one of them. We expect it to stay that way for another century.

À Bientôt!

Part Two of this article will appear soon.