Once upon a time in France.

It is widely believed, and with reason, that, in the art of cooking, the French are supreme. France gave birth both to the techniques of the haute cuisine--its many ways to slice, peel, combine, heat, and the like--and to its repertoire: its basic sauces and traditional dishes. France produced the seminal theorist of the culture of food and taste, Brillat-Savarin, and the authoritative reference work of the culinary arts: the Larousse Gastronomique. The things themselves come from France, but so do the names for them. A consequence is that, as an air controller must understand English, however narrowly specialized the vocabulary, and an opera star must be able to sing in Italian, so a chef, ambitious to excel, ought to become fluent, if not in French, than at least in "Kitchen French."

France's leading position where food is concerned may be explained, at least in part, by the range and excellence of its natural produce. But the French themselves have found a more satisfying explanation of why they are the best at it. As a spokeswoman for Centre Ferrandi, a Paris culinary institute, recently remarked: "Mais c'est simple. Ici nous avons le gout."(1) But France was not always at the top. The omniscient Fernand Braudel tells us that "sophisticated cuisine, typical of all advanced civilizations, and found in China in the fifth century and in the Muslim world from the eleventh or twelfth centuries, did not appear in the West until the fifteenth century, and then in the rich city-states of Italy." Catherine de Medicis, coming from Florence to wed the French king Henry II a century later, is said to have introduced Paris to the culinary wonders for which Italy was then known. Other countries, too, made their contributions. From the sixteenth century on, France was open to food influences "from the four corners of Europe." Braudel seems to concur in the common view that "great French cooking" appeared only in the eighteenth century.

It may be no coincidence that in the same century the French invented the restaurant. The invention is believed to have occurred in the 1760S, though it had its roots in the past. For a long time, Paris shops had sold hot prepared foods to customers and passersby, but without supplying the premises in which to consume them--nor would the shopkeepers supply individual portions. Innkeepers supplied individual portions, but did so in the context of an entire meal in which choice and substitution were not allowed and in which everyone was seated and served at the same time. The new creation --restaurants--provided the benefits of both without the inconveniences of either. Writing in 1825, Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer from French Savoy, argued on behalf of restaurateurs that the "encouragement of this new profession, which spread from France all over Europe, is extremely advantageous to everyone and of great scientific importance."

Thus, the restaurants that the European world initially encountered were exclusively French in cuisine and character. Hence, perhaps, the historical explanation of why it was stamped on the world's consciousness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that high cuisine is by nature French. The rise of the Paris restaurants paralleled the rise of France's reputation as the home of great food.

Restaurants made it possible for the first time for the many, who had no personal chef of their own, to enjoy the excellent cooking hitherto available only to the few. The quality and quantity of French restaurants seems to have taken a giant leap forward in the years beginning with 1789, as the French Revolution destroyed aristocratic households, throwing out of work the best chefs in the kingdom. They opened up restaurants to support themselves. There were fewer than fifty Paris restaurants in I789; in 1820 there were nearly three-thousand. In theory at least, chefs now were serving the public the sort of food they formerly had served to the aristocracy.

But it could not be entirely so. That restaurant food has to be different became apparent with innovations introduced by the chef, restaurateur, and hotelier Auguste Escoffier (1846-1835) who worked closely with Cesar Ritz. Escoffier brought a division of labor into the restaurant kitchen--an assembly line of sorts--in which each member of the cooking staff has an assigned function, so that each dish prepared is the product of many hands--and can be produced swiftly.

According to the historian Theodore Zeldin, in volume two of his France 1848-1845, Escoffier