British restaurants are facing tough times, what with staff shortages, rising business rates and increasing food costs, but at least most people agree that cooking in this country is better than it has ever been.
Not so poor old France, which is coming under assault from both sides of the Channel. This year its trade and tourism minister, whose main job, one would have thought, would be to talk up the country’s culinary output, admitted that French cooking was in the doldrums, outgunned by foreign gastronomy. Now it has been given both barrels by our own Delia Smith.
In an article for Noble Rot magazine, she laments that it is very hard to find classic French cuisine in France any more because “something tragic happened.