Well done! (please)

"Well done" is an expression I use when I go to this Steakhouse restaurant. I like it very much : American atmosphere, which reminds me of "Buffalo Grill" restaurants in France, friendly waiters, and most importantly, great great food. How to say.. The first time I went there, I was looking through the menu and was wondering what I would order. The choice is very wide and many meats (except pork meat of course, which is absolutely prohibited) are proposed... Beef, chicken, turkey, mutton... and also some fish, that I did not try. One feature of my personality is that I am very difficult and conservative about food, no one reading this post can say the contrary : neither the persons who know me well, and even less the people who don't know me :P You might think it's very silly to order a-l-w-a-y-s the same thing in a restaurant. But as far as I am concerned, I am a bit afraid of being disappointed with a changing. I know the value of what I'm ordering and I don't want to change. That's why I always have the same seat and the same dish. From my seat, next to the kitchens, I can see the waiters and cookers running here and there, filling the plates and so on. It is something we don't have in France. When you go to a restaurant there, the kitchens are hidden from the customers. Here it's not, and actually I prefer that.

In August, I decided that I would go to this restaurant once a week, every Wednesday after duty. Now, the waiters know me and know my order. It's like in France, when you've been living in the same town for a couple of years and are used to buy your baguette at the same baker shop, they know your name and your order. However, I don't consider staying here for years of course ;) And I know I will miss this restaurant and its food, for sure.

What is so special about it? That's simple : the quality of meat. In France, you can easily make the difference between the quality of meat that you buy at the supermarket, meat that you buy at the butcher's and meat you eat in a good restaurant. Until I reached Saudi Arabia, the best meat I had ever had was in those "Buffalo Grill" restaurants - even though the quality of their food has been decreasing those last years. To me, it was the highest level, the best taste. But now it's far behind what I experience here. The quality is incredibly good. I asked one manager about the origin of beefs; they are neither from the Gulf nor from Europe, but from Brazil. I was surprized.

I remember that after the affair of "mad cow" in Europe in the mid 90's, the French government had created a kind of "norm" such as ISO9001 but specific about Beef, after they discovered in the "Hard Rock Cafe" restaurant in Paris that they were keeping out-of-date beef meat in the freezers. This "VF norm" (Viande bovine Française) was supposed to "relieve" customers about the quality of meat they were buying. At that time, there was a huge phobia about meat coming from the UK, as if each piece of British cattle was contaminated with this "madness" !! But since that time, there has been a typically French paradox I still cannot understand. The Government insisted on important measures about freshness of meat, health of cattle, better tools to identify the origin of meat.. and in the meantime, quality has been decreasing. I'm not the only one who claim this. Meat is not as good as before, and I don't believe it's because of industrial methods of killing, because they haven't changed for 20 years; I have no clue that could solve this paradox. To conclude about french meat, I would say that such protectionist measures didn't provide us a better quality.. Brazilian beef does taste much better ;)

You may think that I have much time to waste, by writing about food. But if we look well into the topic, it's not just about food. It's generally about the way we (French people) deal with our own national products. It's not only about meat! Look at wine. For many decades now, the French has thought that the quality of their wine had no possible competitor all around the world. Bordeaux and Bourgogne vineyard's owners refuse to accept competition, but it's been there for a long time already. Five years ago, there was a wine worldwide contest. Each country picked its best wine and sent its best experts. Those experts, just by sipping some wine, could tell you about the country, the year, even the type of grape, the region, and many other details (that's why they are called experts :P). During this contest, of course, all the bottles were blindfolded, only 2 or 3 persons actually knew which label corresponded to which bottle. Each bottle had a number. So, after some rounds, the experts unanimously chose one bottle. They were all sure that it was one of the best Bordeaux ever but they were all wrong. It was a wine from Australia. I guess that a little wind of shame was blowing this community of "experts" that day.

So what? what is the relation between this wine contest and the quality of food? This relation can merely be called "illusion". This illusion is founded upon the old reputation of a French style that is nowadays completely obsolete. If French wine used to be the best, some years or decades ago, now the competition about quality is harsh and I have absolutely nothing against this; the instant when you start thinking that you are above any competition because your products have a good reputation, I think you start losing the point. Because in this competition, there are many guys who have enough energy to convince you that your reputation belongs to past. And I'm sure that this French touch already belongs to past....