Day 872 (Tuesday) 29^th October 2019

It was a lovely day again today and my bougainvillea is coming along very nicely.

Huw needed to go to Nice to get some spices from his favourite Asian shop so he kindly dropped me off in Magnan in Nice where Celine picked me up and we went to her apartment. We spent the first hour sitting on the balcony drinking coffee and chatting and then we went inside and spent two hours looking at grammar. She gave me a lift back to the tram stop and I got the tram to the centre and did a bit of shopping in Massena.

 

I got the bus from the Old Port and was soon back in the lovely Villefranche.

Going back to yesterday’s article about food in France – here is the next bit.

Tipping in restaurants in France

This is a subject that seems to cause endless arguments on travel forums... Should I tip in a restaurant in France, and if so how much?
Some travel forums seem to be occupied by cheapskate folk righteously trying to justify not tipping in restaurants in France. As if the fact that waiters in France get social security and medical cover as part of their minimum-wage work contract meant that they didn't need to be tipped!  Everyone in Europe gets social security and medical cover as part of their work contract. It's not a perk. The fact is that tipping in restaurants in France IS the norm - but there is no fixed rate. And you can't add it onto the bill as a discretionary - or demanded - extra when paying with a credit card, as you do in North America. A normal tip in France will amount to up to 10% of the bill, left discreetly on the table in coins or small notes. That is in addition to the "service compris" which nowadays is basically a service charge, not to a tip.

The ten percent tip is a normal way of acknowledging good service and/or good food in a restaurant. If service is poor, leave less; but if it is slow because the waiter is worked off his or her feet serving more people than he or she can cope with, don't add insult to injury by not leaving a tip!
 In self-service restaurants, tipping is not expected, though many people will leave a euro or two on the table or in a basket for this purpose as a "thank you" to the staff. Finally, in cafés a small tip is always appreciated though not so much of a norm.

Eating out: traditional restaurants

It is in the evening, for dinner, that French restaurants often pull out all the stops. Even on weekdays, and eating out in the evening can often be a long-drawn-out affair, and diners can easily spend between two and three hours at the table. Dining out, in France, is an evening's event, not just a means to avoid feeling hungry; it is highly unusual to find restaurants that chivvy their clients to eat up, pay up and leave, as may happen in some other parts of the world.
   

The menu will contain the same stages as the classic three/four-course menu indicated above, but may well include five or six courses, with the addition of an "hors d'oeuvre" [or d'eur-vreu] at the start, and a light green salad or a sorbet between courses. In the best restaurants, diners will be expected to start with a pre-meal drink (an apéritif), which will be accompanied by little home-made snacks, which the French call des amuse-bouche or des amuse-gueule [dayz amuse-girl] - a word that has on occasions been misinterpreted by unsuspecting foreign diners - but really means things to whet your appetite.
The number of courses, and the quality of the food, will depend on the reputation and nature of the restaurant, and also on the cost of the menu or à-la-carte dishes chosen; but in any self-respecting restaurant, the cooking will be done using fresh ingredients, and the chefs will take pride in their work.

"Nouvelle cuisine"?

Many French restaurants - and at the top end of the scale, virtually all of them - have adopted "nouvelle cuisine".  In this, the accent is very much on quality, taste, originality and presentation, rather than on quantity.  While the staple of traditional French cuisine might be something like a plate laden with "steack frites", steak, french fries and french beans (common in restaurants serving workers and truck-drivers), the main dish in a nouvelle cuisine restaurant might be something like fine slices of roast beef, with asparagus in an original cream sauce, with a small portion of pilau rice and two cherry tomatoes - this being carefully arranged on the plate and completed with some form of edible decoration.

Snails & Frogs legs?

Those classic dishes that foreigners love to associate with France, snails and frogs legs, belong more to the traditional cuisine than to nouvelle cuisine; but they are not everyday fare in France! Like many things, they belong to France's deep rural tradition. Both are indeed tasty, though with snails it is really the butter-parsley-and-garlic sauce that is the great taste, and with frogs' legs, the taste is not very different from crunchy chicken wings.  Note: most of the frogs' legs consumed in France are imported, and the decline in the frog population in certain Asian countries, due to a lucrative export market, has been - and is - an ecological disaster.