 and welcome to the British Library food season, which is generously supported by KitchenAid. I'm Angela Clutton. It is my complete joy and delight to be the guest director of the food season, work with Polly Russell who founded the food season four years ago and is its curator. Thank you for joining us for tonight's event. It's set to be a fascinating conversation with Bill Buford, Jonathan Meads and Tracy McLeod. Just a little housekeeping to get through before we get started with that. You should be able to see on screen some tabs where you can give your feedback on the event. You can read a little bit more about our speakers and find their books or perhaps make a donation to support the work at the British Library. We hope you might be like to join in and submit a question to our speakers and if you'd like to do that there's a box just below the video where you can type that in. You'll also find the social media links to join in the conversation on other platforms too. Also there is a competition being run for the food season with KitchenAid where you can win some cordless kit, a place on the virtual cooking class and a copy of Karen Franklin's book, The Pyrooom. So to tonight's event with Bill Buford, Jonathan Meads in conversation with Tracy McLeod about their shared passion for food, words, restaurants and France. I'm going to let Tracy introduce Bill and Jonathan but first from me a little background about Tracy. Tracy McLeod, a broadcaster, writer and regular guest judge on the hit BBC series MasterChef. For many years she was a presenter of the BBC's flagship art show The Late Show where she specialised in music subjects and has also hosted her own shows and radio stations including BBC Six Music, LBC, GLR and BBC Radio 2. As a restaurant critic the independent she has won numerous awards so there can be no one better place to say our discussion tonight. Tracy over to you. Thanks very much Angela. When you say numerous awards I think it's probably two which is numerous. Welcome to you all out there and to my guests, my distinguished guests Bill Buford and Jonathan Meads. Neither of them is a conventional food writer but both of them are passionate about food and write wonderfully well about it. Jonathan Meads when he isn't writing provocatively about architecture, art, politics, sport and everything beyond is an artist, photographer and documentary maker. His huge range of passions and prejudices is on full display and given full reign in his wonderful new collection of journalism and other writing from the last 30 years which is called Pedro and Ricky Come Again and Bill Buford was the distinguished editor of Grant of course for many years based in London and his first book Among the Thugs saw him immerse himself in the world of English football hooliganism which may or may not have given him a good background and a good experience for his subsequent immersion in the world of the professional kitchens of First New York and now France in his latest book Dirt. Good evening you're both very welcome. Good evening. Hello. We're on three we're in three different time zones this evening aren't we? Yeah. Bill you're in Brooklyn, Jonathan you're in Marseille and I'm in London Town but you know I've just finished lunch. Oh I just finished lunch, Jonathan's probably just finished dinner and you're still hungry. Exactly. I haven't had dinner actually. You know what I write? We do indeed. Yeah yeah yeah we've known each other for years. Yeah and you have in common many things but principally for this evening's purposes the experience of being expatriates in France with Bill moving there from New York and you're a recovering expatriate really aren't you Bill because you've now moved back from Lyon to Brooklyn and Jonathan you've been in France for more than 15 years now haven't you? Yeah. Do you want to both talk first about what what drew you to live in France? Do you want to start Jonathan? A kind of weariness with London I think. I'd lived in London since I was a student and I felt I'd got the best side of it and wanted to change and we did look at moving into the sort of English countryside but it's great to look at from a car but I don't think one actually wants to live there and we live briefly in the French countryside and then to Marseille which is a city like no other. I mean it is to France what Liverpool is to England sort of scally and fairly fairly on French. I'm a people from the phone book 40% of the names are Italian many in North African. It's a place of great mixy day and the cooking is wonderful but it's not particularly French. Some friends of mine who probably know actually the late Tony Elliott and Janie came one weekend and said we've got to go and eat somewhere. I said what sort of place do you want to eat in and he said well French of course. We didn't know any French restaurants. We've been here for about three years and we've never been to French restaurants. I mean you go to couscous restaurants, you go to pizza restaurants, you go to all sorts of Spanish restaurants and so on but I mean Ur-French is not something which Marseille specializes in. So it's almost the opposite of Lyon where Bill went to pursue his dream to be a professional chef trained to be a professional chef. Mainly but it is interesting that Marseille is kind of the portal for a lot of the North African community and if they don't stay in Marseille they come up to Lyon and it's actually a very big part of Lyon as well. I mean here in New York the second language is Spanish and in Lyon the second language was definitely Arabic and where we lived it was a big big Arabic community. It's nothing like Marseille. Marseille is the mecca of a certain kind of kind of Mediterranean blend. I want to say cosmopolitanism but it's like it's a Mediterranean mix. Lyon though for me was I went there for different reasons although I certainly understand Jonathan's attraction to getting away from the place you've grown up in. I lived in England for 20 years and left it actually very reluctantly to come to New York and then since then I've been trying to get away. My wife and I lived in Italy for about a year and we're all set to do something else when we had twin boys a lovely event in our lives but it was a certain post certain inhibitions to leaving New York and so Lyon was like a great thing that we've been waiting for. All my life I wanted to be able to speak French and hold my own in a French kitchen not all my life all my adult life ever since I sort of discovered kind of the wonders of the French kitchen so it was a it was just something I wanted to do. I wrote a book about the Italian kitchen and we lived in Italy as I said and in Italy they persuaded me that the Tuscans had invented French cuisine and that was an excuse enough just enough for me to think I've got to go to France next and Lyon the main reason for Lyon which I didn't know well at all was that it wasn't Paris what I discovered was a kind of backwards slightly old-fashioned wonderful food city mainly where people like to eat well and eat economically surrounded by fantastic wines and chickens and cheeses and lakefish and pigs and we were very very happy there. We left reluctantly after five years and I envy Jonathan being where he is for so long. Jonathan you've written the book of recipes which is singular in your in your own way this was your your book before the plagiarist in the kitchen the book before the the current one you would you describe yourself as a self-taught cook as opposed to Bill who obviously could cook before but went down the route of becoming a disciple. I've never worked in a professional kitchen and I'm far too much of a coward to want to do so dangerous places, volatile places. I taught myself to cook by reading a book called Mastering the Art of French Cooking and which is a astonishing number of other young people of my people who were young when I was young it was a very long time ago it was a hugely influential book I mean you couldn't do you couldn't use Elizabeth David she wasn't a teacher she's a kind of anthropologist but and many of her recipes simply don't work but Mastering the Art of French Cooking everything worked and if you followed it step by step in a very learning by rote sort of way um it was effective and I've cooked ever since I may cook but she has my life and I I enjoy it. It's a resoundingly obvious point that I don't think many people have made which is that you don't read Elizabeth David really learn how to cook a dish you can get an approximation of the dish you can get what the dish should feel like but she's um she's actually a narrative writer I I love her and I I'm always consulting her books but um it is a you can't get away with you know not doing it more than once to be able to figure out how to how to do it that's that's fascinating I almost all all my British friends would cite Elizabeth David and very few of them would would cite Julia Childe. Oh well Julia Childe is a teacher whereas David as I say it's kind of anthropologist or something um and a memoirist um but that the trio who wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking and all came from other different backgrounds and um there's a kind of literality about it which there isn't about many um right that time it was a it was a long time ago these books came out I mean it's a uh Elizabeth David's first books came out 70 years ago um and um Jane Griggsan another very very good writer who happened to write about food but I mean um they kind of opened um an unfortunate sort of sluice to lots of people writing about cooking gastronomy and so on who simply couldn't write they might have they were buffs they they knew a lot about how to put together a dish but they couldn't write in any way that they'd make you want to emulate them or even go on reading them. Of course Jonathan when you were writing about restaurants which you did for something like 15 years um for the time, brilliantly I might say, brilliantly uh the master much missed um that was at a time where food culture in Britain was completely transforming and um the rise of the celebrity chef the the rise of sort of you know different sort of slightly avant-garde styles of eating and the opening up to the world I mean you're very you're very scathing in in the new collection about um about celebrity chefs uh generally I think you call them something like irony free nincompoops or something like that. I wouldn't use a bird nincompoop. No okay definitely. Wanker maybe I don't know um the um well I was very lucky I mean I was hired by the Times um and with in the summer of 86 and within 18 months Marco Pier White River Cafe, Rony Lee, Simon Hopkins and Alice Little had all opened but they opened at that point and there was a shift um and to away from the kind of on the one hand kind of great temples of gastronomy which are like cathedrals with carpets and um on the other kind of kind of amateurishness. I mean these people were were professional and but they weren't they weren't trying to do um grand cooking. They were doing a kind of casolingo or cuisine corn there and it was great um the trouble is that the next 14 years that I wrote the Times everything was a bit of anti-Chimactic um nothing very little else came along of that kind of absolutely striking originality and um rightness. I'm realizing now as you're describing that too that um that was an extremely exciting time and I know for me I guess I'd been in Britain then at least 10 years it probably is what excited this interest for me that I should go to France um because it was just there was a connection to France or at least there was a connection to Europe but it was it's actually when you're in the middle of a Renaissance you know realize it's the Renaissance it's just really fun and um and quite exciting and then when it's over you think wow how come I wasn't appreciating that. Did you eat in all of those uh that kind of new wave of exciting restaurants the the you know Harveys the Marco Pier White restaurant and Gordon Ramsay and you know when he exploded with Aubergine and so on. Did you was that part of your world or were you an impoverished as a literary editor? I guess that was that was right around the time when I was figuring out how to how to develop an expense account for being the editor of Granta so I I probably ate at more places than I should ever own up to. Um although I didn't I don't think I ate Gordon Ramsay's food until he came to New York. Gordon Ramsay was he was he was he was yeah yeah he was that that kind of second second stage yeah Gordon Ramsay is the kind of um you know one of the Marco really. I guess the um what they had was that French classical training which they then developed and that's something that it it feels like you know Bill that's very much Bill's um mission in in uh Dirt to all the French chefs all the great chefs that you speak to in uh in New York and Washington, Dan Barber and Daniel Boulue and so on they all say you have to go to France and you have to learn the French classical techniques if you're going to be any kind of chef and um is that something that you know Jonathan you would necessarily agree with before before Bill talks about that. I don't agree with that at all I mean if you want to learn to be a classical French chef go to France and work with a classical French chef but it's not going to necessarily do you um any good if you want to develop in another direction. I mean Bill makes the distinction in Dirt between chefs and bistro chefs and so and so he's great he's great guy he's a he's but he's a bistro chef he's not he's not gonna it's like being told no you're never gonna make it with man you but you might be kind of fairly okay with Preston you know um and um so there are these different gradations and in France there is I don't think there is such a thing as French cooking because what do you eat in Lille say is totally different from what you eat in Lyon what do you eat in Nantes is totally different from what you eat in Grenoble and so on um but at two levels there is French cooking at the highest level there are pretenders to Michelin stars and some of whom achieve those stars at the lowest level there's Burger King Hippopotamus Domino pizza etc etc the interesting thing in France is what happens in between a kind of vernacular cooking which is still localized you come to Nice and virtually every restaurant will have the same same menu same dishes you go not all that go central central France to say Clément Ferrand and every restaurant has the same dishes but they're totally different from the dishes in Nice and um there is an unselfconscious um regionalism which is not um which does not pertain in Britain and there are lots of dishes in Britain which have a place name affixed to them like Sussex Bond pudding or York Ham or something um but it's it's just a name I mean the picking question's probably been nothing nor the trend what do you think about that Bill I mean Lyon was the the place that everyone said this is where the the old the old traditions are still alive this is the sort of you know ground zero of French cooking and you have to go to Lyon you have a sort of almost kind of a romantic uh kind of notion of it don't you uh I do I'm sure I kind of very self-consciously elaborated the the romance of it I I agree with Jonathan completely and I referenced your earlier question I don't think I needed you know chefs telling me that I had to go to France um because I wanted to go to France and I didn't know what I was going to find um and I certainly you know I I worked at a a place with two Michelin stars and had as ambitions of getting a third because I wanted to do that but I what I really wanted was to learn French discipline French techniques French knowledge and most of that is applicable and just efficient in almost any place you would you would cook there's a kind of it probably goes back to a scophier maybe it goes back a little further but it's just it's just simple attitudes like how how you cut an onion how you treat your cutting board how you treat your fruit what you do with water how you use your hands how you organize your brain when you're cooking and these are all things that um I I may I'm grateful for that I use when I when I cook at home but Jonathan's bigger point which is that France is just a bunch of regions and that is actually the great thing of France and may it long continue I got and one of my obsessive sidetracks um which I didn't really write about or I did an earlier draft and and tossed was um France in the 20s and 30s which was around the time that Leon was called the gastronomic capital of the world was a France that it discovered started discovering itself with with the automobile and until then there were definitely regions and you could you would reach the regions and uh everyone's aware of the reasons but it wasn't until the until the car came along that that France really discovered the diversity of France and it was extremely exciting it's what gave birth to the Michelin guide obviously but also uh since there was like it gave birth to a uh a big critic of the time named Cronoski who who wrote lots of volumes about what the cooking was like in Marseille what the cooking was like in Brittany and what the cook was liking in in Alsace and they are very different that really gratifying thing about France is those differences still exist and as Jonathan said you can eat one kind of food in one place another kind of food in another place you come to Leon and you're going to eat a bouchon and the bouchon it's going to have you know 12 basic dishes plus variations in all these different directions maybe 14 basic dishes but you'll get you'll get different versions of it but mainly you go to a bouchon to have a very léoné experience and it's very relaxed and the wine is served in a poke which is a an unmarked bottle of I think 500 milliliters um and you always have three courses you always have dessert you're very relaxed the service is very relaxed you often get a little drunk you sometimes get very drunk uh and it's it's you meet someone on the street and and like in in London someone was hey we we should go have a pint let's go have a drink sometime um and Leon they say ah we should go to let's go to eat a canel and let's go let's go to a bouchon and eat a canel um and that that was fabulous um and if Leon is actually I mean what Leon is is it's not international like Paris and it's got a sense of itself it's got very received practices as Paul Bacuz as the pope who's now passed away of course and there is a belief in the discipline of the kitchen and the the higher reaches the kitchen but it is basically local food and its real advantage is that you just go a little ways and you can buy your bouchon laid by the barrel if you wanted to you can go down the other way and buy your coat de ronde by the barrel you you get your you can you can get your fish for your uh your canal you can get you know you get your your chickens from uh from breasts and it's all in kind of um there's kind of a magic number that some historians have come up with which is like what you can transport in a day whether it's 25 miles 50 miles 75 miles depending on a river where you're going by by cart um and um um that's the magic of the of the city it's it's it's the capital of it's the capital of the Rhone Valley so it has all the good things that the Rhone has to offer and i i think the variety of France is absolutely essential to what french cooking is absolutely essential and it's fabulous did you not find it frustrating that you were cooking this this two Michelin star food basically that that kind of kitchen you know is is like a military operation isn't it and you might be doing the same thing as you write very vividly about being you know put in uh uh you know in a lowly position and doing the same thing again and again and again and again and what struck me was it's it was an extraordinary thing for someone to do who had very young children as you say you know twin boys that were in sort of toddlers when you arrived in France i wondered if there was it was almost a reaction to that uh the experience of becoming a father and that feeling that you have to kind of you know you have to be in control you're the pata familias you know you have to have your hands on all the ropes um and you are very amusing about the fact in the book you're you're kind of a bit of a chaotic person and you're kind of understatement that that sort of discipline that is imposed on you just at the point where you might be expected to kind of step up and be an authority figure in the world you then go put yourself down in this very lowly place in a kind of production line where you have no free will you're you know you're abused if you arrive five minutes late for work it's it's just a complete uh it's an interesting timing you're or you're just abused because you can be abused and why not why not why not abuse the guy uh i don't think there's anything that conscious i think i'm uh probably the most unreliable patriarch of a family that one could imagine and certainly one of the most unreliable um it was you know as a writer and it was just this is just one part of the book but as a as a writer um to go into a situation like that and you go in as a writer i'm obviously not coming in with my my cv that proves that i'm you know i i should be hired and should you know but it will work on the line but to go in and then actually become part of the kitchen because at that time the kitchen had just reopened the money was tight uh they were they were managing hirings and they actually needed me and therefore to be needed and be part of the brigade was like just pray it for copy but as an experience it was it was hard because the hours were really really extraordinary and uh the pressure was extraordinary and usually by Tuesday or Wednesday people would just be sleep deprived enough that they would start to behave really badly really really really badly um what i found interesting uh and it took me longer to articulate is that i went from new york and i was in a privileged spot i was yeah i that time as a staff writer of the new yorker i've been the fiction editor of the yorker uh i had lots of social connections it was um it was a nice life and and i was known and i went to a city where i wasn't known and really became really became a new really became anonymous and had to create myself from what i was doing there and i found that uh surprisingly challenging um interesting but but very challenging um and there's no question that that life in the kitchen was that was all my life was at that time just all every day that life Jonathan you've never you said you would never be attracted to working in a kitchen but have you ever done you know one of those kind of days that uh occasionally people would be would ask you to kind of do a charity event or something and you have to cook in the kitchen because i've done it a few times and i have to say at the end of each of those days i have been you know my back's been killing me it's it's really exhausting physical work i always felt as a restaurant writer that i didn't actually want to know what was happening in the kitchen that wasn't my job to know i wanted to know what the experience of the diner was going to be and almost like no letting too much light in on what get what happens in the kitchen uh was quite inhibiting when it came to writing about restaurants i well i i won't get to pretty good um feeling for what's going on in the kitchen because you hear the screams and shouts and you hear the knives and so on being thrown around um but i don't think it is the job of um i think if you start writing about uh gastronomy from the point of view of a professional chef you're becoming um a sort of um a kind of pr for for for that chef and for that restaurant um and you're it's not consumer journalism any longer it's producer journalism and um which one sees in other areas of genre journalism like till only a few years ago nearly all architectural journalism was kind of um sort of analengual sucking up to Norman Foster or Richard Rogers or so on and um once now i got thankfully a generation of other petrol writers who are nothing like that and like putting the boot in um and um so i would i might know what's going on in in the kitchen i might know about the appalling behavior um but it's not something which um should which i lie to impinge on what i wrote um uh i try to write as kind of a normal punter who who who goes to a restaurant and is not particularly interested in whether the people who work in it have been abused by by some tyrant i know that's that's rather you know it's it's conchieing out of it but um that's the truth it's a difficult time to be i mean obviously you haven't done it for for some years in fact you say that you would have stopped doing it much sooner at the times but they just kept offering you more money to stay so you you didn't feel you could leave that wasn't a problem i had at the independent that's where the independent isn't done by Mr Murdoch no i was i was very i was very well treated by the time um i had no good relations with with people there especially with Charlie Wilson who's the the editor when i arrived a man who sat for us Johnson um uh and was still incandescent about Johnson's behavior a long time after that happened um um i was i was as i said earlier i was i was lucky and it was it was it was a good time but um i don't think it's um sage for anyone to go on who wants to who thinks themselves a writer rather than as a kind of um gastronomic um guide um to go on doing something like that for as long as as long as i did um and it got boring and in part one of the reasons got and i was doing a huge amount out of out of London because a lot of that time i was making telly films and every order or my films used to take each one would take weeks and i would be i know what it's like to be in Worcester for four weeks and you know you find out what the food is like in Worcester i don't recommend anyone goes in my footsteps um you know i know what it's like to be in the fence and and so on so i was writing about places which were kind of absolutely typical of the British gastronomic experience um rather than kind of um go to places which were all the same and there'd be a certain number of restaurants outside London which all restaurant critics go to because they had been actually quite good but if you're chuffed down in Sleiford for several weeks you kind of begin to wonder about the veracity of this gastronomic revolution which we kept on hearing about we kept on hearing about it and the same example was always used Ludlow this this food town and it was used because there was nowhere else to to say you know you go to Macklesfield um you can eat this that and the other when you can't um Ludlow was the only place where you where you get and had a very curious etiquette attached to it it started having fun food festivals and and so in fact everyone now has food festivals like everywhere and now has literary festivals what's your impression now when you come back to to Britain have you have you eaten widely in uh London because there was a sort of the the sort of bistronomy movement of Paris was quite influential here you know and that idea of these small chef owned restaurants opening up in unfashionable you know areas and cheaper areas and that's been something that's been a real shot shot in the arm for for the for the food scene certainly in London and and elsewhere. Astronomy actually started in the early 90s that's when that word was coined and Comte de Bordeaux and Thierry Breton and so on we're doing that yeah still doing it I mean I go to Thierry Breton's restaurant one frequently when I'm in Paris but um and Comte de Bordeaux's place I mean which is wonderful but but I never noticed that that had any influence on on on Britain um at all I mean I think it subsequently I mean after I'd stopped doing it maybe maybe its influence was felt but I mean I I I didn't notice it at all. I'm just going to remind the audience that if they want to put any questions to Jonathan and Bill at the at the end of our conversation then they should start sending them in now and I want to just talk about something that you've both got in common is that you have a dedication to doing things in a traditional way and but you diverge around the idea of innovation um it seems to me that innovation is really a novelty a kind of what drive not just restaurant culture but increasingly the kind of new um food uh sort of culture that's happening a lot on social media I mean I actually found myself cooking a recipe from TikTok last night at the um the hest of my teenage son which I isn't something I could imagine either of you willingly submitting to but Jonathan you're dismissive of the idea of of food as art and those kind of directional food trends um you you sort of uh quote in your new book Jonathan that the delusion that cooking is an art it's not it's at best a craft. Bill you're a bit more you're you're you're a bit more um open to the idea that the grand chefs are artists and that the food that they produce can be thought of and written of in the same way as art. Um I think uh cooking gives rise to creativity I I don't know if I've ever used the word art to describe any chef although I do have two teenage sons who are full of TikTok recipes that I'm having to defend their assaults. It's like Instagram but shorter. Yes I was. Like Instagram but shorter videos of that people yeah um you I I think the the kitchen making food like making anything um it gives rise to create creativity um you know I I think of two examples one the the supposed Italian influence on the on the French kitchen that the Italians made the Italians think they invented French cooking and part of that the the reasoning of it is that cooking was just a feature of the Italian Renaissance and you had the Renaissance expressing itself in architecture and sculpture and painting um and you actually had less recognized the Renaissance expressing itself in the kitchen there was a an ambition to there was a there was ambition to um to make presentation important and the the moment you had that then you then gave rise to creativity. What I found in the French kitchen was um it was so structured that it is a little bit like like learning to to write poetry only by by imitating the form of the sonnet it was so structured that you kept seeing spots where you could do something different and the the chef I got to know at the very beginning of this book Michelle Richard I never understood him until I went to cooking school and learned like this is the way you do breadcrumbs and this is the way you do this and this is the way you do that and this is the way you do that this is the way you do caviar and realize oh he learned all these things and he it then suggested something else to him and I think a genuine fluid spontaneous active creative mind has a lot of fun in a highly structured place uh and it does give rise to creativity and um and again Michelle Richard he used to read old cookbooks turn of the century cookbooks 19th century cookbooks for ideas because he would take these structures and then he it would produce something else for him I don't know if that's art I don't actually care if it's art I I I would be embarrassed if someone said a dish that I made was art but um I think there's a lot of pleasure in presentation and there's a lot of pleasure and surprise and surprise is at the heart of a lot of creativity surprises a very big part of cooking I'm more comfortable with surprises that arise out of certain disciplines than combining random ingredients in a way that seems to make sense at a given moment but that might be that just be my might be my limitation but I I'm I'm I'm delighted by surprise but I don't think that's art Jonathan you quote Paul Bacousa saying that a chef is lucky if he invents one dish in his lifetime yeah I I I'm I'm I'm in all the three star restaurants I've been to and it's not that many that was that was quite the best but I mean it was fabulous I don't know if it's kind of fabulous because the food was fabulous but whole whole experience was really rather extraordinary and carnival-esque and very and kind of it's kind of great theater and and the food food was good but I mean if I was in Lyon I'd pass in to go to a food shop then go to Bacousa or somewhere like Lyon de Lyon where Bill had a reporting meal um I had I had I had I had a moderate one there was um but um I don't like surprise um I kind of like things being done the same way over and over again I'm rather like Lord Lucan who used apparently to eat lamb chops for lunch every day and in summer lamb chops on jelly um I'm very very very happy not not to be pretty surprised and I I have a whole presentation of food I don't like kind of pictures on plates and you know chef A thinks he's Mondrian chef B thinks he's Mero etc um that that it kind of appalls me and it's like square plates I mean why um and that there's a lot of trying to reinvent the wheel I think in in professional professional kitchens um which doesn't open it but basically you get to the point where you realise that you're kind of old fart and um you you find an almost inbuilt antagonist to um do what's the next generation is doing you're very scathing about Mark Verra these foraging high three we're up in the mountains foraging for bark root and roots with weren't you yes yes and yeah wild carrots and and things he's uh I I like Mark Verra but I think I like the theater of Mark Verra and uh I like his kind of trumped up alpine worship because I I I'm great I'm very very happy when I'm in the alps but I completely understand there's a lot of there's a lot of a lot of theater Mark Verra um one point on Paul Bacuse who's regarded as I was regarded as like you're one of the leaders of Neuvel cuisine and one of the innovators of French cooking and I think what Jonathan discovered when he went there is that there was a lot of theater and there's a lot of spectacle and there's a lot of jollity it's a very fun fun place and you are you're having you're having the high entertainment of being in a in a restaurant that is looking after you but the food is actually very conservative and yeah yeah he's I think he's associated with Neuvel cuisine mainly because of his friends that anything he did and and if you look at his menu most of the dishes are paying homage to some some usually a woman but somebody in Lyon who has made the dish I mean I that's a madam Fio who is uh he credits for doing his um poulien Bessie the the chicken that you cook in a pig's bladder um and but what he does do with all these things is that the ingredients are absolutely topped I can remember when I was there we have the best raspberry we have ever eaten in our life I mean it was just a raspberry but it was so exquisite it has beaten every other raspberry we've had since and then the preparations are just very exacting Lyonaise traditional dishes and they're often peasant dishes uh are not peasant dishes but they're rustic dishes they're like mere dishes from the 19th century um and that's he was much more Lyonaise than he was any kind of adventurous or creative cook he really wasn't a creative cook he just was a great things were executed brilliantly I think don't remember Daniel Daniel Balu uh telling me Daniel Balu is the Lyonaise chef who lives in New York that um he first time he had um I'm gonna forget what the dish is called now but it's basically um um it's ham cooked in in hay and he had it at Paul Bacuz and uh Danielle grew up on a farm and he regarded hay as what he had on the farm he never regarded as something that you would have at a at a fine restaurant he was also allergic to hay so he had a very antagonistic relationship to hay and that that is actually a kind of great fun traditional dish that I found references to going back I think to the 17th century it's a rustic dish and it's using hay as a as a as a flavoring and that was a Paul Bacuz dish I'm sure he did it very exquisitely and did it in fact I know he did it very explicitly I know he cheated because we had a conversation with him Danielle and I later when he admitted that he used rosemary as well uh because hay actually has a flavoring ingredient as um uh fades when you cook it Dorothy you're looking a bit pained at the idea of ham cooked in hay no I'm not I'm interested in those those sort of um ancient peasant dishes um and they they still exist in the level of vernacular cooking which which I which I like the I mean I like partly because they they almost define regions as we going back to this thing of the fact that France being being so separate parts being so separate from each other and um no one I think in Marseille would would cook and beer um in the way that the part of France called Belgium does and part of France which a but some part of France called Belgium um so it's that beer it's like it's like hay I mean it's it's it's something which you know it's it's there I remember having a wonderful dish of of um a pike cooked with um a gin called huile um huile huile yeah in um right on the Saapotier uh on the French Belgian border and for kind of very remote place felt felt like the kind of end of the world there's just one house and that wasn't in side the road and you couldn't stay there's no no other house anyway and they were doing this dish which is one of the few areas this before this kind of outbreak in general over the world um that they were cooking with what they'd always cooked with and and huile is one of one of the plate one of the big distilleries or not one of the big distilleries the place where there are several distilleries rather than person on rent and have several breweries dozens of breweries likewise likewise I enjoyed the the burgundy dish of cooking eggs and red wine the fumoret and um they're very sophisticated ways of doing it but the the more you go around burgundy or Beaujolais the more basic the dish is and it is basically just eggs cooked in red wine and then you reduce it down and have a very elementary sauce but there's a there's a great and I remember looking at uh old uh recipe like in the early 20th century where they say well you know what you for your you take your eggs and then you take a bottle of volnai you pour that in there and harking back to a time when volnai costs almost nothing whereas now a volnai would cost much much much more but there's a it was this red wine with the abundant ingredient and and people cooked with it yeah they still do but they don't use some ground wines to to to cook in I mean they they they use you know sort of supermarket own brand yeah have you both both been spending obviously this last year has been a catastrophic one for the restaurant industry around the world but have you both been finding any upsides in it in um in that it's pushed you into the kitchen to experiment do more cooking learn new ways of cooking I suspect Jonathan will like given that your book is quite prescriptive and purist around featuring recipes that you know from places that you've already been to you're not you're not a big experiment or or dabbler in cuisine fusion cuisines and that sort of thing but how has your cooking been over the last year and what percentage have you spent of the day have you spent thinking about what you're going to cook every evening um I spent um yeah far too long thinking about what I'm going to cook um probably start very early in the morning when I cut up from about seven o'clock I start thinking what's going what's going to be going on later um and no I haven't really formally experimented with anything but I have done various dishes which I probably haven't ever thought of doing cool um been using a lot of salt cod uh wonderful food um and we had very in the autumn they were incredibly good set and they're very abundant and very good um but I had no the very few um I've done a few dishes which I hadn't done for several years but I and I've been very happy to sort of experiment with certain um certain ingredients in space but um I'd be happy or not what about you Bill uh well um I love Jonathan's idea of starting at seven seven o'clock think about what you're gonna have to do and I'll often think about it a couple days in advance but um I don't often start until later in the day but would the the the one of the surprises of the of the lockdown for for me was I was cooking I started cooking sort of individual idiosyncratic dishes for their and writing about it for the New Yorker and they're making a video with my sons uh who are who of course grew up eating French food and learning French in Lyon and uh we've produced a dozen videos and we've had a lot of fun doing it I mean if I'm right it was in fact the last one the next one was on french fries before that we did one on a passion fruit vinaigrette and then steak tartare and you know rectitouille and things like that uh and that's been that's been a lot of fun um and that's just an ancillary benefit and of uh we're in lockdown and uh there's not a lot we can do and we've been having having fun doing that you haven't put anything on TikTok yet uh not that I know of I've managed to lose the page ah there we go uh so I have some questions here that I'm going to um have a quick now so Diane has asked is the Michelin star a French institution outdated or does it push the industry forward it's outdated and it's an embarrassment um it causes bankruptcies because people get a Michelin star they redo their premises with the fancy interior decorator they harm more more star and um it all goes um pear shaped I wouldn't disagree with that um the one thing I what I discovered when I was in France was surprised me is how once you just get into the vernacular of the Michelin star you will you will actually there there will be difference between a one star place and a two star place and a three star place um but then it then leads to a the obsession of getting that extra star and maintaining that star and it doesn't says it's it's uh it's an enormous and ridiculous expense and I think a three star if you get three stars it's almost like ruins the kitchen um and makes the restaurant a place actually that you don't want to go often and this is a related but uh broader question from Felicity Cloak and lovely to have Felicity with us Felicity? Do you think French restaurant cooking on the whole is on the up or in decline or indeed neither? I think it's to an extent in decline um but it depends where you're looking at if you're looking from Britain um restaurant cooking has become so much better over the past 20 25 years um that the gulf between it French English cooking and or British cooking and French cooking isn't has narrow um there's a huge problem with French restaurants in that it's so expensive to employ people if you're paying someone a thousand euros a month um you're going to have to pay 750 euros in social charges and so small mom and pop places um can just about keep going um whereas a lot of other places are the cooking will be really good but they're incredibly under starved and the staff are under enormous strain and it doesn't make for a kind of great experience but I mean the um I think I think there is there has been a decline but because of that not because any loss of technique or will to tour there's there's there's there's merit there's merit in that certainly about the about the overheads and it is what gave me the chance to work in a kitchen in the way that I that I that I got because they clearly didn't want to hire somebody else and they clearly had somebody who was for free and even though he's got to write about them and even though everyone behaved very badly and gave me lots of copy um I the the first thing was that I I I could hold my own and they didn't have to hire someone but when I went to Lyon I was pretty convinced that French cooking was finished and that was still the time when people were talking about you know El Bouli hadn't closed yet and people were talking about you know the supremacy the French and this new gastro explosion and I was so surprised when I got there that nobody there realized that they that their cooking had died um and and there wasn't any insecurity about it whatsoever and it there was something very appealing about it was kind of an almost uh example of cultural autism because they they they didn't they didn't they didn't know that there was any threat to French cooking so they they're cooking at least they're experiencing it in the city there had a kind of an integrity um it was tight as Jonathan describes it was definitely tight and overheads are tight and the margins are tight and I don't I I'm surprised more places don't go belly up than they do the the ones that are the most successful the ones that can figure out how to run a busy place on a small staff the Bouchon especially um one of our favorite Bouchon we're very good friends with the owners of a place called Bouchon Defi which is run by women um and uh they just have number of routines where they they're doing their their their first courses in the in the beginning of the day and it just has an efficiency that makes the restaurant work but um I I I I think what I found there was that in my experience of it French cooking was surprisingly confidently itself and actually probably getting getting better um very point that it's that the difference between Britain and France is definitely closed but like what's what's happening with the bistros in Paris and what a lot of young people are doing and where there's been this big explosion of cooks in Lyon it's there's it's um it's not a stayed thing there's a lot of energy and it doesn't for all the the fair points about employing people especially in Lyon it doesn't take much to open a restaurant the rents are cheap you could you can there were a lot of places that I saw which really had two places two people in them only and there's um that energy is fantastic it's much more energy that I would see here in New York even though New York's in New York City there's lots of restaurants opening all the time um and that was I don't know that's that's positive that's that was it was a it was a lovely lovely aura have you both got restaurant tables booked for when we are allowed to go out and eat again in inside restaurants where where we where your first meal is going to be uh well here in my restaurants the restaurants here have opened up um and as it happens I am going to a fancy Michelin star restaurant tonight Le Bernardin, Eric with Paris Place with with with friends um but yeah restaurants have have opened up and uh many have perished many are still barely able to make it but there's a real feeling here anyways of um restaurants having made it through a really really hard winter and um I have to admit it was strange because we're sort of have these habits of being at home it was strange to actually go out and go to a restaurant we did the first one two weeks ago um and uh yeah we're still there they're still there. Jonathan? I think be tempting fate to to book anywhere um the restaurant I mean they go to a kind of handful of restaurants regularly um and um one which I guess we like best it it does have quite a lot of outdoor seating but several don't and more appealing in Marseille than it is in London the outdoor seating idea there's a lot of shivering blankets going on yeah yeah I mean your blankets outdoor he's quite actually easy to do um but um I did I as I said I don't want to template a very happy eating time and I kind of more or less forget what restaurants like I mean I'll have to you know go on a course to get reminded and has the whole Brexit nightmare made you think about whether or not you're going to be staying living in France or like possibly I can see no no reason to move back to England I I I um there's so much I hate about him um it seems um sort of squalid little country from both kind of squalid little cabinet um uh monstrous um uh as I say I mean after I I interviewed I gave recently um I can't see any reason for not crowdfunding at Jibbit the Johnson let's slip that one out and put that on the British Library's social media feeds well it's been very good to talk to both of you um and London's loss is Brooklyn and France's gain but um thank you for your writing and your two wonderful books I'll just remind the audience that Jonathan's latest book which is an absolutely stimulating mind-blowing tour d'horizon of all his many interests is called Pedro and Ricky come again and Bill's uh incredibly immersive and stimulating trip into the French the the La France profonde in the kitchen form is is called dirt and that's out now uh thank you both so much for your time this evening and being so entertaining thank you Tracy thank you yes indeed Angela's here yes yes thank you Tracy and thank you to Bill and Jonathan that was definitely one of those events where you sort of lost track of time it was so many fascinating strands of conversation coming together so huge thanks to you all and thank you also to KitchenAid for supporting the work of the British Library food season plenty more to come from us um we're here right through until the end of May next up Saturday afternoon you can take a little peek inside the magnificent pyroomb can frankly um he's going making an incredible pie talking to Polly Russell about the arts and history of pies that's Saturday afternoon head to the British Library web page it's all there um if you would like to donate uh and support the work of the British Library you'll be able to see has to do that on a tab but for now thank you and goodbye from the British Library food season