France will be celebrating French gastronomy with a worldwide initiative on 19 March aimed at raising awareness of French cuisine. Over 1300 chefs from all the five continents are expected to join the Goût de / Good France event. Dinners will be served simultaneously in participating restaurants worldwide to honour the merits of French cuisine, its capacity for innovation and its values: sharing, enjoying and respecting the principles of high quality.
This initiative was taken by the French foreign ministry as a way to promote French tourism and to send a message to the culinary world that French cuisine is also contemporary. In a way, it is a response to many food guides which have recently tended to ignore France in favour of other gastronomic destinations in the world.
The great French chef Auguste Escoffier, who is the father of modern French cuisine, created Epicurean dinners in 1912 where he chose one menu on a given day and served it in cities around the world to as many guests as possible. This event in 2015 will take that idea further, bringing all categories of restaurants together from fine dining to bistro. This event is also the first concrete event following French cuisine’s recent listing in the “Intangible cultural heritage of humanity” category of UNESCO.
The restaurants have been selected by a committee of international chefs led by the most famous French chef Alain Ducasse. The menus will include one French traditional aperitif with champagne and gougers or iced cognac and foie gras, one cold starter and one hot starer, one fish or shell-fish course and one meat or poultry course, one or a selection of French cheeses and a chocolate dessert. This will be served with French wines and one French liquor. The chefs who created the menus were asked to follow one guideline: menus should focus on vegetables to represent the values of healthy eating by reducing fat, sugar and salt content.
For a list of the restaurants taking part in this unique event near you, you may want to take a look at www.goodfrance.com. Well known chefs taking part include to mention a few names Raymond Blanc (UK), Heinz Beck (Italy), Peter Goossens (Belgium), Richard Ekkebus (Hong Kong), Guy Savoy (France) and Gennaro Esposito (Italy)
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