The rat's nest of a French Haute Cuisine kitchen

Rating: 10/10 (2 August 2007)

Everyone knew that Paris hotels had the biggest, friendliest and juiciest fleas in the world with whom all tourists fell in love at the first bite. A real legend these fleas of Paris Hotels. Ask Ms Paris Hilton: she will tell you everything about it and she can compare with the fleas of American prisons. But Walt Disney has decided to go a lot further in its debunking of Paris, to teach those damned urban frogs a good lesson since they don't seem to have understood that they had to make themselves very, very small after their being rejected for the 2012 Olympic Games. And the lesson is as hot as hell. All best restaurants in Paris have hired, as chefs in their kitchens, the ugliest and least hygienic people they could find, I mean the gutter and sewage rats, and there again Paris has a record: not so much as for the quality of their rats but as for the number of them. It is even murmured that unemployment has gone suddenly down in Paris because of this hiring policy of Paris hotels since all unemployed people in Paris, particularly in the ethnic northern and eastern suburbs, are nothing but rats basking in the moonshine. That will show how low these Frenchies of Paris have gone: their haute cuisine is done and produced by rats. You can be rest assured that in the next Walt Disney film they will show that French haute couture is in the hand of a bunch of pigs and French perfumes in the hands, or shouldn't I say in the sweaty shoes, of bedbugs, or who knows what other stinking beetle or skunk. The kids though love it and there is some humor here and there, and I must say the Parisians deserve it quite a lot because they are always obnoxious with foreigners, strangers and tourists. All serious study proves it with hard data. So they just get the change their fake forged bank notes deserve. But there are some myths that like going around in the world. Ratatouille has nothing to do with Paris since it is a dish prepared in Marseilles, originally, at least as far I know, though some dictionaries tell me it is from Nice. Same mistake. At least they do not bring up the most popular and famous dish of France in France today, i.e. couscous, that is prepared, it is well known in France, by some special species of rats, but this would have been racist. At least one thing will be sure: French fries will no longer be what they used to be. I bet they can be called fried rat's nests and enter the legend that in Haute Cuisine they don't have cockroaches, but they have coq au vin, and no one knows what's the connection between the two, nor which one is better than the other. At least in Paris you can't make the difference. I must admit though the few views of the Eiffel Tower were quite appetizing.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne