Posting this solely to share that first comment by "Aubré Flounders," which I'm pasting below in its entirety. The best thing i've read on the internet today.

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My formation in French cuisine was in the mid-60's, when we ate in middling restaurants at the beginning of the month and smoked Gauloises, and then graded down toward mid-month to places like Roger la Frite, which means roger the French-fried potato, or Jean-dans-le Passage where a principal plate was 90 centimes, or about twenty cents at the time, cockroaches included. By the end of the month waiting for the stipend to arrive we were eating mostly sliced tomatoes in peanut oil and a little vinegar, demi-baguettes, which are a baguette where you ask the shop-girl to cut it in half in a machine like a paper-cutter, and we were smoking P-4's, which were floor sweepings that came in four-packs that cost about a nickel if I remember correctly, or rolled our own. The chokes were always part of it.

In those better beginning-of-month restaurants there were never desserts like they have today, the gloppy ice-cream concoctions like a dame blanche. Those sneaked in later while I wasn't watching and made a lot of Frenchmen fat. For a dollar or two you got the ménu which was an entrée or hors-d'oeuvre like a feuilleté or maybe a vegetable dish or tomato salad or terrine, and then a principal plate, usually some meat and potatoes or a stew like a bourguinon or filet mignon, which is pork tenderloin, and then a lettuce salad followed by selections off a cheese plate and then a selection of whole fruit or, if you wanted, some sort of pastry like a religeuse or millefeuille, which we here call a Napoleon. It was a pretty good way to eat, with a basket of bread slices that you could ask to have refilled, and a half-litre of ordinary wine for another twenty cents or so. Even the dank low-end places like Roger the French-fry would give you an edible steak-frites for about a franc, twenty 1967 cents, everything else extra. At the poor end of the month you might go to a charcuterie and get a carton of good salade niçoise or something similar, and a half-baguette and an éclaire for not much, and you could take an emptied soft-drink bottle to the place where they fill it with wine out of a hose for less than a litre bottle of ordinaire, at different per-litre prices depending on the degree of alcohol in it. I don't think there was ever anything like that in the US, places where sitting with a good-looking girl made fresh sauce-soaked bread and shitty wine taste great. Lookism put to practical use, quoi. Don't avoid places with beautiful women in them, ignore who's already there and take a beautiful woman with you, or at least one who looks beautiful in bistro lighting. Trust me, the food tastes better.

As an aside, there were wine afficionados around then who said you had to develop a palate for wine, so I made a decision to develop my palate toward the cheapest wine available, and became a three-star gourmand of plonk, the way some people can end up enjoying strip-mall noodle bowls if they work hard at it and believe in themselves.

A lot of french people actually can taste differences in wines, but then you have the great masses of them who drink plonk, for example the guys in the south who sit around drinking balloon-glasses of rosé, which even I know is almost always abominable, with ice cubes in the glass.

Nowadays there is a lot of shitty food around France, café food and Maghrebi or Turkish sandwich places that make any sandwich into an Americano by piling it with fries. But there are lots of fairly cheap good middle-eastern restaurants and good cous-cous places. Cous-cous is always passable-to-excellent, and I think Wednesday is cous-cous day and you can get it in just about any café. There are still places around, even in Paris, that offer an abbreviated version of the old prix-fixe ménu, probably without both the cheese and the dessert fruit, and without the lettuce salad after the principal dish.

By the way, entrée means the entrance, but I think our practice of calling the main dish an entree is legitimate, coming to us through the twisted linguistics of Victorian England.

Tipping, back then you tipped for everything. A cup of express at the counter cost 45 centimes and you left five centimes, about a penny, and the barman would flip it into the pot for sharing out. I remember 13 1/2 percent as the going rate, which was about the same as in the US, where you tipped ten percent, or fifteen if you felt yourself to be in the fats. Now there is virtually no tipping in France, the service is compris, although you usually leave the bronze coins, mostly because you don't want to tote them around. Back then most people had one of those little clam-shell coin-purses for the purpose, which also came in handy for tipping the lady taking care of the urinals.

I'm surprised that an authentic strip-mall guy like Tyler shops in supermarkets in France. You go to whatever street market is on that day-- there's going to be one nearby, or to the many little mom-and-pop bakeries and creameries and fruit-and-vegetable "merchants of the four seasons" and butcher shops that still exist. French supermarkets are marginally OK, and they let the cashiers sit down, but they are no way to pass the occasional week-long or month-long visits you use to add up to your x years of having lived in France.

In most of the US, the memory of good food was wiped out by the efficiencies of the post-war years, I think, the way good beer was wiped out from the mid-50's until only recently, after they started putting most of it in cans and marketed it to suburban house-wives and Harley-Davidson riders. So we invent cuisine traditions and end up with places like Red Lobster and the Olive Garden, and expensive places where the food is arranged on the plate with tweezers. It's enough to drive a gluttonous man into the strip-malls.