Adam Gopnik on the Days of Great French Dining
By JEFF GORDINIER
Published: November 1, 2011

“YOU feel transported,” Adam Gopnik said, moments after easing into a red banquette at La Grenouille, the Gallic grande dame on East 52nd Street that made its debut a few weeks after the Cuban missile crisis. “This is a reminder of why there were great French restaurants, once upon a time.”

It was a Tuesday evening in late September, and Mr. Gopnik, a longtime writer at The New Yorker, the author of the new book “The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food” (Knopf) and possibly America’s most devoted public Francophile, had come to dip into one of the pleasures that he celebrates and explicates in the book: the full, old-school arc of an archetypal French dinner, from that first sip of Champagne to the final jolt of caffeine.

To read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/02/dining/adam-gopnik-on-the-days-of-great-french-dining.html?_r=1&emc=eta1#

Picture: Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times