Restaurant meals

One thing we French women are aware of that makes us much more sophisticated than people in the Anglo-Saxon world is how we size up the value of restaurants' wares.

Stupid Anglo-Saxon people think that the value of a restaurant meal is the constituent value of its parts, i.e. they think that if the cost of the meal is only slightly higher than the cost of the raw materials, they have found a bargain.  What awful ignorance!  As Cécile Delarue says in her website French and Parfait, "My poor non-French people".  Particularly in the USA, people are very keen on buffets (yes, I know this is regrettably a French word) or all-you-can-eat places where they can stuff themselves silly.  How terribly un-stylish, vulgar and unfitting for stylish French women such as myself!  Why is it that some people are so daft and don't know how to do restaurant meals properly?

A French woman knows that this is not the proper way to do restaurant meals.  After all, "restaurant" is a French word, so if one wants to know how to do restaurant meals properly, one can do no better than asking a stylish French woman such as myself.  A French woman sizes up the value of restaurant meals not by the sum total of the cost of the raw materials, but by how much pleasure it gives you.  A well-made French restaurant meal gives a French woman (who has a sophisticated enough palate to know the difference between good and bad food) a sensation of pure pleasure.  I could describe what sort of pleasure a good restaurant meal gives a sophisticated French woman, but that would result in my blog receiving a warning saying that it is only suitable for people over the age of 18.  Look at these presumably Francophone women gaining pure pleasure from eating chocolate at the Museum of Cacao and Chocolate.  Yes, I know that this is in Brussels, the capital of Belgium and not France, but it is too late at night to find a more suitable photo on Wikimedia Commons and anyway, Brussels (or Bruxelles) is a Francophone area, even if it is surrounded by Flems, or should that be phlegms (LOL, or MDR, as people say in France).

A proper restaurant meal should be elaborately presented and with as dainty portions as possible.  The reason for this is that a Frenchwoman wants her food to be a feast for her eyes as well as for her taste buds. We are so sophisticated that we can very nearly look at a delicious meal and feel full up.  When I found myself in the UK, people weren't so bothered about food presentation and found the obsession rather silly, saying that there was no point, given that the food would soon be gone (ooh la la, such ignorance).  I found it hard to avoid eating more as a result.  The point is that if a Frenchwoman is given an immaculately-presented dish, she will almost full just by looking at it and she will be able to eat only a few dainty nibbles to feel full.