French cuisine on the skids

A recent weekend in Paris with my son David confirmed certain dismal impressions that previous visits to France had produced. Paris still looks great, the museums and the shops are wonderful but gone are the days when one went to France to eat well and shop for books. Unless you go to the very posh restaurants, the food now in Paris is tired and expensive fare, poorly done and poorly presented. Nothing is new or exciting: everywhere you find the same old recipes indifferently done. Forget the bookshops, too. I spent two nights carefully combing "l´Écume des Pages" and "la Hune" in the Boulevard St-Germain, two fashionable bookstores next to Café de Flore and Deux Magots, that are open until midnight. Quite apart from the tiresome presentation of french books, which has not changed in several generations - white and only white covers - nothing seems to catch one's eye or arouse one's interest. Foucault, Barthes, Lévy Strauss, to name just some my favorites, are gone and no one seems to have taken their place. Not to speak, of course, of the newspapers: flimsy Libération, dour Le Figaro, and of course, Le Monde, easily the most boring newspaper in the world.