Fooding - the new French craze

Fooding is the latest restaurant craze to sweep Paris. A combination of "food" and "feel-ing", Fooding is supposedly a new kind of restaurant experience.

Last week was the first Fooding Week in the French capital, with this new gastronomic phenomenon discussed (sometimes less than seriously) across the French media: Canal Plus and Paris Premiere devoted entire TV programmes to it, while Technikart and Zurban magazines, and the highly respected newspaper Liberation all devoted several pages to it.

Restaurants should be more than just places to eat. They should be destinations, places that nourish the aesthetic sensibilities, even the soul - with a combination of exclusive menu (forget the steak and frites), carefully designed environment, and the right amount of music, at just the right volume and tempo. At least that's what Alexandre Cammas believes. The 29-year-old restaurant critic of hip Parisian listing mag Nova, Cammas dreamed up the idea at the end of last year, while sitting in a cheap restaurant. The neon lights gave him a nasty pallor, and the cheap, red velvet banquettes were playing havoc with his Paul Smith suit. The menu listed steak tartare, and Barry Manilow was playing on the sound system.

Yes, all right, so a certain section of London's hippest young things would find this kind of ambience perversely thrilling, but remember: Cammas is a Parisian.

"I thought to myself, how would I put this right, if I were allowed to? That's when I realised we had to invent a new way of eating, with a feeling of joy and lightness."

Et voila! Le Fooding was born. With typically Gallic flair, Cammas has described it as, "feeding oneself with feeling, with emotion and intuition, discovering a new gastronomic art - a way of cooking or of being at the table, either at home or in a restaurant, involving a certain state of mind: an appetite for novelty and quality, a refusal of tedium, a love of ordinary beauty, the wish to be entertained, and above all, to eat in a contemporary manner."

Anywhere else, Cammas would have been laughed out of town. This being Paris, the idea caught on.

Earlier this month, the first annual Fooding Week was inaugurated with a round-table discussion at Café Flore, followed by a media blitz, culminating with an awards ceremony for the best Fooding restaurants at Alcazar, Terence Conran's new restaurant, itself decidedly Fooding. There were winners in 11 categories from Best Menu to Most Convivial Toilets.

The Georges, at the top of the Beaubourg, is perhaps the typical Fooding restaurant: menu printed on

papyrus, a VIP lift which opens straight onto the maitre d's lectern, waitresses with handbags, and nearly all the tables are for two - thus instantly excluding rugby teams, rowdy gangs of coke monsters and hen nights.

Other Fooding establishments, such as les Crocs, pride themselves on seating their guests communally at large, battered farmhouse tables: thus obliging them to make conversation with each other. Fooding, it seems, can be whatever you want it to be - as long as it's not just about order ing some food and eating it. Other restaurants to nail their colours to the Fooding mast include Bon, Korova and Rue Balzac, L'Auberge du Clou and La Table d'Aligre. While most are relatively new establishments, some are definitely old enough to know better.