Eating in France: Café, Bar, Bistro, Brasserie or Restaurant? (#726)
One of the pleasures of eating in France is that choosing where to eat can be almost as interesting as choosing what to eat.
On a recent trip through France, I became increasingly aware that the words café, bar, bistro, brasserie, and restaurant are not simply interchangeable French labels for somewhere that happens to serve food.
Each describes - or at least once described - a somewhat different institution, with its own rhythm, expectations, menu, clientele, and place in French life.
The distinctions have blurred.
A café may serve dinner. A bar may offer a surprisingly sophisticated lunch. A bistro may have a chef producing food worthy of a Michelin star. And a brasserie may be grander than many restaurants.
Still, the five categories remain useful. More importantly, understanding them makes eating
in France considerably more fun.
The Café: An Extension of the Street
Perhaps the most French of them all is the café.
A traditional café isn't primarily about gastronomy. It is about being there.
The chairs often face outward toward the pavement rather than inward toward one another.
That tells you almost everything you need to know. You are not merely having coffee. You are watching France go past.
Order an espresso and you have temporarily rented a front-row seat to the neighborhood.
The village café can be even more basic: tiled floors, metal chairs, newspapers, a television somewhere in the corner, a few elderly regulars who appear to have occupied the same table since Georges Pompidou was president.
Someone is discussing football. Someone else is discussing politics. Neither discussion is likely to be quiet.
Food may be decidedly secondary. There might be a plat du jour, perhaps pâté, a ham sandwich, or that wonderfully French invention, the croque-monsieur - ham and cheese transformed by heat, butter and confidence into something far greater than the sum of its parts. Put an egg on top and it becomes a croque-madame.
The café is democratic. You need not understand the wine list, dress for dinner, or contemplate whether raspberry belongs beside monkfish.
You simply sit down. And watch.
The Bar: The Apéritif Has a Home
The French bar occupies another part of the social landscape.
Yes, people go there to drink. But the important French concept is not simply drinking. It is the apéritif.
There is a lovely distinction between having a drink and having an apéritif. The former quenches thirst. The latter marks a transition in the day.
Work is over. Dinner has not yet begun. Nobody is in a hurry.
Wine, beer, pastis, vermouth or a cocktail may arrive, perhaps accompanied by olives, cheese or charcuterie. Conversation expands to occupy the available time.
That little interval before dinner is not wasted time.
It is the event.
The French have somehow institutionalized something many cultures have allowed efficiency to destroy: sitting around doing very little with people whose company you enjoy.
A sophisticated urban bar may now serve cocktails, brunch and quite ambitious food. But its essential purpose remains social rather than gastronomic.
You go to a restaurant primarily to eat.
You can go to a bar simply to be with people.
There is a difference.
The Bistro: Food Without the Theater
Then there is the bistro - or bistrot, if the proprietor prefers.
This may be my favorite category.
Traditionally, bistros are small, often independent and sometimes family-run. Tables are close together. The menu is relatively short. Food tends toward the recognizable rather than the theatrical.
This is where you hope to find onion soup, pâté, steak-frites, duck confit, sausages, perhaps a regional specialty and a dessert that someone's grandmother would recognize.
The crucial characteristic is not simplicity for its own sake.
It is good food without unnecessary ceremony.
You may find yourself sitting close enough to the couple at the next table to know what they ordered, whether they enjoyed it, and possibly what they think of their son-in-law.
That is part of the experience.
Then came bistronomie - the rather wonderful collision of bistro and gastronomie.
Ambitious chefs began applying serious technique to informal restaurants: excellent ingredients, inventive cooking and attractive presentation without the white-tablecloth performance or corresponding price.
The result has blurred the old categories further.
A modern bistro can be casual without being simple.
And sophisticated without being pompous.
The Brasserie: Dinner as Spectacle
The brasserie is something else again.
Originally associated with brewing - brasser means to brew - the classic brasserie evolved into a large, bustling establishment serving food for long hours, often from lunch well into the evening.
And the great French brasseries are glorious.
Mirrors. Brass. Globes of light. Banquettes. High ceilings. Waiters moving at extraordinary speed. Seafood arriving on enormous platters. Oysters. Sole. Steak. Choucroute piled with enough sausages and pork to make a cardiologist nervous.
A café observes the street.
A brasserie puts on a show.
Some of the famous examples are almost theatrical spaces. You don't simply enter them for dinner. You enter a performance already underway.
The waiters are part of it.
There is a particular skill to the French brasserie waiter: brisk, efficient, occasionally intimidating, somehow carrying twelve things at once while remembering who ordered what at six different tables.
Our waiter at Le Franc-Tireur in Paris, whom I have already compared to Seinfeld's Soup Nazi, would have understood the genre perfectly.
There is movement, noise and life.
And that is precisely the point.
The Restaurant: When Eating Becomes Gastronomy
Finally, there is the restaurant.
Of course, restaurant has become the universal word for almost anywhere we pay someone else to cook for us. But at the upper end of French dining, the word takes on another meaning.
Here, eating can become an event.
The chef may have a philosophy.
Indeed, the chef's philosophy may occupy half a page of the menu before you encounter anything edible.
Ingredients have provenance. Sauces become emulsions, reductions and coulis. A raspberry may suddenly appear beside a piece of fish. Someone has carefully positioned a beetroot crisp at an angle that surely required architectural consultation.
The wine list can resemble a doctoral thesis.
And dinner may take three hours.
At its finest, this is cooking at an astonishing level. Great French gastronomy demands technique, discipline, imagination and consistency. The Michelin tradition has helped create a culture in which tiny details matter enormously, and that influence extends well beyond starred restaurants.
But there is another side to it.
Fine dining requires participation from the diner.
You are expected to arrive on time. You probably shouldn't wear your football jersey. You are expected to listen while dishes are explained. Courses arrive deliberately. Wine is considered. Plates may be beautiful enough to make you reluctant to disturb them.
Eventually, appreciating all that subtlety can become rather hard work.
After several courses, multiple wines and sixty minutes of culinary explanation, I sometimes begin thinking longingly about steak-frites.
Which tells me something important.
They Aren't Really Five Levels
It is tempting to imagine these five establishments as a hierarchy:
Café → Bar → Bistro → Brasserie → Restaurant.
But that misses the point.
They perform different jobs.
The café gives you the street. The bar gives you the apéritif. The bistro gives you intimacy and honest cooking. The brasserie gives you bustle and spectacle. The restaurant, at its most ambitious, gives you gastronomy.
And sometimes the €18 lunch in the little bistro you stumbled upon by accident will remain in your memory long after the elaborate dinner costing five times as much has faded.
Perhaps that is one of the lessons of eating in France.
Price and pleasure are not synonyms.
Neither are sophistication and enjoyment.
There are evenings when I want the white tablecloth, the sommelier, the chef's philosophy and the beetroot crisp balanced precariously against the monkfish.
But there are many more evenings when I want a small table on the pavement, a glass of wine, something recognizable on my plate, people talking too loudly beside me, dogs under the tables, scooters passing in the street - and absolutely nobody explaining the philosophy behind my dinner.
Five ways of eating.
Five rather different versions of France.
I recommend trying all of them.
But if you're looking for me, I'll probably be in the brasserie down the road, making too much noise and paying a fifth of the price.
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