Ideal Driven

That idealism is what I find so compelling at the best Spanish restaurants, and so sadly missing in France. The nouvelle cuisine movement burgeoned at the end of the hopeful 60's, nurtured by a belief that honest cooking -- mindful of culinary tradition, natural products and individual creativity -- could make a better world. That optimism has curdled. Besieged with soaring costs and smothering regulations, French chefs think more imaginatively about brand extension than about recipe invention. They cling to past glory, to a tradition of nouvelle cuisine that is becoming as hoary as Escoffier. In Spain, as García Santos says, young chefs still touchingly believe that they can change the world.

- Arthur Lubow A Laboratory of Taste