Eating out: traditional restaurants
See also: Choosing the best restaurants - a guide to the guides
As stated above,a meal in a typical French restaurant will consist of: a starter (une entrée), such as a mixed salad, soup, some terrine or paté. A main course, (le plat principal, [ler plar pranseeparle]) typically a choice of meat or fish, with potatoes, rice, pasta and/or vegetables; a cheese course (often a selection of local cheeses) and/or a dessert. Desserts are sometimes not detailed on the menu, so you have to listen to the waiter. Common choices include: fruit tart (such as apple tart, tarte aux pommes), crème caramel, ice-cream (glaces). Coffee at the end of the meal is an optional extra.
For special fixed lunchtime menus, called le Menu du jour, see above.
It is in the evening, for dinner, that French restaurants often pull out all the stops. Even on weekdays, an eating out in the evening can often be a long-drawn-out affair, and diners can easily spend between two and three hours at the table. Dining out, in France, is an evening's event, not just a means to avoid feeling hungry; it is highly unusual to find restaurants that chivvy their clients to eat up, pay up and leave, as may happen in some other parts of the world.
The menu will contain the same stages as the classic three/four-course menu indicated above, but may well include five or six courses, with the addition of an "hors d'oeuvre" [or d'eur-vreu] at the start, and a light green salad or a sorbet between courses. In the best restaurants, diners will be expected to start with a pre-meal drink (an apéritif), which will be accompanied by little home-made snacks, which the French call des amuse-bouche ordes amuse-gueule [dayz amuse-girl] - a word that has on occasions been misinterpreted by unsuspecting foreign diners - but really means things to whet your appetite.
The number of courses, and the quality of the food, will depend on the reputation and nature of the restaurant, and also on the cost of the menu or à-la-carte dishes chosen; but in any self-respecting restaurant, the cooking will be done using fresh ingredients, and the chefs will take pride in their work.
"Nouvelle cuisine" ?
Many French restaurants - and at the top end of the scale, virtually all of them - have adopted "nouvelle cuisine". In this, the accent is very much on quality, taste, originality and presentation, rather than on quantity. While the staple of traditional French cuisine might be something like a plate laden with "steack frites", steak, french fries and french beans (common in restaurants serving workers and lorry-drivers), the main dish in anouvelle cuisine restaurant might be something like fine slices of roast beef, with asparagus in an original cream sauce, with a small portion of pilau rice and two cherry tomatoes - this being carefully arranged on the plate and completed with some form of edible decoration.
Snails & Frogs legs?
Those classic dishes that foreigners love to associate with France, snails and frogs legs, belong more to the traditional cuisine than to nouvelle cuisine; but they are not everyday fare in France! Like many things, they belong to France's deep rural tradition. Both are indeed tasty, though with snails it is really the butter-parsley-and-garlic sauce that is the great taste, and with frogs' legs, the taste is not very different from crunchy chicken wings. Note: most of the frogs legs consumed in France are imported, and the decline in the frog population in certain Asian countries, due to a lucrative export market, has been - and is - an ecological disaster.