These leading restaurants are at present in the throes of a serious struggle for existence; pessimists go so far as to predict the extinction of the whole species in the not very distant future. The Maison Dorée and the Café Riche had to make way some years ago for business houses that could better afford to pay the soaring rents, and in 1912 the Durand was transformed into a tailoring establishment. Of the old classical restaurants the Tour d'Argent, Lapérouse, Paillard, Bœuf à la Mode, Voisin, hold their own, yet I have dined in them on evenings when they were anything but crowded.
Doubtless the custom of some of these places of not affixing prices to the viands offered on the bill of fare has had something to do with bringing about this result. Even a well-to-do diner does not always care to be entirely at the mercy of the head waiter in the making-up of his bill. But it is the multiplying of the brasseries that is chiefly responsible for the decline of the high-priced restaurants, and another dangerous rival that has helped to bring it about is the palatial, up-to-date hotel. Some of these hotels employ as good chefs as the leading restaurants and offer as abundant opportunities for sumptuous and savory repasts, at prices tall enough to please the most reckless visitor from New York or Buenos Ayres.
Gourmets will doubtless continue to frequent the classical restaurants as long as they maintain their high standard. It would be a historic as well as a gastronomic calamity to have them disappear. If necessary the Government should give them a subvention as it does to the Opéra and the Théâtre Français; for these epicurean establishments have done quite as much as the theaters to make France famous among the civilized nations of the world.
It is owing to them that French long ago became the culinary world-language. Go wherever you please, from Paris to Berlin, to Lucerne, Milan, Vienna, Constantinople, Tokio; or, in the other direction, to London, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Melbourne,—everywhere, at the leading restaurants, you will find the menu printed in French, and, in case of a course dinner, the viands offered in the order prescribed by French gourmets.
In Germany, after the Franco-Prussian war, chauvinistic attempts were made to banish French words from the bill of fare. These attempts were, as Hermann Dunger frankly admits in his Verdeutschungswörterbuch (1882), a failure; in some cases the comic consequence was that Germans who recognized a dish under its French name hadn't the remotest idea what it was when translated into their own language. Like the Italian forte, piano, adagio, diminuendo, and other musical expression marks, French gastronomic words have become parts of a spontaneous Esperanto—a world-language, which has come to stay; a perpetual reminder of the most important contribution made by the great French nation to modern civilization—the gradual substitution, everywhere, and particularly in Germany and England, of refined methods of preparing food in place of the barbarous mediæval ones prevalent until two centuries ago.
We get an interesting glimpse of French gastronomic leadership by glancing at the words successively adopted by the Germans. In 1715, when the "Frauenzimmerlexicon" of Amaranthes appeared, the following French words had already gained currency, among them: bouillon, carbonade, champignon, côtelette, coulis, crème, à la daube, entremets, farce, fricadelle, fricandeau, fricassé, gelée, hachis, marinieren, omelette, pikant, potage, ragout, saucisse; and for most of these there was no exact equivalent in German.
During the time of Louis XV Germany further imported the following: dejeuner, diner, souper, dessert, entrée, fumet, haut-goût, poularde, saucière, sorbet, table d'hôte, bonbon, champagne, limonade, liqueur.
To a later period belong braiser, bœuf à la mode, consommé, filet, hors d'œuvre, konserve, roulade. These as well as the words gastronome and gourmand were imported during the early decades of the nineteenth century. To the second half of the century belong croquette, entrecôte, flan, remoulade, meringue, purée, vol-au-vent. The word menu was not adopted in Germany till after 1850.