"Homemade" in Oxford and Paris

There’s been a lot of discussion in the national and international press over the summer about France’s introduction of a “Fait Maison” law: the introduction of a little symbol intended to show which restaurant dishes have been entirely prepared in house, and which have had some kind of prep done off site. The majority of the fuss has been around the specifics of the rules: frozen chopped vegetables are fine, unless they’re potatoes for chips, which aren’t acceptable; paté can’t be made elsewhere but pasta can; that French classic, steak tartare, could be chopped up in some factory and then dumped on your plate and still qualify for the logo. But is there any point in having such a symbol at all? Would it improve food in Oxford?

You might think this is the sort of thing I would be entirely in favour of: I love supporting independent restaurants who craft and produce fantastic food that reflects Oxford and themselves, not mass-produced generic pap. Oxford is flooded with exactly the type of chain restaurant which France’s Fait Maison law is designed to expose, but would introducing a similar symbol here actually have any effect on them? We need to recognise that a large proportion of Oxford’s restaurants are sustained by the tourist trade, by visitors whose concern is not for the local but for the safe, the recognisable, and the comfortable. They prefer not to risk a chef at a local independent restaurant serving them something spicy, and what on earth are they meant to do when faced with homemade brawn on a menu?

These customers are unlikely to be deterred from visiting a chain restaurant simply because it doesn’t display a logo, so the restaurants which benefit most from their custom will continue to do so, squeezing out independent trade in the city centre. But what of locals? I like to think that I’m capable of knowing just from reading a menu whether or not the majority of the food is prepared and cooked in house, or shipped in ready-prepped. Menus with more than 15 main courses are unlikely to consist entirely of fresh ingredients, for example. And then there is the helpful weasel phrase “home-cooked”: not “homemade”, mind, but produced in a factory hundreds of miles away and then reheated in the restaurant kitchen once you’ve ordered it. No independent restaurant crafting dishes from scratch needs to specify home-cooked on a menu, because that is their default state; it is only restaurants where this isn’t the norm who feel the need to use this phrase. So I don’t think having a helpful little symbol on menus would help me much, either.

That’s not to say that there isn’t a group of people who this symbol wouldn’t help. There are thousands of local residents who want to eat better food but who struggle to know where to find it, or who want to support independents but are confused by restaurants owned by massive corporations masquerading as indies. Everything helps, and an easily spotted symbol on menus displayed in restaurant windows might enable this group to spend a bit more of their money on businesses doing good things.

And, finally, the symbol would allow me to easily avoid one of my greatest bête noirs, the nightmare that haunts me through even my waking hours, ruining meals just when my hopes are highest: the unexpected, frozen, oven, chip.