PARIS: Even if you couldn't be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition. Eat a hamburger. Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer - in cafés in Saint Germain des Prés, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs - they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun. "It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit - the subversive, even," said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant in Paris. "Eating with your hands, it's pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it." It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald's for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.
PARIS: Even if you couldn't be on the Champs-Élysées for Bastille Day on Monday to watch seven parachutists float down in front of President Nicolas Sarkozy, you can still celebrate the greatness of France with a new local tradition.
Eat a hamburger.
Beginning a few years ago but picking up momentum in the past nine months, hamburgers and cheeseburgers have invaded the city. Anywhere tourists are likely to go this summer - in cafés in Saint Germain des Prés, in fashion-world hangouts, even in restaurants run by three-star chefs - they are likely to find a juicy beef patty, almost invariably on a sesame seed bun.
"It has the taste of the forbidden, the illicit - the subversive, even," said Hélène Samuel, a restaurant consultant in Paris. "Eating with your hands, it's pure regression. Naturally, everyone wants it."
It is a startling turnaround in a country where a chef once sued McDonald's for $2.7 million in damages over a poster that suggested he was dreaming of a Big Mac. Hamburgers were everything that French dining is not: informal, messy, fast and foreign.
