L'industrie gets a lot of hate on Yelp…read more
There is a lot that is legitimately wrong with L'Industrie.
But it is a quirky place that is somewhat unique in what it does.
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Let's put the ugly truth on the table now.
L'industrie serves completely industrialized food.
The name L'industrie is no accident.
Everything you will be served comes straight from some corporate food factory in frozen pre-measured individual servings.
French people seem to hate the food.
When we were there, there were lots of people sitting on the drinking side just having beer.
We were the only people on the dining side eating food.
There was a gigantic film festival happening across the street at Institut Lumiere.
You would have thought that at least someone would have come across the square to eat something at dinner time.
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Normally, an industrial food cafe would get two stars from Samuel C.
If the room was really cute, or the people were nice, maybe three stars.
So what is with the four stars?
L'Industrie plays with its food.
It takes standard industrial ingredients and mixes them up in unusual ways to come up with dishes that are entirely its own.
I had a hamburger served between two commercial perfectly-circular-from-the-cookie-cutter-machine hash brown patties, with a melange of bagged salad in the middle, a bottled sauce of some variety (maybe Andalusian sauce - a standard French condiment?) and two slices of American cheese food.
Yes, Kraft-style American cheese slices.
You never never never ever see Kraft American cheese slices in France and for good reason.
The French have high standards concerning cheese.
Yet, here were factory cheese squares smiling at me from underneath hash-brown circles.
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You know what?
That hamburger was good!
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The immediate analogy that came to mind was Betty Crocker housewives of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States.
There was a lot of interest by American housewives in the 1950s and 1960s in time-saving industrialized food.
Cake mixes were big. Canned soups were big. Prepackaged macaroni and cheese was big.
But American housewives got creative with those ingredients.
They found 500 uses for jello.
They found 800 uses for canned cream of mushroom soup.
They found 1000 uses for dried onion soup mix.
Some of those inventions were really really good.
In suburban Boston, Jello was not as popular as it was to be in the South.
But dried onion soup mix got a lot of work.
In my house, sour cream and dried onion soup mix was a standard cocktail dip.
With ridge-y potato chips, it was just marvelous.
Dried onion soup mix worked its way into meat loaf.
Baked chicken with dried onion soup mix and seasoned salt was a thing.
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So I kind of have a place in my heart for people who play with industrialized food.
Just serving things out of the freezer or the packet is awful.
This is the culinary equivalent of doing the minimum amount of work possible.
But if you really want to COOK with industrialized ingredients,
And create something that is distinctively yours,
Then you start drawing the interest of Samuel C.
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L'industrie does this.
Give the house some credit.
