France’s Approach to the Olympics: Food, With a Side of Games
A wing of the Eiffel Tower has been cleared out to make way for a brand-new restaurant called Gustave 24. A fully built commercial kitchen is set to be airlifted into the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art museum on the Right Bank. Open-air brasseries will soon be erected on two bridges across the Seine.
Oh, and there’s also some kind of athletic event about to take place.
As it prepares to host the Olympics, France — a nation already sitting on an elaborate culinary infrastructure — is creating a from-scratch collection of pop-up restaurants and dining experiences on a scale far beyond the offerings at any past Games.
Some 80 temporary restaurants are being set up in Paris and other locales around the country where competitions will be staged. They will serve an average of 30,000 diners a day, each offering a different menu and format. And they’ll offer visitors a chance to experience the Olympics as dinner theater.
At Versailles, they can feast on lobster ravioli in the gardens while watching equestrian events. In the Eiffel Tower, they’ll be able to enjoy moules frites and live music while observing beach volleyball down below. And when competitions aren’t taking place, these restaurants will host speeches from past Olympic winners, and virtual- reality experiences that simulate participating in a swimming race or standing on a podium to receive a medal.
A food program this sweeping may come as little surprise in a country whose cuisine is so revered that it was named part of UNESCO’s “intangible heritage of humanity” in 2010. But France is hoping to draw even more attention to its culinary traditions, and the multicultural country it has become.
