It's been said you can't get a bad meal in France. This is a lie. In France, you're more likely to get a crap, uninspired, unappetizing, poorly prepared restaurant meal than almost anywhere else in continental Europe.

There was probably a time, in the dimly remembered bucolic past, when the words “French” and “cuisine” resonated together, the promise of a culinary treat, rather than a threat. Real French cooking was never the rarefied cuisine of the Michelin-starred gastronomic palaces of Paris and the major cities. They have always served luxurious menus to a select group. The real glory of French cooking was in the ordinary establishments, ones catering for a neighborhood or a small provincial town or a village, which served good, well-cooked, imaginative lunches to local businesspeople during the week and to families on weekends. Their strengths were local produce, timeless dishes, changing menus, and a tradition, passed down through generations, of good food. These restaurants catered to the bourgeoisie, the solid, conservative, very traditionalist French middle class. They weren't going to tolerate rubbish. Other restaurants catered to workers and shopkeepers. They may have been simpler and less well-appointed than their more upscale counterparts, but they too carried on the traditions of French cooking. The routier sign, signifying a restaurant deemed good enough for French truck drivers, was an emblem displayed with pride. God knows what's happened since that golden age. It's as though French chefs have forgotten everything they once knew, or perhaps there's a new generation of chefs that never knew anything in the first place.

The point is that French restaurants now are very often very bad, and French food, in general, is much less interesting and much less good than anything you'll get in Italy, Spain, or even Germany. Restaurants in Britain -- or London -- are better than they were 20 years ago, but, to be fair, that ain't saying much.

The first thing that is remarkable about French food these days is its homogeneity. Go to any French town like Lille, and walk around the streets and look at the menus displayed outside restaurants. What do you see? You see pretty much the same damn thing everywhere. There are grillades and poissons on every menu -- pretty much the same grillades and poissons too -- along with the ubiquitous Magret de Canard and Soupe de Poisson. If it's a fish restaurant, it's specialty will be the very boring Plateau de Fruits de Mer. If it specializes in meat, there will be any number of uninspired grilled bavettes, entrecotes, and cotes de porc. This is pretty much the standard French a la carte menu now. It’s both unappealing and unappetizing, and if you're traveling through France, you'd better get used to it. It's reproduced, almost without variation, in restaurant after restaurant from the Pas de Calais to the Pyrenees. Regional cuisine has been homogenized out of French cooking. Both Soupe de Poisson and Magret de Canard were once local dishes from the south of France, almost unknown north of Lyon. Now they're a staple, on menus of French restaurants from Nice to New York and from Lille to London. They're both perfectly fine dishes, but sometimes you might want to try something else. There are, it's true, restaurants in France that claim to be Alsacienne, they serve lots of sauerkraut, or Languedocienne, they serve lots of beans, but these places aren't in Alsace or Languedoc. They’re in Paris and Lyon and Marseilles, and that means they're generally peddling a warmed-over pastiche of the real thing. Go to Alsace and Languedoc and what do you get? You get grillades and poissons and Plateau de Fruits de Mer.

Another staple of modern French cooking is known as the salad composee. These have replaced what used to be a highlight of a French meal, the ordinary green salad with vinaigrette dressing, served after the main course. Used as a cheap cold alternative to a starter, salad composeescan be made in advance, perhaps days in advance by the look of some of them, and put together with a bit of green stuff and anything else that happens to be past its sell-by date. For some odd reason, they almost invariably include bright yellow, tinned sweet corn. The French often say their cuisine has been McDonaldized, but it wasn't McDonald’s that told French chefs to replace local produce with frozen, factory-manufactured dishes, or exchange fresh fish for farmed fish, or to speed up service by pre-cooking meals and then warming them up in the microwave, or to replace homemade dishes with convenience foods.

These days in France almost everything served in restaurants is industrially produced, flash-frozen, pre-cooked, and microwaved. The mayonnaise, salad dressings, sauces, and stock almost all comes out of a jar. It's quick, it's convenient, it's fast, it increases profits -- and it all tastes like mush. In one fairly well-known restaurant in Paris recently, I ordered Vollaile aux Champignons. It's not a difficult dish, and the recipe has been around long enough for any half-competent chef to be able to make. When it arrived it looked fine. When took the first bite I realized it had a very familiar taste. Of course it did. The base for the mushroom sauce was that old favorite, Campbell's cream of mushroom soup.

There are, it's true, rosetted and garlanded French restaurants with celebrity chefs and long, elaborate, and imaginative menus. People who know about food say they are extending the range of French cuisine and creating memorable dishes. I don't know. The last time I was in a Michelin-starred restaurant in France, the most memorable part of the dinner was the bill, but who, even if they had the money, would want to eat in one of these places every day? They serve real food in the way that a Ferrari is a real car. It’s eclectic, rarefied, and extraordinary. What France has lost is the ordinary -- the sort of little place just off the road that didn't look like anything, that had its menu du jour, probably cooked by the husband and served by his wife, which used fresh ingredients and prepared them well. That was the foundation of French cuisine. Now that's all but extinct, and so is French cuisine.