Paris 2024 tried bold new ‘food vision’ in contrast with French culinary tradition
A few blocks away from the roaring La Concorde arena, where Olympic athletes skateboard, breakdance and play 3x3 basketball, there is a haven of quintessential Paris.
PARIS — A few blocks away from the roaring La Concorde arena, where Olympic athletes skateboard, breakdance and play 3x3 basketball, there is a haven of quintessential Paris.
Le Grand Colbert is a traditional brasserie bedecked with white tablecloths, high, decorative ceilings and opulent chandeliers. But what makes it undeniably French is the food: frogs’ legs served with lashings of parsley and Provençal garlic butter; steak tartare (raw minced beef with a raw egg yolk); and escargots Burgundy-style, which is sea snails with, yes, more garlic and more butter.
But Paris 2024, now in its final days, has eschewed this gastronomic stereotype in favor of something altogether more modern. An approach which, as it turns out, was not universally loved by athletes.
The Olympics is a geopolitical soft-power project as much as a sporting one, where the host country seeks to project its national image into the world. As such, Paris adopted a “food vision” for the Games, one that sought to combine France’s historical culinary excellence with the need for food sustainability to combat the climate crisis.
Members of the International Olympic Committee take food from a salad bar at the Olympic Village, in Saint-Denis near Paris on July 22, 2024.David Goldman / Pool / AFP via Getty Images“Anyone coming to the Games in 2024 will be expecting to see incredible sporting performances, but as they will be in France, spectators will also be expecting good food,” Paris 2024 President Tony Estanguet said.
Rating: 5