This Food Festival Is Your Intro To French Cuisine

If you've always shied away from French food because of how inaccessible and unfamiliar everything is, this is the perfect month to try out all the French dishes you've been curious about. Goût de France (Good France) 2019, which is celebrated in over 150 countries including the Philippines, will officially start on March 21. 

This chocolate pie uses local Malagos chocolate. Yum!

Photo by courtesy of Goute de France

This chicken is paired with a robust sauce made with local coffee.

Photo by courtesy of Goute de France

This year, chefs from 28 restaurants from Metro Manila, Tagaytay, Baguio City, Cebu City, and Malaybalay City are participating and created menus that will highlight French cuisine from southern France.

In Samira, Anya Resort in Tagaytay, Chef Jonathan Bouthiaux has been working a lot with local flavors (he recently made his own spin on bulalo just a few weeks before: a surprising bulalo dish with grilled foie gras). For this year's Goute de France, he created a menu that showcases French flavors and is a delicious ode to his hometown.

No French meal is complete without cheese on the table.

Photo by Trixie Zabal-Mendoza

The duck confit by Chef Jonathan Bouthiaux is a great intro a cuisine that is all about layering flavors. Photo by Trixie Zabal-Mendoza

Buttery and silky, this plate of foie gras is also dressed up in a fruity sauce.

Photo by Trixie Zabal-Mendoza

Appetizers are a choice of Smoked Salmon Foam, French cheese puffs (classic Gougeres), or Beef Tartare. The seared buttery foie gras (fattened duck liver) silky texture and subtle flavors shine, dressed up with a fruity green apple and red wine sauce. A juicy duck leg confit-a traditional French dish made extra flavorful by infusing the meat with fat and is left to marinate herbs and flavor before it is cooked in a slow simmer-is a great intro to a cuisine that is all about mastery of techniques and layering flavors. Before you dig into dessert, a tangy and sour lime sorbet with vodka will prepare you for a simple but satisfying Black Forest Cake paired with pistachio ice cream.

While the mere mention of French food conjures up images of fancy plates and anniversary dinners, French cuisine is really all about using different techniques to layer and pile on the flavors, meant for everyone to savor a meal down to the last bite.

The Goute de France five-course menu at Samira, Anya Resorts is priced at P2,500 per person. 

For more information on the participating restaurants and their respective menus, visit the Good France website. Goute de France will run until April 15, 2019. 

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