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Vive La France - London January 2003

I visited the Vive La France exhibition at Olympia in London on Friday, January 17 - my birthday, no less!

My first impression was how grey the audience was. So many people who were already retired or approaching retirement and were looking to France as the best place to live out that retirement. And they were fully catered for in an exhibition that was one of the slickest I have attended in the past few years.

It had everything - wine tasting, food tasting, a continuous fashion show and a wonderful cookery demonstration: "La Theatre de la Cuisine" which featured Jean-Christophe Novelli and to quote the exhibition blurb, he is "known to millions through his numbrous appearances on our television screens and his pop;ular cookery book: Your place or mine?

Novelli, who comes from Arras, began his career as a bakers' boy at the age of 14. He has was appointed head private chef to the Rothschild family before his 20th birthday and has just been made directeur des cuisines of Brocket Hall, a stately home in Hertfordshire where the flagship of their three restaurants is L'Auberge du Lac. This is a 17th century hunting lodge on the edge of the River Lee.

Every region of France was represented at the exhibition and at the Eurotunnel stand, they featured a Champagne fountain. Unfortunately, the table on which the pyramid of wine flutes was placed was not itself level, so only one side of the glasses got filled while much of the fine wine was spilled on the tablecloth. Nevertheless, those who were standing by were given a glass each so they were not worried!

This was a perfect way to present the atmosphere of France in London and will, I am sure, mean many more Fancofiles leaving these shores for the sophisticated life in France.

Contributed and photographs by Michael Moriarty

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