A new wave of Channel-hopping chefs

On a July morning last summer, Jean-Francois Pioc and Tanzi Ellison woke up from a makeshift night's sleep in the back of a rental van. The French-English couple had parked themselves in Montreuil-sur-Mer in Normandy, where the eve-of-Bastille Day market is a trove of second-hand furniture, bric-a-brac and car-boot treasure. Like everywhere else, the best deals here are done early, so torchlights in hand at just gone 3am, Pioc and Ellison started to "walk through the dark", searching for bargains.

Almost a year later, in Kentish Town, north London, their finds from vide-greniers and brocantes around France decorate Patron, their small new cave a manger: candelabras from the Dordogne, old clocks, posters, a street lamp from Deauville and a job lot of chairs.

"It was quite funny," Pioc says of their restaurant-decor mission. "We met some ­brocanteurs who said they were selling stuff from a brasserie [that was closing down]."

Some 7,600 restaurants and hotels closed in France in 2013, 5.4 per cent more than in the previous year, according to Banque de France. And the success of French food has been dipping slightly in London as well, a little like a wobbly table. Gallic ideals may appear to be everywhere in the capital's restaurant life, from grand Parisian-style brasseries such as Balthazar to the classical French cooking that every chef has some of under his fingernails, but the actual restaurants only represent about 3.5 per cent of London's total.

Horizons, the restaurant analysts, counted 257 French food outlets within the M25 in 2014, seven fewer than in 2009. "French independents will have suffered in the past few years as the market is very tough. Chains like Cote will have increased their market share," says Peter Backman, director of Horizons.

But along with Patron, those Parisian imports keep on coming, most recently Big Fernand burgers, bistro Le Chabanais and, this summer, wine bar Les 110 de Taillevent. French food may yet make some noise this year, showing off the reinventions of eating and drinking habits that have livened up the French capital.

Jean-Francois Pioc grew up on a farm in Brittany and came to London nine years ago. He met Ellison - then a trainee chef - at Westminster Kingsway College, where he was a kitchen porter. "In France our teachers used to tell us British food is really bad, it'll be fish and chips," Pioc says, adding that this lesson had been quickly corrected. Ellison, meanwhile, believes in French food's power: "I've always thought that French people know how to cook and how to do it best."

At Patron, above the blue-green banquettes, little blackboards are chalked up with bistro classics such as escargots in butter and garlic, onglet steak, moules marinieres and a truly excellent duck confit - crispier and more tender than any I've eaten in Paris - for which Ellison guards a secret recipe. But the duo don't want to be stuck in the past: "French food was perceived as very fattening; now it's changed, the old bistro [style] has faded out a bit," Ellison says. A section of the menu is devoted to "small plates"; there are dishes such as onion creme brulee - "between sweet and savoury, it's a nice twist" - and their cheeses come direct from an affineur in France. Though nearby Tufnell Park has a French community settled around the lycee, they have not marketed themselves directly to it: "The fact that we said we're a French wine bar did the marketing for itself," Ellison says.

Managing the idea of Frenchness in London isn't necessarily easy. Big Fernand, a successful French burger chain that began in Paris and spread to eight outlets in France, opened its first London outpost on Percy Street, Fitzrovia, last month. Alexandre Auriac, one of three partners who set up the chain three years ago, has always been fascinated by London. "You can see it at St Pancras when you arrive, there is an energy; the food is creative - and the people are demanding."

Big Fernand's "hamburge" flippers are dressed in flat caps and checked shirts, and a waiter is stationed at the door to explain its "French Burger Workshop" concept (you can pick your own burger ingredients, from veal to chives and caramelised onions). Big Fernand started planning its Channel-hop a year ago. Auriac says London customers are friendly but "definitely connoisseurs . . . We were aware that the competition here was intense. The level of burgers is really great. But we have a taste, something distinctive, and we're fast."

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Big Fernand built its name in Paris by diverging from the French view of burger joints: "Traditional burger places had their selling point as 'the exotic American way of food'," says Auriac, "but the quality wasn't always there, and they would offer burgers with a knife and fork." Fernand is fast and casual; inside it's a no-frills mix of plain wood tables, anodised steel lights and burgers on trays wrapped in waxed paper.

Auriac's business in many ways mirrors the entrepreneurism that has pushed London food forward. He and his partners come from the tech industry (they made hidden cameras) and their quest for the perfect burger was a theme of office banter that grew into a business: "We're not any kind of geniuses but we like hard workers and good food . . . There is a new type of restaurateur in Paris who doesn't necessarily come from the restaurant business or a cooking background."

Les hamburges themselves are good. The bun, a mix of "baguette, bakery breads and a bit of oriental", is large enough to make eating the contents decorous; no dripping sauce or sloppy onions. Le Big Fernand, the signature burger, has Angus beef ("We found out that you have really good meat here," Auriac says), Tomme de Savoie cheese, sun-dried tomatoes, parsley and cocktail sauce - a much milder combination than the sour pickles and mustard of American-style burgers. "We're bringing French gastronomy in our burger, but it's a new, interesting way to discover it, less pretentious and more accessible."

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Last month, Sylvie Bermann, the French ambassador to the UK, held un repas a la francaise at her Notting Hill residence to celebrate foreign minister Laurent Fabius's "Gout de France" - an initiative to rally global interest in French gastronomy. Quoting the 18th-century lawyer and gastronome Brillat-Savarin, Fabius noted that, "La destinee des nations depend de la maniere dont elles se nourrissent." (The fate of nations depends on the manner in which they feed themselves.)

The dinner strove very hard to show off some of the different ways in which modern France approaches its food, including a speech by Axelle Lemaire, secretary of state for digital affairs, who revealed that French vineyards use drones to ­monitor the timings of their harvests. Instead of a cheese trolley, diners were presented with tubes of Camembert to be squeezed on to biscuits with quince and salad. It all seemed a little nervous.

How does Bermann think Londoners regard French food? "It's so usual, so traditional in London that sometimes [people] don't even think they're going to a French restaurant. There is a lot more diversity now, which is very good. French food was the first [cuisine] to be known by Londoners, so they want to test something else. But there's still some creativity in French food."

Chef Inaki Aizpitarte, whose Le Chabanais bistro opens on Mayfair's Mount Street this month, is one such example. Flanked by designer stores, the London site is in marked contrast to the quiet 11th arrondissement street that the restaurant's elder sibling, Le Chateaubriand, sits on in Paris.

Aizpitarte is credited as one of the leaders of the "bistronomique" movement that has shaken up old ways of cooking in local Parisian restaurants in the past five years. For London, the menu will be slightly less avant-garde. "It's a big project," Aizpitarte says. "But we're not bringing something radically French to the English. We've made a big effort to work with English suppliers, too." The exact dishes are yet to be decided but may include steamed lobster with mayonnaise, a delicate ­rendition of blanquette de veau, or the classic dessert of Mont Blanc, with shavings of champignons de Paris. "The flavours go very well, and it brings something a bit unexpected and original."

There's no menu degustation, since the restaurant is too big and open every day. "We're trying a new experience," Aizpitarte says. "We'd wanted to do something abroad for a while and when someone offered us the London site, we thought why not, as the city is changing so much. We really have the impression that we've travelled when we come to London, even though it's so close."

Natalie Whittle is FT Weekend Magazine's associate editor. Patronlondon.com; bigfernand.co.uk; lechabanaislondon.com

Photographs: Jack Davidson

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