Crackpots #88: Paris, Texas (Patreon)

This week's crackpots comes from Patrick Redford, staff writer and co-founder of Defector. He hosts Only If You Get Caught and co-hosts Nothing But Respect. Liz has been on twice! He lives in Oakland, but this one is coming to you live from France.

It was somebody's birthday at the Buffalo Grill. You could tell by the pounding soundtrack, which hit the uncanny midpoint between Cocomelon and the denatured EDM that plays at slot machines, and in which the discerning listener, even one that doesn’t really speak French, could understand occasional snippets, like "anniversaire," "birthday," and “Indiens.” The idea is that when you’re here, you’re something more than family. You are meant to be called higher as you enjoy your Big Tenders de Poulet, your Chili con Carne (from the “Best of USA” section), or your Menu El Dorado. You and the somehow 120-plus French people here on dates, here enjoying stunningly intergenerational family dinners, here to get a little taste of America, are a tribe, wishing a bon anniversaire to all les p'tits Indiens et Cowboys.

Buffalo Grill is a widely adored American-themed restaurant with more than 300 locations across all regions of France. They make half a billion Euros per year in revenue. The first time I encountered the restaurant was last month when I was covering the Tour de France and staying on the outskirts of an unremarkable town halfway between Toulouse and Pau in a terrible budget hotel. Our sprawling parking-lot hell also hosted a McDonalds, several car dealerships, and what appeared to be a place that sold farm equipment. You won’t find Buffalo Grill anywhere remotely touristy, you’ll find it in places like this: alongside highways, out on the periphery of cities, encrusted with acres of parking lots. 

As soon as I learned about Buffalo Grill, I was pulled to it out of equally strong forces of anthropological and culinary curiosity. A racist, American- themed restaurant doesn’t fit into the conventional imagination of France, yet it’s a totally logical part of the France that exists. The collective imagination of American Francophilia conceives of France as a hyper-affected land of taste and beauty, a country-sized delight crafted by some whimsical deity of twee precision. It’s a soothing fantasy, motivated by a perhaps repressed revulsion at the orgiastic consumption that animates American life. Surely the bastion of highbrow European sensibility is immune to our disease? No; France is also mid-sized towns hollowed out by urbanization, the overwhelming infrastructure of logistics and supply, and anonymous places that look like Bakersfield.  

Buffalo Grill offers a fascinating reverse perspective, one that can help disentangle the contradictions. French food is held up as the global standard, at least among the global white-people community. So why then do so many French people love eating at a somewhat faithfully reskinned TGI Fridays with like four dozen images of the Route 66 highway badge? What is Buffalo Grill really like, and why?

I would like to first assert that we visited the ideal Buffalo Grill at the ideal time. Our crew was out among the Zs and umlauts of the German borderlands near Belfort, having just wrapped up a particularly punishing day of driving across the last few hundred kilometers of the empty center of France (which is referred to as the diagonal of the void) to make it to the finish of a boring stage. It was a Friday night. The Tour was just over halfway done and we’d been eating French food for two weeks; lunch that day was one of those French gas station salads with a fork fashioned out of breadstick material that you can eat. It was time to see if Buffalo Grill could knock us out of our canard-induced stupor and sate us with its various American offerings.

Upon exiting the A36 for the Buffalo Grill in Andelnans, the first thing you see is a 15-foot tall totem pole with an eagle spreading its wings, looming over the front door and the massive red buffalo next to it. The second is that the Buffalo Grill is packed so full of people that we had to park in the third overflow parking lot. Who were all these people clamoring for the Buffalo Grill? Everyone was there. Families with shrieking children, sleek couples on dates, curious gaggles of German tourists, groups of teenagers. No group of people in the southern suburbs of Belfort was missing out. When I asked my French friend who now lives near me in San Francisco if he’d been to Buffalo Grill, he said his dad took him there all the time, and that was how his American dream started. He sent a photo of the family adorned in headdresses.

Buffalo Grill is well-known and decently well-liked within the Tour de France press room because it’s everywhere, open late, and never surprising. French food is not always beef bourguignon paired with a delicately floral Gamay and followed up with a surprisingly light crème brûlée, oftentime it’s burger, which is a delightful word to hear in the French accent. We saw fewer headdresses than we apparently would have seen pre-Covid. Veteran reporters told me the Indian iconography used to be significantly denser and wilder a few years ago, with waiters in costume and far more offensive menu items and descriptions. I heard some vaguely foreboding tell of coordinated dancing and play-acting. 

The Buffalo Grill we dined in was relatively spartan. High black fences separated the red leather booths, which were not American-sized, forcing me to knock knees with an Australian colleague over whom the faintly hallucinatory irony of the restaurant held no charm. The overhead lighting was pure and crystal-bright. On a poster in the front of the restaurant, Buffalo Grill’s bison mascot Bizcoto rode a Harley-Davidson and sported a Coca-Cola lapel button. Two framed portraits of Native Americans loomed over my dining companions, though after a lap of the place, I only saw those two photos repeated several times throughout the restaurant alongside generic Old West art of horses, hay bales, and the Route 66 highway badge.

Maybe Buffalo Grill had ditched the Native stuff I was warned about? The kid’s area, however, was framed by a huge wall-sized mural of four huge buffalo dressed in stereotypical native garb, cutting it up and dancing around a campfire that appeared to be cooking, confusingly, a kebab-shaped log of what I can only assume is buffalo meat or perhaps cow meat. Cannibalism aside, it’s as if Buffalo Grill knows better but also knows that its clientele loves the chintzy, racist decorations. The official YouTube version of the birthday song, “Bon Anniversaire les p'tits Indiens !,” has 4.5 million views, gloopy first-gen AI art of so many p'tits Indiens playing the violin, eating birthday cake, and generally going nuts, and a closed comments section.

Buffalo Grill was founded by a French guy named Christian Picart in 1980. Picart was born in 1939—not a great year in French history—and after finishing up his mandatory military service, he went West and found himself in San Francisco. Picart was a server at La Bourgogne, a now-closed but once-notable French joint on Mason Street across from the Pinecrest Diner. Despite being in San Francisco in the 1960s, Picart got into the  young-money hustler mindset instead of sex, drugs, or rock-and-roll, and he found himself charmed by the American steakhouse as a restaurant concept, which, fair enough.

When he eventually founded Buffalo Grill after like 10 years of starting a bunch of other failing businesses, he also made the very practical and very American choice to stick his restaurants on the side of roadways. The first Buffalo Grill opened its doors in 1980. Forty-six years later, and the chain is the largest themed restaurant chain in France. Picart sold the company in 2005, and three corporate owners later, it is now owned by the British private equity firm TDR Capital. Though they opened branches in every neighboring country, none survived, and Buffalo Grill is now an all-France operation. 

That doesn’t mean its fascination with the American West is uniquely French. Europeans love cowboy shit. The continent has been fascinated with the landscape and indigenous inhabitants of the Americas since they started sending guys over there in the 1600s and bringing back captives to gawk at and parade around at World’s Fairs and human zoos. The introduction of the mythic figure of the cowboy a few centuries later really set things off, as it gave the Europeans an aspirational figure. They may have been the increasingly alienated subjects of slowly industrializing post-feudal monarchies and duchys, but they could at least imagine themselves as free to roam as cowboys were. Buffalo Bill Cody’s famous Wild West Show hit Europe like a meteor. The kings of Saxony, Greece, Denmark, and Belgium participated in the opening show in London in 1887. They toured for princes, dukes, and sold-out arenas of thousands. Legend has it Annie Oakley shot a cigarette out of Kaiser Wilhelm’s mouth.

A few years after the first Wild West Show, Karl May published Durch Wüste und Harem, the first of his wildly popular travel stories. May was a prolific writer of cowboys-and-Indians fiction from the mid-1880s until his death in 1912, most of which centered on an Apache leader named Winnetou and his German best friend, Old Shatterhand. Though he’s little-known in the English-speaking world, May is one of the most celebrated and widely read German authors of all-time. He dressed up in old-timey Western gear and pretended not only to have traveled to the American West, but to have lived the events of his stories. 

You are a TrueAnon listener, so you can probably tell where this is going: of the many young Germans who were influenced by May’s Old West writings, a certain Adolph Hitler was a particularly zealous fan. “I owe [to Karl May] my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world,” Hitler wrote. Per a paper from two University of Minnesota economists on the way Hitler was inspired by the American government’s treatment of its Indian population, “On the eve of becoming Chancellor in 1933, Hitler decided that he would read all 70 volumes of May’s works. He kept a vellum bound set of May’s volumes in his personal library and insisted that every German officer should carry one of May’s “Indian Books” (Indianerbucher). On the Eastern Front, he had 300,000 copies of May’s books printed and distributed to his desperate soldiers.” Karl May scholars apparently get pissy when people bring this up, and they point out that Einstein, Hesse, Kafka, all those guys, they all read and liked May too, to which I would counter that none of those guys are Adolph Hitler.

Anyway, American West mania continued after the war. Mononymous Belgian cartoonist Morris published the first issues of the comic Lucky Luke in 1946. Everyone in Europe lost their minds for it, though unlike May’s heavy-handed moralist work and the Wild West Shows that preceded those, Lucky Luke is an evolution of the form for its mildly parodic elements. Now subjects of those very cowboys via the Marshall Plan, it was worth laughing both with and at them. 

This brings us back, finally, to the Buffalo Grill. The same impulses and desires that make Buffalo Grill so beloved are the same ones that made Morris and May bestselling authors. Eighty years after the publication of the first Lucky Luke, and the ironic attachment has progressed, though the dynamic still holds. The American West as it exists has basically nothing to do with the fantasy—though I think all these French people would love Sacramento, Ca., the Buffalo Grill of California—because much like its Francophilic mirror, it’s detached foremost from time. By the 1900s, when May’s celebrity was at its zenith, the iconic figure of the cowboy was mostly an anachronism. If May had lived a lot later, I think he would have found the story of Red Dead Redemption II quite touching.

But what of Buffalo Grill’s tribute to the great American dish, the burger? What of their food? Diners are greeted with a warm, gummy roll and a welcome salad of undressed lettuce and a handful of corn. The menu has approximately 2,000 words, an appropriately level of American overkill and hyperindulgence. I order the Spritz du Sherif, which is an Aperol spritz with a different name and a different flavor profile (it tastes like piss.) Le Super Famous Bacon Burger is so salty it could kill a housecat, and is not nearly as “good” as it is “big.” The fries are served with an actually quite delicious simulacrum of ranch dressing. 

One colleague orders one of the entree + plat + dessert menu options, and he describes his food as “the stuff that’s served at an eight-year-olds birthday party.” Another gets the spicy chicken sandwich, which he likes, describing a heat level that someone with a French palate would find “extraordinary.” My Australian friend gets overwhelmed by the size of the menu, orders wrong, and winds up with the sort of meal he says he’d feed his children when he was out of ideas. We decide to try the Famous Cookie for dessert, though when I ask the waitress in dogmouthed French why the cookie is famous—literally, it was more like “The cookie is celebrity; why?”—she looks at me like she wants to kill me, and says, in English, “I don’t know,” and storms away. I did not go to bed hungry, which is a win of sorts.

The next day, we drove down to the Alps, away from the bad vibes of the German border. We stopped in the small, anonymous town of Bellegarde-sur-Valserine for lunch. While walking around looking for a place, we came across Pearl Ar’bor sushi, which bore a wall-sized mural of a Japanese warplane striking an American warship. According to Google reviews, the citizens of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes love the food there.