by Beth Anderle

Created on: February 19, 2009   Last Updated: February 20, 2009

Think of the gentle subtlety of French cuisine with its delicate balances and hints of diverse but harmonious tastes. Now imagine the taste of the Southwest: chilies, corn, black beans, and Southwestern herbs. Put it together and you have one of the hottest trends in American cooking today.

Because of the economy, Americans are staying in the States and a number of Europeans are traveling over here to take advantage of the weak dollar. Arizona has found itself with a number of French enclaves and it is just as likely to hear a group of migrs chatting away in French as it is to hear the Southwestern drawl. As a result, more and more restaurants are finding a way to bring a French flavor to the land of pueblos and cactus.

Today restaurants such as Janos, Le Rendezvous, Sau'tee and Penelope's in Tucson and Binkley's in Phoenix are embracing the new style of French Southwestern cuisine. Carefully searching the menus at these restaurants reveals the unusual combinations.

Touches like the tomatillo sauce over the Urban Roasted Chicken at Sau'tee, tortillas served with Jasmine rice, honey-jalapeno barbecue sauce over a chop salad, salsa, chipotles, avocado all of this Southwestern fire is taking the nuanced traditional French cuisine to a whole new level. Where the individual dishes remain traditional the menu as a whole will show the influence of both styles of cooking. Coq au vin shares the stage with black beans, real French onion soup and escargot with garlic and shallots play well with an Arizona chopped salad.

Janos in particular serves as a fine example of this Europe meets Southwestern style. Chef Janos Wilder cooked under several fine French chefs, but on returning to the United States he ended up in Tucson. Seeking inspiration from the local produce, he incorporated mesquite flour, chilies, beans, squash, Prickly Pear cactus, and blue corn meal into his cooking.

He hired gardeners to plant his own kitchen garden of the ingredients he wanted to work with and opened his restaurant in 1983. Janos menu included such diverse items as Maine Lobster and Mushroom Bisque with roasted Anaheim chilies and rich lobster cream baked in puff pastry dome; Grilled Pork Tenderloin and Spanish Chorizo Galette with apples, olives, mushroom, local winter greens, corn puree and pickled grapes; and a New York Strip rubbed with piloncillo, black pepper and chili, grilled and served on creamed corn and bacon with foraged Oregon mushrooms, spicy red wine syrup and green chili vinaigrette.

In 1990 he published Janos: Recipes and Tales from a Southwest Restaurant (Berkeley:Ten Speed Press, 1990).

Chef John Rivera Sedlar may well be credited with popularizing this French-Southwest fusion in California in his 1980's restaurants like St. Estephe's and Bikini.

His first book, Modern Southwest Cuisine (John Rivera Sedlar and Norman Kolpas, New York:Simon and Schuster, 1994), gives recipes for such delightful dishes as lasagna made with flour tortillas, peppered oysters with chilies, green chili souffle, as well as various creamy garlic sauces.

There are still many French bistros and many traditional Southwestern cafes to visit if you are interested in a purist dining experience. But for a pleasing and palatable culinary adventure, it is well worth your time to try one of the French-Southwestern fusion restaurants for a flavor that will make your taste buds wake up!

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