France is the centre of the world when it comes to high quality food and wine, and throughout the country, you can find excellent and surprising restaurants that offer great food that has been cooked with more care than you would expect in most places.
Broadly speaking, there are 3 types of restaurants in France, Cuisine Bourgeois, which is the high fat, high quality, creamy foods characterised as being particularly French, such as Coq Au Vin, or Boeuf Bourguignon, and is typically what you would find in upmarket French Restaurants in the UK.
Cuisine du Terroir is the typical day-to-day food that most people eat, and in recent years has become very fashionable as a kind of "back to Basics" farmhouse cooking with local produce. The name effectively means regional food, and the kind of things on offer depend on where you are: in the northeast, food is Germanic, and features sausages and sauerkraut; in the Mediterranean south, you find olive oil and tomatoes in most dishes while in the area around Paris, food is often quite rich and many things are cooked in butter.
Nouvelle Cuisine developed in the 1970s, and was a return to traditional French ideals, although with less focus on long cooking times and large portions and more on the amount of different flavours in the dish. Nouvelle cuisine is generally quite light to eat.
Vegetarianism is pretty much unknown in France, and although in larger cities, there is an increase in the number of "foreign" restaurants on offer, in smaller places you will normally only find French Restaurants.
