A funky, 200-page restaurant guide to Paris and the rest of France for 2016 covers everything from la crème de la crème to the avant garde, and claims to be the voice of the zeitgeist. The magazine compares the cuisine of 2015 with that of 2000, and cites “neo-bistrot” dishes such as toast soup, deconstructed pot au feu, beetroot espuma and rose flavoured raw milk ice as proof of the shake-up of French gastronomy, where dress codes have been dropped and previous formalities are challenged. It read very much like a guide to modern Scotland.

In fact on a recent trip to France, I found the food in many restaurants to be no better than the contemporary cuisine we have here. A terrine de foie gras with orange jam and toasted sourdough, followed by a lamb daube with creamed polenta, and a salad of chick peas with hazelnut oil and chorizo followed by pan-fried seabass fillets on baby vegetables, served at one of the newest and hippest restaurants in Nice’s old town, was excellent but nothing we had not tasted before.

A pheasant ballottine with foie gras and cranberries, an unctuous, deeply flavoured ravioli St Jacques, and a bouillabaisse, with its velvet tomato sauce spiked with aniseed notes and four species of local fish, part of the menu at an acclaimed and long-standing Nicois bistrot, were certainly rooted in classical French cuisine and given a youthful, modern, confident expression; but we felt we could have enjoyed the equivalent at Glasgow’s The Gannet or The Honours, Edinburgh’s Timberyard and Gardener’s Cottage or Dundee’s Castlehill to name a few.

The simple lunch menu in Toulon featured a melting rosemary-spiked fillet of lamb, deeply flavoured organic roast chicken and fresh scallops in fish broth with rice, followed by a fresh fruit salad or profiteroles. Again, delicious and affordable, but no longer unique.

By contrast, we had many mediocre meals, the worst of which was a local brasserie’s langoustine stir-fry which sounded great on paper but which arrived swimming in soy sauce with hardly any noodles and a few overdone shell-soft prawns.

A half-hearted salade Nicoise served at a sunny port-side bar en route to Monaco boasted precisely one teaspoonful of tuna, two anchovies, too many large, tough leaves, unripe tomatoes and a disappointing absence of proper vinaigrette.

Which begs the question of where French cuisine is headed. While Scotland’s best chefs train mostly in the French classical tradition but look northwards to Scandinavia and increasingly eastwards towards Asia for inspiration, I didn’t see much evidence of that hungry ambition in the places we ate in France.

It’s claimed that complacency is rife in the industry, and some blame France’s 35-hour working week, which was introduced in 2000 by the Socialist minister Martine Aubry in an attempt to spread the work out and ease climbing unemployment rates.

According to popular opinion it’s ended up creating a culture which discouraged ambition and instead put the emphasis on leisure time. The French chef Raymond Blanc, for example, recently said on Twitter that the “loi Aubry” had “killed the nobility of work, spirit of entrepreneurship and French gastronomy”.

That said, the “eat local” message, still such a novelty in Scotland, remains second nature in France, where (unlike Scotland, at least for now) every town and city has its list of local specialities – and celebrates them. Socca, a chickpea flatbread served hot with a drizzle of local olive oil and a dusting of salt and white pepper, and panisse (deep-fried chick pea fingers) and olive tapenade are available everywhere.

Bars and cafes serve mid-priced menus that could compete with what we self-consciously call gastro-pubs any day of the week: slow-cooked beef stew, curried rabbit in pastry, seafood duo of coley and salmon, veal kidneys in mustard sauce. They use French cheeses with PGI status, like tomme de Savoie, liberally. Even McDonald’s has goat cheese wraps and cheese burgers with Dijon mustard topping on the menus of their Provencal branches.

In mountain villages local traiteurs, or delis, sell homemade take-away pissaladiere (onion and anchovy pizza), quiche Lorraine, sliced rare roast beef fillet, salmon cakes. There are producer markets everywhere, and they take place daily in some parts. They sell past-their-best or “ugly” vegetables at less than £1 in baskets labelled “perfect for ratatouille”. I’ve never seen that at a Scottish Farmers’ Market.

They hold seasonal chestnut, olive and wine harvest festivals, and families join in.

What France still has is a food culture. French gastronomy has been placed on UNESCO’s delightfully named World Intangible Heritage list, aimed at protecting cultural practices.

The French gastronomic meal, it says, “emphasises togetherness, the pleasure of taste, and the balance between human beings and the products of nature”.

You hear men, young and old, discuss food between themselves. They ask about dishes on the menu and they always receive a robust and informed response. In restaurants, bistrots, bars and cafes, children are welcome. This creates a sense of familial, democratic conviviality, even if the food itself isn’t always up to scratch.

So while we continue to enjoy the happy renaissance of our own food culture, we still have a lot to learn from the French.