Pierre Gagnaire, a French three-star chef, hit back this week at the New York Times for criticising the state of France’s cuisine as being stuck in a 20-year time-warp and failing to change.

Stung by the comments in an article in the paper last month, the Parisian chef said in a statement sent to Agence France Presse that contemporary French cuisine remained “modern, dynamic and open to the world”.

In the New York Times article, Arthur Lubow placed today’s epicentre of creative contemporary cooking in Spain, saying: “You can still eat very well in France, as you did 20 years ago. Nothing has changed.”

Drawing similar parallels to the detriment of the French in the fields of art, architecture, film and lifestyle in general, Lubow highlighted the ebullience of Spain, particularly in the Basque country and in Catalonia.

“Spin rising, France resting,” he said, stating that French culinary art had rested on its laurels since the revolution wrought by its ‘nouvelle cuisine' in the late 1970s.

But Gagnaire retorted that: “the considerable developments over the last years, in so many directions, reveal the unequalled vigour of French cuisine.”

“Modern, dynamic and open to the world, it nevertheless maintains the memory of tradition, the ancient guarantee of its authenticity, creativity and long life. We are perhaps seeing the epitome of culinary art.”