The French Love Affair with Kitsch

Somewhere between their obsession with haute cuisine and their inexplicable reverence for Jerry Lewis, the French have a deep, unembarrassed love for kitsch. Not ironic kitsch. Not winking, self-aware kitsch. Real, sincere, heart-on-the-sleeve kitsch.

Which brings me to La Plage, a restaurant in Montrichard sitting right on the sandy banks of the Cher River.

It bills itself as a BBQ joint. You smell the smokers before you see them. Wagon wheels straight out of Texas dot the patio. The menu promises pulled BBQ pork sandwiches. But because this is France, what arrives is shredded pork and cheese stuffed inside a pastry and topped with crispy onion straws. It’s equal parts barbecue and boulangerie — like Memphis and Montmartre had a baby and raised it near a river.

Then you go inside.

La Plage has two massive party rooms that double as shrines to American pop culture — not the cool, curated kind, but the glorious, unapologetic, VHS-rental-era kind. One room greets you with Rocky Balboa in full Italian Stallion regalia standing next to C-3PO, who is inexplicably guarding a Coca-Cola mini fridge. Darth Vader looms nearby. Jaws, Rambo, Back to the Future, and Terminator posters cover the walls. King Kong roars. Indiana Jones dodges snakes. Schwarzenegger clutches a shotgun with the same expression you’d have if someone double-dipped in the guacamole.

It’s chaotic. It’s excessive. And somehow, it works.

Because when the French go kitsch, they commit. No half-measures. No ironic distance. Just full-throttle admiration. And sitting there, eating BBQ pork in a pastry under the watchful eye of Rocky Balboa, you realize something strange: you’re not in America… but you’re not not in America either.

And that, oddly enough, feels very French.