Oh, the French. They look gorgeous till they die. They have sex eight days a week, half the time with Gerard Depardieu. (Unless ... I may have that wrong.) And the food! Pates and freshly baked baguettes and coq au vin simmering till the coqs come home!

Or so I thought. But guess what you can find in every town in France.

"Cheese shops?" asked my friend.

Well, yes, I'm sure there are cheese shops. And cafes. And young boys on bikes delivering tarts before school, their berets bobbing in the breeze. But what there also are, mon ami, are frozen-food shops. Groceries filled with only frozen food.

"In France, freezers are much smaller, and yet there are probably 1,000 Picard stores," says Elisabeth de Kergorlay, a French native. Picard stores, she goes on to explain, are a chain of shops devoted solely to frozen food. And beyond Picard, there are Picard's frozen competitors. France is awash in rock-solid food.

Who knew? Not we Americans. So de Kergorlay set out to change that. This past summer, she opened Babeth's Feast, the first all-frozen French-tinged grocery in America. Not surprisingly, it's in New York City, in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods on the planet: the Upper East Side. And this past week, she invited some lucky reporters to come check it out, as well as taste the store's offerings.

The store itself is a cross between country charm and clinically clean. The floorboards are wooden; the light is bright; and the freezers are filled with packages so well-designed that they could be in the Museum of Modern Art's gift shop.

Breakfast, lunch, hors d'oeuvres, dinner, dessert — they all have separate freezers. The breakfast one is filled with croissants, crepes, biscuits, brioche... Basically, if an item involves butter and flour — often layered on top of each other ad infinitum — it's here. Put it in the oven and your house smells like a Juliette Binoche movie.

The appetizers are strong on quiche, and come to think of it, so are the side dishes. But dinner — mon Dieu! The store has saute de veau aux carottes (that's veal with carrots to you), poulet a la provencale (chicken stew), braised lamb with turnips... Where's the Salisbury steak with green beans and whipped potatoes?

That sense memory turns out to be de Kergorlay's biggest bugaboo; the frozen food most Americans grew up with convinced us that "heat and eat" means heat and run. "But if a recipe wasn't good before it got frozen, people assume it's bad because it was frozen, not that it was bad and then frozen," she says. In other words, we got it wrong. You can freeze good food fast, and it will taste like good food again once revived.

To prove it, a chef in the shop's kitchen prepared a dinner of previously frozen soup, potato puffs, steak, Brussels sprout casserole and chocolate souffles.

How were they? Yummy. Indistinguishable to this palate (which, admittedly, recently had oral surgery) from freshly prepared. They're also kind of pricey. A main course can run $19.99 to serve three or four. Side dishes are about $10.

So are Americans ready to upscale their frozen food options? My guess is yes. We've already embraced better coffee, better bread, better chocolate. Better living through finer frozen food could well be next.

Although, better living through looking gorgeous till you die would be my first choice, if given the option.

Lenore Skenazy is a keynote speaker and author of the book and blog "Free-Range Kids." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy ([email protected]) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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