It is 1997 and The New Yorker writer Mr Adam Gopnick is fed up. Despite accepting his dream job as Paris correspondent, he is disillusioned with French food and pens a piece entitled “Is There A Crisis In French Cooking?” He recognises none of the invention and wit in the cooking that he fell in love with as a young man. Yes, there’s L’Arpège, Mr Alain Passard’s gastronomic temple, where dozens of American students listlessly peel tomatoes just to say they work there, but, apart from a handful of restaurants, it’s mediocre steak frites for miles and chefs who live by the staid mantra of “deglaze the pan and add butter”. French food, unlike what we might now call “modern British food”, is stuck in a rut. But Mr Gopnik sees something else happening in cheap cafés run by Algerians and Moroccans, a new dish that contains the germ of a food revolution: couscous.

Two decades later, couscous is something of a national dish and Parisian cooking has become the envy of the world again. Soaking up the influences of its diaspora communities, Parisian food has transformed itself by becoming supple and multi-dimensional, challenging what people think it is and, more crucially, who gets to define what it is. First and second generation immigrant chefs usually get plaudits for adhering to “authenticity”, but some chefs are now breaking with that and creating new cuisines that are reflective of both their origins and their city, propelling Parisian cuisine into new, uncharted waters.

At CAM, an unprepossessing exterior hides the cooking of Korean chef Mr Esu Lee, who plays on the idea of millefeuille with layers of crispy tofu skin and paté, and a winking take on vegan temple food inspired by his time with Korean monk Ms Jeong Kwan. At Waly-Fay, a bare-bricked restaurant that opened soon after Mr Gopnick’s essay, the food of Francophone west Africa that dominates the Château Rouge district as well as suburbs such as Montreuil and Aubervilliers, is brought into the 11th arrondissement. The food is refined, but not prettified, a showstopper of chicken yassa bears the scent of wood smoke and citron vert.

Nearby at Le Rigmarole, skewers and small plates made by Taiwanese-American chef Ms Jessica Yang and her partner and Harry Potter-lookalike Mr Robert Compagnon serenely emerge from a small konro, using the language of yakitori to create something that is not Japanese but something else entirely: a completely Parisian grillhouse with French produce and aromatics (espelette, orange zest), Japanese technique and something ineffable, finishing with tsukune (chicken meatball). Add to this a paratha made by the Bangladeshi kitchen porter Mr Moshu Noor Amin who weaves between them, washing and cooking, in what is by now a finely tuned performance. At the tiny bakery Mokonuts (again in the 11th for those who wish to do as little walking as possible), French-Lebanese chef Mr Omar Koreitem pairs cockles drawn from where the Loire meets the Atlantic with chermoula and fennel flowers, while his partner Ms Moko Hirayama dismantles the chewy/crisp cookie binary, with creations that ooze inside an eggshell thin crust that shatters on impact. Inside is a shrapnel of sarrasins.

Sarrasins, or buckwheat, is everywhere in Paris, particularly in your teeth, and is the common link between the cuisines of Nagano and Breton, both of which use the seed indiscriminately. Places like Mr Katsuaki Okiyama’s soba noodle restaurant Abri Soba fuel the demand for noodle soups, but the Parisian love of soba is so profound that farmers Mr Olivier Campardou and Mr Berenger Martinel have set up Atelier Soba, where French-grown buckwheat that 10 years ago would have been destined for galettes is freshly milled into noodle dough for Parisians to take home and cook themselves.

In London, the same revolution is taking place, although this time we’re playing catch up, with the most interesting cooking happening in temporary residencies and pop-ups rather than bricks and mortar restaurants. While the early pioneers of “modern British” centred on traditional techniques and unfashionable ingredients, the next generation is looking further afield. Mr Jon Chantarasak draws on his dual heritage with his pop-up AngloThai, most recently seen at Clapham’s The Dairy. Chantarasak’s laab of raw Dexter beef with fermented ramsons pushes both British and Thai food in an unexpected direction, while collaborations with friends and chefs connect different strands of the London food scene.

Two of those collaborators are Ms Peiran Gong and Ms Tongtong Ren of Chinese Laundry in Brockley. Their food could be described as modern Chinese, inspired by childhood memories as well as local produce: classic Suoyi cucumber, impeccably sliced into layers so it resembles an ordnance survey map, might be paired with pickled berries or physalis and rhubarb. Another pop-up, opening in Seven Sisters in early 2020, is Chuku’s where siblings Ms Ifeyinwa and Mr Emeka Frederick aim to introduce Nigerian stews and soups to a new audience using a language familiar to most Londoners. Small plates and burritos may not sound inherently West African, but the Fredericks’ cooking is as much a reflection of the city of London as it is of Lagos, neither toned down nor in thrall to authenticity, attempting to win over both skeptical Nigerians as well as those who don’t know their jollof from their moin-moin.

Mr Sirichai Kularbwong’s celebrated Thai restaurant Singburi is also pushing beyond authenticity’s straightjacket. While Singburi’s blackboard was initially a way of separating the “real” Thai menu from the satays and green curries, it’s slowly trialling ideas inspired by Mr Kularbwong’s travels around London – from a pad prik lamb soured with smoked, pickled cherries, to a riotous laksa of venison presented with Flintstones-sized bones to scoop rich, wobbling marrow fat from. As his fame grows, expect to see Mr Kularbwong working slightly outside the boundaries of Thai cooking in 2020, with more experimentation and collaborative dinners.

Finally, at Tayer + Elementary, a small cocktail bar on Old Street, a barrier conceals the chef’s table where Mr Zijun Meng and Ms Ana Gonçalves hone the latest form of their Luso-Asian pop-up TATA Eatery for just four guests per seating. Although people are obsessed with their Iberico pork sando, a London-wide trend which in lesser hands is just an excuse to charge more for smaller sandwiches, the most satisfying dishes are still the wet rice bowls that blur the boundaries of Portuguese mariscada (seafood stews) and Chinese congee; sometimes austere with clams and fermented cabbage or luxuriant and creamy with cuttlefish ink and crab. And when the pair cooked for a week in Paris in 2018, who were they asked to fill in for? Why, Mr Esu Lee at CAM of course; proving perhaps that the food of these two cities are more linked than ever, or maybe just that game recognises game.