THE table is laid, the waiter has taken the order and the diners are looking forward to an outstanding French meal.

But in the kitchen, the chefs are spraying an omelette with a truffle-flavoured chemical and injecting fake wild-mushroom drops into a duck filet.

Science fiction? No, this is the reality in many French restaurants, which are “cheating” their customers with a growing range of artificial products, according to gastronomic purists. They say that the use of flavourings to enhance the taste of otherwise ordinary dishes is misleading because they are rarely mentioned on the menu.

For years, secrecy surrounded the products, which come in liquid and powdered form. They were an unspoken ingredient of contemporary Gallic gastronomy.

But their existence has been brought into the open by two leading chefs, Joel Robuchon and Alain Passard, who have both spoken out against what they describe as a “scandal”.

“It is shameful,” said M Passard, who claims to use only natural ingredients at his celebrated Parisian restaurant, l’Arpège. “I don’t know what to call the people who use these chemicals, but they are not cooks. Cooking is about seasons and nature.”

M Robuchon, widely considered to be one of the most talented chefs of the past 20 years, agreed. He said: “I am 200 per cent against the use of artificial flavours and additives.” However, such flavours appear to be an increasingly common ingredient in French cuisine, with chefs looking for quick, cheap recipes.

Jean-André Charial, who runs the Oustau de la Baumanière hotel and restaurant in Baux-de-Provence, southern France, said: “I know chefs around here who have a drawer full of plastic bottles in their kitchens.

“They put a drop of this in here, and a drop of that in there, but they don’t tell their customers they are doing it. You save time and money, but I think it’s a form of cheating.”

Chefsimon.com, a French culinary website, supplies many of the arômes artificiels that have become popular. These include caviar, truffle, prawn, crab, shallot and cep drops.

The site also explains how to inject wild-mushroom flavour into duck, make a “wine sauce” with a violet-coloured powder, add a zest of bottled scallop to scallop tagliatelli, and spray saffron perfume on to a marzipan turnover.

Chefsimon.com says that its products “faithfully reproduce the sought-after tastes”, adding: “Vanilla, coffee and pistachio flavourings are widely accepted and used in kitchens.

“An increased range should logically be tolerated and accepted by everyone in the end. However, the fear of being accused of cheating prevents the chef from using them openly.”

Another supplier to the French restaurant trade is Pierre-Jean Pébeyre, whose family company has been selling truffles for 110 years.

With France’s annual truffle production falling from 800 tonnes to 12 tonnes during that period and prices now reaching €4,000 (£2,700) a kilo, he has developed an artificial truffle oil, which he says is popular.

A 250ml bottle costs just €7, and enables cooks to add the distinctive taste of the great delicacy to their dishes.

“It is best to spray it on because that spreads it around better,” said M Pébeyre. “A little squirt and you get a far better odour and flavour.

“With truffles costing so much, people are using less and less of them and they need our oil to improve the taste. I think this product is rather good, but it may be that it is misused from time to time.”

He said that chefs who served truffle dishes out of season were tempted to use artificial flavours without saying so. “The fact is that white summer truffles, for instance, have no taste of their own. Customers may not realise that.”

REAL FLAVOUR

Jean Antheleme Brillet-Savarin in his 17th Century work The Physiology of Taste was one of the first to attribute aphrodisiac properties to the truffles