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The French chef Michel Guérard, who has died aged 91, was to many British diners, readers and cooks the chief exponent of nouvelle cuisine. This way of cooking gained wide acceptance in the 1970s. It broke away from classical culinary tropes in search of greater lightness, directness and invention.
Guérard was but one of a group of transformational chefs in the nouvelle cuisine movement, including Paul Bocuse, the brothers Troisgros, and his early mentor Jean Delaveyne of the Camélia restaurant in Bougival. However, it was his book La Grande Cuisine Minceur, published in 1976, that first delivered his cookery to tables worldwide (more than a million copies sold, in 13 languages) even though the recipes the book contained were in fact calibrated for customers on a diet.
The consequence was that cuisine minceur soon became confused in British eyes with nouvelle cuisine itself, which was thereafter tainted with a reputation of minuscule portions, fancy reductions and purées, and pictures on a plate.
Although his early career boasted many successes, Guérard’s name will always be joined to that of Eugénie-les-Bains, the health spa in south-western France where he began cooking in 1974, after his marriage to Christine Barthélémy, to whose family the resort belonged. It was there that he developed a range of dishes suitable for the recovery of good health; and where he established a restaurant of immeasurable class, serving imaginative food of the highest quality, around which grew up a positive village of collateral ventures including a bistro, cafes, cooking schools and hotels.
He followed up La Cuisine Minceur with the less body-conscious La Cuisine Gourmande in 1978. Enthusiasts would assert this his crowning glory, and diners who have enjoyed multiple versions of marquise au chocolat, chicken with vinegar, or countless forms of puff-pastry feuilletés should doff their caps to their original inspiration.
His books made Guérard an international celebrity before most of the general public had heard of his equally capable colleagues in France. In 1976 he featured on the front cover of Time magazine, under the headline “Hold the Butter”. In the same year, he forged an alliance with Nestlé and launched a range of frozen foods under the Findus trademark, again in anticipation of a universal trend.
Guérard was born in Vétheuil, a village to the west of Paris once home to the impressionist painter Claude Monet. Michel was the younger son of Maurice, a butcher-grazier, and Georgine, children themselves of the village butcher and grocer. When he was still an infant, the family moved to Pavilly, north of Rouen, then later to the town of Mantes-la-Jolie on the Seine. Educated at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, when he left school at 16 he went as apprentice to the pâtissier-caterer Kléber Alix in Mantes. There is no better training for a chef than patisserie, which imparts routine, precision and delicacy. He passed his trade examination at the top of the class, just as he would achieve the prestigious award of Meilleur Ouvrier de France en Pâtisserie in 1958 as the youngest candidate that year.
Apprenticeship over, and after more classic French cooking at a former coaching inn not far from Dieppe, Guérard spent his military service in the navy at Cherbourg. He was now fit for an assault on Paris, working first at the Hôtel Meurice and then, as pâtissier, at the Hôtel de Crillon, before moving to the Paris Lido, a barnstorming mixture of burlesque and fine dining on the Champs-Élysées.
Guérard’s parents were concerned that he was not yet set up in an owner-occupied business in the family tradition. In 1965, his response was to buy from the receiver in bankruptcy a run-down bistro, Le Pot-au-Feu, in the industrial Paris suburb of Asnières. It was all he could afford. On the opposite corner was a rivet factory, the place seated only 28 people and the kitchen was tiny.
His transformation of a hang-out for locals into a destination for the capital’s high-living inhabitants was rapid, the client list soon stellar, bookings necessary months in advance. The on-trend French guide Gault-Millau described Le Pot-au-Feu as “the best suburban bistro in the world”. It gained a Michelin star in 1967 and two stars in 1969, despite the humble surroundings.
But a life of constant activity – cooking at his own restaurant, consulting on menus at the fashionable Régine’s nightclub, sleeping no more than three hours a night – was upended by two events: meeting Christine in 1972 and the compulsory purchase of his Pot-au-Feu to accommodate a slip-road.
Christine was the daughter of Adrien Barthélémy, the postwar creator of a chain of health resorts who had placed her in charge of Eugénie-les-Bains, in an unfrequented corner of France. Her meeting Guérard, his loss of premises, their failure to find a substitute in Paris, was a series of happy coincidences that led to his assuming the direction of the kitchens at Eugénie in 1974.
He never looked back, concentrating for the rest of his career on developing this resource. Its closure for business during the winter months allowed him some freedom for other ventures, be they his books, his opening a shop opposite Fauchon in Paris or at Bloomingdale’s in New York, consulting for Régine’s expansion beyond France, or buying the nearby chateau of Bachen and developing its vineyard.
Eugénie held three stars in the Michelin guide from 1977 onwards and Guérard’s influence on French restaurants was immeasurable.
He exemplified the singularities of nouvelle cuisine: plate service under silver domes; the chef-proprietor interacting with his customers as well as his chopping board; the emphasis on short cooking; the delight in sweet-acid combinations. His firm friendships with like-minded chefs, as well as their gift for the art itself, made the movement unstoppable.
Christine died in 2017. He is survived by their two daughters, Éléonore and Adeline.
English (US) ·