The French chef Michel Guérard, who has died aged 91, was to many British diners, readers and cooks the chief exponent of nouvelle delicacies. This fashion of cooking gained large acceptance within the Seventies. It broke away from classical culinary tropes searching for better lightness, directness and invention.
Guérard was however certainly one of a gaggle of transformational cooks within the nouvelle delicacies motion, together with Paul Bocuse, the brothers Troisgros, and his early mentor Jean Delaveyne of the Camélia restaurant in Bougival. Nevertheless, it was his ebook La Grande Delicacies Minceur, printed in 1976, that first delivered this fashion of cookery to tables worldwide (greater than one million copies bought, in 13 languages) despite the fact that the recipes it contained have been actually calibrated for purchasers on a weight-reduction plan.
The consequence was that delicacies minceur quickly turned confused in British eyes with nouvelle delicacies itself, which was thereafter tainted with a status of minuscule parts, fancy reductions and purées, and photos on a plate.
Though his early profession boasted many successes, Guérard’s identify will all the time be joined to that of Eugénie-les-Bains, the well being spa in south-western France the place he started cooking in 1974, after his marriage to Christine Barthélémy, to whose household the resort belonged. It was there that he developed a variety of dishes appropriate for the restoration of fine well being; and the place he established a restaurant of immeasurable class, serving imaginative meals of the best high quality, round which grew up a optimistic village of collateral ventures together with a bistro, cafes, cooking colleges and inns.
He adopted up La Delicacies Minceur with the much less body-conscious La Delicacies Gourmande in 1978. Fanatics would assert this his crowning glory, and diners who’ve loved a number of variations of marquise au chocolat, hen with vinegar, or numerous types of puff-pastry feuilletés ought to doff their caps to their unique inspiration.
His books made Guérard a global superstar earlier than a lot of the common public had heard of his equally succesful colleagues in France. In 1976 he featured on the entrance cowl of Time journal, below the headline “Maintain the Butter”. In the identical 12 months, he solid an alliance with Nestlé and launched a variety of frozen meals below the Findus trademark, once more in anticipation of a common pattern.
Guérard was born in Vétheuil, a village to the west of Paris as soon as dwelling to the impressionist painter Claude Monet. Michel was the youthful son of Maurice, a butcher-grazier, and Georgine, youngsters themselves of the village butcher and grocer. When he was nonetheless an toddler, the household moved to Pavilly, north of Rouen, then later to the city of Mantes-la-Jolie on the Seine. Educated on the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, when he left faculty at 16 he went as apprentice to the pâtissier-caterer Kléber Alix in Mantes. There is no such thing as a higher coaching for a chef than patisserie, which imparts routine, precision and delicacy. He handed his commerce examination on the high of the category, simply as he would obtain the distinguished award of Meilleur Ouvrier de France en Pâtisserie in 1958 because the youngest candidate that 12 months.
Apprenticeship over, and after extra basic French cooking at a former teaching inn not removed from Dieppe, Guérard spent his army service within the navy at Cherbourg. He was now match for an assault on Paris, working first on the Hôtel Meurice after which, as pâtissier, on the Hôtel de Crillon, earlier than shifting to the Paris Lido, a barnstorming combination of burlesque and advantageous eating on the Champs-Élysées.
Guérard’s dad and mom have been involved that he was not but arrange in an owner-occupied enterprise within the household custom. In 1965, his response was to purchase from the receiver in chapter a run-down bistro, Le Pot-au-Feu, within the industrial Paris suburb of Asnières. It was all he may afford. On the other nook was a rivet manufacturing facility, the place seated solely 28 individuals and the kitchen was tiny.
His transformation of a haunt for locals right into a vacation spot for the capital’s high-living inhabitants was speedy, the consumer checklist quickly stellar, bookings essential months prematurely. The on-trend French information Gault-Millau described Le Pot-au-Feu as “the perfect suburban bistro on this planet”. It gained a Michelin star in 1967 and two stars in 1969, regardless of the common-or-garden environment.
However a lifetime of fixed exercise – cooking at his personal restaurant, consulting on menus on the modern Régine’s nightclub, sleeping not more than three hours an evening – was upended by two occasions: assembly Christine in 1972 and the obligatory buy of his Pot-au-Feu to accommodate a slip-road.
Christine was the daughter of Adrien Barthélémy, the postwar creator of a series of well being resorts who had positioned her answerable for Eugénie-les-Bains, in an unfrequented nook of France. Her assembly Guérard, his lack of premises, their failure to discover a substitute in Paris, was a sequence of joyful coincidences that led to his assuming the course of the kitchens at Eugénie in 1974.
He by no means regarded again, concentrating for the remainder of his profession on creating this useful resource. Its closure for enterprise through the winter months allowed him some freedom for different ventures, be they his books, his opening a store reverse Fauchon in Paris or at Bloomingdale’s in New York, consulting for Régine’s growth past France, or shopping for the close by chateau of Bachen and creating its winery.
Eugénie held three stars within the Michelin information from 1977 onwards and Guérard’s affect on French eating places was immeasurable.
He exemplified the singularities of nouvelle delicacies: plate service below silver domes; the chef-proprietor interacting along with his clients in addition to his chopping board; the emphasis on brief cooking; the enjoyment of sweet-acid combos. His agency friendships with like-minded cooks, in addition to their reward for the artwork itself, made the motion unstoppable.
Christine died in 2017. He’s survived by their two daughters, Éléonore and Adeline.
