Obituary of Michel Guérard
French chef Michel Guérard, who has died aged 91, was for many British diners, readers and cooks the leading exponent of nouvelle cuisine. This style of cooking became widely accepted in the 1970s. It broke with classic culinary tropes in search of more lightness, directness and inventiveness.
Guérard was just one of a group of transformational chefs in the nouvelle cuisine movement, including Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers, and his early mentor Jean Delaveyne of the restaurant Camélia in Bougival. But it was his book La Grande Cuisine Minceur, published in 1976, that first brought his cooking to tables around the world (more than a million copies sold, in 13 languages), even though the recipes in the book were in fact calibrated for dieting customers.
As a result, cuisine minceur quickly came to be confused in the eyes of the British with nouvelle cuisine itself, which has since acquired a reputation for tiny portions, imaginative reductions and purées, and pictures on a plate.
Although his early career was a success, Guérard’s name will always be linked to that of Eugénie-les-Bains, the spa town in south-west France where he began cooking in 1974, following his marriage to Christine Barthélémy, to whom the resort belonged. There he developed a range of dishes suitable for restoring good health; and where he established a restaurant of immense class, serving imaginative food of the highest quality, around which grew up a positive village of ancillary activities, including a bistro, cafés, cookery schools and hotels.
In 1978, he followed up La Cuisine Minceur with the less body-conscious La Cuisine Gourmande. Aficionados would call it the crowning achievement of his work, and diners who have already tasted several versions of marquise au chocolat, chicken with vinegar or countless forms of puff pastry feuilletés should take their hat off to their original inspiration.
His books made Guérard an international celebrity before the general public had heard of his equally capable colleagues in France. In 1976 he appeared in the front of Time magazine, under the headline “Hold the Butter”. That same year, he forged an alliance with Nestlé and launched a range of frozen products under the Findus brand, again in anticipation of a universal trend.
Guérard was born in Vétheuil, a village west of Paris that was once home to the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Michel was the youngest son of Maurice, a butcher-grazier, and Georgine, themselves children of the village butcher and grocer. When he was a baby, the family moved to Pavilly, north of Rouen, and later to the town of Mantes-la-Jolie on the Seine. He trained at the Lycée Corneille in Rouen, and when he left school at 16, he apprenticed with the pastry chef-caterer Kléber Alix in Mantes. There is no better training for a chef than pastry, which teaches routine, precision and delicacy. He passed his exams at the top of his class, just as he would win the prestigious Meilleur Ouvrier de France en Pâtisserie award in 1958 as the youngest candidate that year.
The apprenticeship over, and after more classical French cooking in a former coaching inn not far from Dieppe, Guérard spent his military service in the Navy in Cherbourg. He was now ready for an assault on Paris, first at the Hôtel Meurice and then, as pastry chef, at the Hôtel de Crillon, before moving to the Paris Lido, a stormy mix of burlesque and fine dining on the Champs-Élysées.
Guérard’s parents were concerned that he had not yet established himself in an owner-occupied business in the family tradition. In 1965, his response was to buy from the bankruptcy trustee a run-down bistro, Le Pot-au-Feu, in the industrial Parisian 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.
Its transformation from a local hangout to a destination for the capital’s wealthy was rapid, with a client list quickly growing, and bookings had to be made months in advance. The trendy French guide Gault-Millau described Le Pot-au-Feu as “the best suburban bistro in the world”. It was awarded a Michelin star in 1967 and two stars in 1969, despite its modest surroundings.
But a life of constant activity – cooking in his own restaurant, advising on menus at the fashionable nightclub Régine’s, sleeping a maximum of three hours a night – was turned upside down by two events: his meeting with Christine in 1972 and the forced purchase of his Pot-au-Feu to pave a driveway.
Christine was the daughter of Adrien Barthélémy, the post-war founder of a chain of spas who had put her in charge of Eugénie-les-Bains, in a little-known corner of France. Her meeting with Guérard, his loss of premises, their inability to find a replacement in Paris, was a series of happy coincidences that led to him taking over the kitchens at Eugénie in 1974.
He never looked back, concentrating the rest of his career on developing this resource. Its closure for business during the winter months gave him some freedom for other ventures, whether it was working on his books, opening a shop across from Fauchon in Paris or at Bloomingdale’s in New York, advising Régine on expansion outside France, or buying the nearby Château de Bachen and developing its vineyard.
Since 1977, Eugénie had three stars in the Michelin Guide and Guérard’s influence on French restaurants was immeasurable.
He exemplified the particularities of nouvelle cuisine: table service under silver domes; the chef-owner who treats his customers as well as his cutting board; the emphasis on quick cooking; the delight in sweet-and-sour combinations. His close friendships with like-minded chefs, and their gift for the art itself, made the movement unstoppable.
Christine died in 2017. He is survived by two daughters, Éléonore and Adeline.