Chef credited with smears, splodges of jus and dollops of foam
MICHEL GUERARD: 1933 – 2024
Michel Guerard, who has died aged 91, was, with Roger Verge, Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros, one of the founding fathers of nouvelle cuisine, the culinary movement that marked a radical shift towards lighter, more delicately flavoured French cooking, breaking away from the heavy, rich sauces of the traditional Escoffier canon.
Michel Guerard (centre) with staff tasting food in the hotel restaurant Les Pres d’Eugenie in Eugenie-Les-Bains, France, 2011.Credit: Getty Images
Guerard was known in particular for developing a sort of sub-genre of the movement known as cuisine minceur – literally “slimming cooking” – essentially consisting of less calorific versions of nouvelle cuisine dishes, and he went on to become one of the most influential and most copied of France’s nouvelle cuisine chefs.
It was in the early 1970s that Guerard, inspired by his bride-to-be, Christine, to lose a few kilograms, created his slimming take on contemporary French fine cooking – replacing butter, cream and oil-rich sauces with less artery-clogging fromage blanc, fresh concentrated stocks and vegetable coulis.
He was also the first leading French chef to cook vegetables al dente, and as cookery programs took off on the world’s televisions, he was credited (or blamed) for the intensely flavoured smears, splodges of jus, and dollops of foam beloved of aspirant television chefs.
Les speciales de Gillardeau avec leur chantilly au cafe vert, an oyster dish by Michel Guerard. Credit: Getty Images
In 1974, Guerard and Christine arrived in the village of Eugenie-les-Bains in the Landes department of south-west France and began renovating an ailing spa resort which was owned by Guerard’s father-in-law. As the spa sought to attract health-conscious Parisians anxious to lose a few kilos, Guerard’s cuisine minceur was just the ticket.
A reviewer who visited his restaurant, Les Pres d’Eugenie, in 2014 was astonished that a lunch consisting of carpaccio of langoustines, followed by roasted milk-fed lamb and peach melba came in at under 630 calories (2636 kilojoules), while crab with grapefruit, roasted pigeon and wild strawberries “Miss Dior” came to just 515 calories.
As nouvelle cuisine went mainstream, with its doctrine of terroir and delicate flavours, it tended to lose its revolutionary edge under consumer pressure. Portions grew a little bigger and butter crept back. Guerard stuck to his principles and in 2014 relaunched his crusade, publishing Eat Well and Stay Slim: The Essential Cuisine Minceur, and opened a school at his spa where practising chefs could learn the secrets of terrines mousseuses de champignons and blancs de volailles farcis.
His recipes, Guerard maintained, were no more expensive than old-fashioned French cooking: “They don’t cost more than meals you buy in the shops. They are just made differently.” And he rebutted complaints that portions were too small: “Our helpings are not really small. It is just that we put less fat, salt and sugar into the dishes.”
“The French do not want to choose between health and pleasure: they want both at the same time,” he explained. “My aim, which is valid in every country where obesity is rocketing, is to get the authorities to teach kids how to eat at the same time as they are being taught to read and write.”
Michel Guerard receives the Medal of Merit in front of author Jean Ferniot and actress Catherine Deneuve, 1980. Credit: Getty Images
In 1977 Les Pres d’Eugenie won three Michelin stars. It has retained them to the present day, and by the time of Guerard’s death it was one of the longest-running Michelin-starred restaurants in the world.
Michel Robert-Guerard was born on March 27, 1933, in the northern Paris suburb of Vetheuil, the son of a butcher who raised his own beef. After the German invasion of 1940, he was brought up just outside Rouen with his grandmother and then his mother.
Watching his grandmother bake pastry inspired him to become an apprentice, aged 14, at Kleber Alix’s patisserie in Mantes-la-Jolie, west of Paris. He then learned “palace cuisine” at the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, becoming the restaurant’s head pastry chef aged 25. He also worked at Le Lido and Maxim’s.
Michel Guérard in his restaurant ‘Pot-au-Feu’ in Asnière, 1974,Credit: Getty Images
An early influence was Jean Delaveyne, for whom Guerard worked for a time at Camellia, his restaurant in Bougival in the Île-de-France region. Delaveyne was famous for saying chefs should not use Escoffier as a straitjacket – a lesson Guerard took to heart when he opened his first restaurant, Pot-au-Feu, in the Parisian suburb of Asnieres in the early 1960s.
It was there that he adapted classical French cooking, making it cleaner and lighter on the palate. Gourmets flocked to Pot-au-Feu, and by the time he moved to Les Pres d’Eugenie, after his marriage in 1972 to Christine Barthelemy – daughter of the founder of the Biotherm skincare company and owner of a chain of spas and hotels – he had won two Michelin stars.
In February 1976, he was featured in a cartoon on the cover of Time magazine with the tagline “The new gourmet law: hold the butter.”
Guerard trained and inspired generations of leading chefs, among them Helene Darroze of the Connaught, Alain Ducasse of the Dorchester and Andrew Fairlie of the Gleneagles Hotel.
Restaurant Michel Guérard, Eugénie-les-Bains, 2023.
The success of his restaurant enabled Guerard and Christine to expand their estate round Eugenie-les-Bains to include a 16-hectare farm, vineyards and several more spas and hotels.
Michel Guerard’s wife, Christine, died in 2017. Their two daughters survive him.
The Telegraph, London
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