French chef pioneered nouvelle cuisine, transforming fine dining

Long before waist-trimming recipes became a staple of the Western diet, Michel Guerard advocated a style of cooking that focused on freshness, lightness and flavour.

French chef Michel Guerard in the kitchen of his three-Michelin-starred restaurant Les Pres d’Eugenie in 2008. Picture: AFP

When Michel Guerard was five he decided he wanted to be a pastry chef. He would walk to the only restaurant in his village and sing until the chef opened the window and passed him a cake. (He never knew if it was meant as a reward or a plug for his mouth).

He grew up to become one of the first Gallic celebrity chefs and, long before waist-trimming recipes became a staple of the Western diet, championed a Japanese style of cooking that focused on freshness, lightness and flavour, with less strain on the belt than traditional French food.

He began developing his cuisine minceur (slimming cuisine) as No.2 to chef Jean Delaveyne at the ­Camellia restaurant in Bougival, Ile-de-France, in the early 1960s.

There he befriended young chefs Roger Verge, Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros, who, with him, would break the iron-clad rules of French haute cuisine, introduced by the cuisine bourgeoise in the 19th century, to pioneer la nouvelle cuisine, a culinary movement that scrapped heavy sauces thickened with flour, using butter sparingly and reducing portions.

Such a philosophy was the bedrock of his first restaurant, Pot-au-Feu, opened in the Paris suburb of Asnieres in 1965. The Gault-Millau guide, launched on the wave of the nouvelle cuisine, would call it “the best suburban bistro in the world” but when he first bought the place it was a gargotte serving sandwiches and rough red wine.

In what he liked to call his “alchemist’s laboratory” Guerard began experimenting with simple flavours and ingredients until he came up with signature dishes such as creamed eggs in a scooped-out eggshell with caviar and morel mushrooms with ­asparagus tips.

His reputation as a food doctor was cemented when in 1974, the year Pot-au-Feu closed, he took over the kitchen at Les Pres d’Eugenie, the spa hotel his wife ­Christine had inherited from her father, Adrien Barthelemy. Located in Eugenie-les-Bains, a stone village in the vast pine forest of Les Landes in the southwest of France – the home of foie gras – the area was a thermal spring known for its therapeutic waters and named after Napoleon III’s wife Eugenie, a regular.

Guerard wanted diet to be a part of the detox. “At the time, food for losing weight was just a plate of grated carrot, so banal,” he said. “I thought, ‘You can lose weight but also eat well.’ ” Everything, he said, should be natural: “I assume the product has a little more talent than I do.”

The low-fat, low-calorie and no-sugar menu employed tricks such as swapping rice for grated cauliflower and vegetable puree for butter or cream, and was composed with the help of nutritionists, biologists, sociologists and behavioural therapists. “I like to work with ingredients that can surprise you,” he said. “For instance, once I wanted to create something with oysters and I wondered for many months what taste or what other ingredient I could combine with their very particular flavour. Finally, I decided on green coffee.”

Michel Guerard in 2013 at his restaurant at Eugenie-les-Bains, southwestern France. Picture: Nicolas Tucat/AFP.

This was duck country and Guer­ard achieved fame for the bewildering number of recipes he produced for foie gras, which formed the backbone of his second book, published in 1978: La Cuisine Gourmande.

Guerard was awarded three ­Michelin stars in 1974, 1975 and 1977 and Les Pres d’Eugenie is one of the longest-running Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. Thanks to him, George Taber wrote in Time, which printed the chef on its 1976 cover: “No longer need a Frenchman dig his grave with a fork.”

Yet in more traditional quarters – the kind that liked their gravy rich and potatoes slathered in butter – his cuisine minceur caused a stir. “I was at worst an outcast,” he said, “at best a crazy cook.”

Les Pres d’Eugenie, however, soon attracted the creme of French, and global, society. “Tito, Yugoslavia’s dictator, spent a few days with us,” he said. “He had his own food taster and everything had to go through him – literally.

“We once had a delightful princess whose beloved greyhound had disappeared. Everyone looked for it for two days. Thanks to local police reinforcements we ended up finding the dog next to the lobster aquarium, which he was watching intensely. He was apparently used to eating this sort of food.”

Michel Etienne Robert-Guerard was born in 1933 in the Paris suburb of Vetheuil, the son of the butcher, Maurice, and his wife, Georgine (nee Boulanger). Michel’s childhood involved wading barefoot in streams to catch trout with his hands and Nazi interrogations about the whereabouts of his family cows.

In 1944 Guerard had his first great gastronomic experience: eating an elaborate Escoffier-style feast at a friend’s house that involved a strawberry-vanilla-praline bombe. Another inspiration was watching his grandmother bake pastry and, aged 14, he became an apprentice at Kleber Alix’s patisserie in Mantes-la-Jolie near Paris, where he was awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France – a title so important that it is bestowed by the president. He was the youngest chef to have received the honour.

He enlisted as a chef in the French navy and on demobilisation in 1952 mastered “palace cuisine” at Paris’s Hotel de Crillon, becoming head pastry chef aged 25, followed by a job at the Lido, a ­cabaret and restaurant frequented by international celebrities.

When nouvelle cuisine began to look a little stale, Guerard offered cuisine du terroir: earthy food offered in a suitably regional idiom and in a rustic ambience. By that stage the Guerards were operating several hotels and restaurants in Eugenie-les-Bains. He remained at the top of the food chain until the generation of Alain Ducasse, who trained in his kitchen, brought in a more eclectic “world gastronomy”.

At his Chateau de Bachen in the Adour valley, amid acres of grapevine and lemon verbena shrubs, he collected paintings. His wife died in 2017 and he is survived by two daughters, Eleonore and Adeline, who run the family spa business, the Chaine Thermale du Soleil.

Slim, silver-haired and sprightly in old age , Guerard was still cooking well into his 80s. “I see a restaurant as a theatre,” he said, “which cultivates taste and beauty, and the beauty of tastes.”

The Times