Born March 27th, 1933
Died August 19th, 2024
Michel Guérard, a driving force behind the 1960s culinary movement known as nouvelle cuisine and the creator of the enormously influential “slimming cuisine” at his 19th-century spa in Eugénie-les-Bains, France, has died aged 91.
Guérard was already recognised as one of the most daring and innovative chefs in France in 1974, when he took over Les Prés d’Eugénie, one of the smaller, less developed properties in a chain owned by the family of his wife, Christine. Together, the couple turned the spa into a big tourist destination, despite its remote location in southwestern France, in large part because of what Guérard called “cuisine minceur”, a low-fat, no-starch, no-sugar, low-calorie application of nouvelle cuisine. (Guests could also go for the full-fat, lavish experience on the other half of the menu if they liked.)
His own efforts to lose weight at the spa, and his disgust with traditional diet dishes, inspired him to develop dishes that relied on vegetable purées combined with low-calorie fromage blanc for sauce instead of butter and cream. Rather than sautéing in oil or butter, he steamed fish and meats in sealed containers with herbs to infuse and retain flavour.
He regarded traditional spa cuisine, which was imposed on him when he first visited Eugénie and needed to lose 15lb, as additional pain for patients already struggling with the rigours of weight-loss regimens. “The punishment was too severe to be borne,” he wrote in Michel Guérard’s Cuisine Minceur (1976), “evasive action had to be taken.”
To put pleasure back into the equation, he created dishes such as mousseline of crayfish with watercress sauce, leg of milk-fed lamb cooked in wild hay, and a 60-calorie pear soufflé “as light and fragrant as hickory smoke,” in the words of Washington Post food writer William Rice.
Without sacrificing flavour, Guérard drastically pared down calorie counts. “The point of slimming cuisine is that it is delicious,” he told the website European Food in 2017. “You don’t feel like you’re making a sacrifice. Moreover, you eat what you need. You are not starved.”
His growing reputation propelled him to the cover of the European edition of Time in 1976, under the headline “The New Gourmet Law: Hold the Butter”
He pulled off the neat trick of slimming down the veal stew known as blanquette de veau from the usual 1,000 calories to a slender 250 by eliminating butter, cream and egg yolks. Instead, he steamed the veal with carrots, cress, celery root and mushrooms and then whipped up a low-calorie béarnaise sauce using the cooking liquid and fromage blanc.
“My attitude towards food did not make sense to chefs at the time,” he told Time magazine in 2017. “I was at worst an outcast and at best a crazy cook.”
The sceptics soon came around. Paul Bocuse, after harbouring doubts, was quoted as calling Guérard “the most imaginative of us all” in a 1975 profile in the New Yorker. Daniel Boulud told Bloomberg.com in 2016: “Out of all the chefs I ever worked with, Guérard had the greatest sensibility and was the most poetic. The way he engaged his cooks always led us toward a kind of creativity that was never conventional.”
Guérard’s cookbook, published in France as La Grande Cuisine Minceur, became a bestseller there, and his growing reputation propelled him to the cover of the European edition of Time in 1976, under the headline “The New Gourmet Law: Hold the Butter”. A year later, the Michelin Guide awarded Les Prés d’Eugénie three stars, a rating the spa has maintained ever since.
Michel Etienne Robert-Guérard was born on March 27th, 1933, in Vétheuil, northwest of Paris, and grew up after the age of six in Pavilly, outside Rouen, where his parents, Maurice and Georgine (Boulanger) Robert-Guérard, ran a butcher shop. He attended the Lycée Pierre Corneille, a secondary school in Rouen, but left at 16 to become an apprentice pastry chef under a prestigious caterer, Kléber Alix, in Mantes-la-Jolie.
After completing his military service in the navy, which he spent cooking for an officers’ mess in Cherbourg, he found work as a pastry chef at the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris and in 1958 passed the gruelling series of tests required for the title meilleur ouvrier de France (finest craftsman in France). At the time he was the youngest chef to have received that honour. Soon after, he left the Crillon to work at Le Lido, a splashy cabaret and restaurant frequented by international celebrities.
In 1965 Guérard bought a tiny rundown bistro, which he renamed the Pot-au-Feu, in Asnières-sur-Seine, just outside Paris. The neighbourhood was dodgy. In the early days, he sold sandwiches to workers at a nearby rivet factory. The clientele included a fair share of gangsters.
He remained at the stove well into his 80s, constantly revisiting and revising his menus
Encouraged by his friend Jean Delaveyne, a wildly inventive chef who inspired a number of nouvelle cuisine chefs, he created what he called an “alchemist’s laboratory”. He scandalised critics by pouring a vinaigrette over foie gras in his signature salade gourmande, much copied and popularly known as “crazy salad”. Saltwater fish steamed under seaweed, later a feature at Eugénie-les-Bains, also originated at the Pot-au-Feu. “I was never satisfied until I had an answer to everything,” he told the New Yorker in 1975. “I always asked myself: Why am I doing this and that? Once I knew, there seemed no point in more reading. I closed all the cookbooks. I crossed the border and went my own way.”
The Pot-au-Feu was awarded a Michelin star two years after opening and a second star in 1971. The Gault-Millau guide called it “the best suburban bistro in the world”.
A road-widening project forced the restaurant to close in 1974; in the meantime, Guérard had met and married Christine Barthélémy, who whisked him away to Eugénie-les-Bains.
Guérard undertook a number of side ventures over the course of his career. In the late 1960s, singer and nightclub impresario Régine Zylberberg invited him to run the kitchen at her Russian-themed cabaret Le Réginskaïa; she later brought him to New York to direct the kitchen at Régine’s. In the late 1970s he worked with the research and development department of Nestlé to develop frozen entrees, notably a fish version of the flaky almond pastry known as a pithivier and deluxe ice creams. He created a speciality food store, Le Comptoir Gourmand, opening branches in Paris and Lyon before setting up shop in Bloomingdale’s, in New York, in 1981.
Guérard was the author of La Cuisine Gourmande (1978) and Mémoire de la Cuisine Française (2020), a book based on a series of interviews conducted by Benoît Peeters. In 2013 he created a school, the Institut Michel Guérard, to provide training in the principles of healthy cooking. He remained at the stove well into his 80s, constantly revisiting and revising his menus. “When I’m brushing my teeth, when I’m driving my car,” he told Bloomberg, “I’m always thinking of new dishes.”
Christine died in 2017. He is survived by his daughters, Eléonore and Adeline, who run the family spa business, and three grandchildren.