Celebrated French chef believed that you could lose weight and still eat well, and Michelin agreed
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.
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 , “evasive action had to be taken.”
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” 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 toldin 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.
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 . 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.
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.
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