Adieu to Le Gavroche: British cuisine and the Rouxs

Some time in the early 1960s, shortly after arriving in London, Michel Roux looked into the steamy windows of Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch and saw, for the first time in his life, a pile of processed peas. Unlike the (apocryphal) story of Peter Mandelson on the stump for Labour in Hartlepool in 1992, Roux did not mistake it for “the avocado mousse”. “Like a witness to a terrible atrocity,” Michel later wrote, “I told myself I had to put this out of my mind as quickly as possible.”

When they opened Le Gavroche – “The Urchin’” — in Lower Sloane Street in 1967, the mission of the Roux Brothers, Michel and Albert, was to bring to Britain “the understanding and love of food”, as Michel later put it, and “play an educative role in developing British taste”. At this time, he thought, Britain was “a land of culinary philistines”. The brothers’ joint aim was “to give good value for money”, and most of all, “to make people happy”. “That is what it is all about.” They are judged by many to have succeeded. According to Albert, in 1988, “You might say that if it was a desert when we started, then now …it is at least an oasis.”

Co-founder Albert Roux and team outside Le Gavroche

To say the Roux Brothers changed a nation’s standards of taste is a bold claim: but they were undoubtedly the spearhead of a movement that did, slowly, improve the nation’s appreciation of good food. They had assistance, of course, from prophets crying in the wilderness such as Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson. Italian, Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern and other previously exotic food, once the real McCoy started to be served, rather than a weak British simulacrum of it, enhanced and expanded our national palate further.

The Rouxs also trained several generations of innovative, ambitious and richly talented chefs. Amongst around a thousand of them were Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing, the last of whom called them “the godfathers of British haute cuisine”. Ramsay remembered that “the energy needed to work there was immense, but the results were phenomenal”. Marco Pierre White “was inspired by the honesty, the attention to detail, the controlled extravagance that I found at Gavroche”. Another graduate said: “Nothing short of perfection was good enough.”

Chefs now had the cachet and the drawing power, rather than slick front of house performers like Peter Langan at his Brasserie. And could they cook. Le Gavroche, run by Albert Roux from 1972, was the first British restaurant to win one, then two, then three Michelin stars; in 1974, 1977 and 1982. Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn, opened in 1972, won the same hat-trick in 1974, 1977 and 1985 – and went on to become the first restaurant outside of France to maintain three Michelin stars for 25 consecutive years.

The Waterside Inn on the River Thames at Bray in Berkshire

It was a rising tide. In 2004 three Michelin stars were awarded to three British restaurants, for the first time ever: Michel Roux’s Waterside Inn, “Gordon Ramsay”, and The Fat Duck (the food laboratory of British cooking’s very own Professor Branestawm, the culinary genius Heston Blumenthal).

Restaurants like these are, naturally, out of the reach of most of the population. But just as high fashions in time filter down from the catwalks of Paris and Milan to the British high street, so too trends in cooking at the high end of the restaurant business filter down, not just to smaller, just about affordable restaurants, but also, importantly, to our tables at home. The Gavroche gold standards for quality of ingredients and how they are cooked have had a beneficial effect on British cooking and eating habits in general — certainly amongst the middle class.

The Rouxs and the other post-war pioneers had, for them, the advantage that they were starting from a subterranean base. The sheer godawfulness of British food has become part of our national myth, like Dunkirk, Carry On films and losing on penalties. Somehow almost comforting, a scrappy defiance in the face of superior odds — in this case, of the culinary variety.

Of course, the privations of the Depression and then food rationing, in force from 1940 to 1954 (that is not a typo), had an inescapably deleterious effect, in the first place on the availability and affordability of any nutritious food; in the second, on the availability of enjoyable as well as nutritious food. The grisly bill of fare of powdered egg, ersatz coffee and the playfully oxymoronic “snoek piquante” (snoek is a South African fish of overpowering tastelessness) is quite rightly regarded as the nadir of our nation’s anti-gastronomy career. But then, rationing over, we reverted to type. And now there was no excuse.

TENTERDEN, ENGLAND – JULY 23, 2021: A British food ration coupon book. Introduced in 1940 during the Second World War, rationing was ended in 1954.

The stale roll call of national shame from the mid-1950s onwards is a familiar one. Bottled mayonnaise and “salad cream”, pre-ground sawdust calling itself pepper, packet soups, gravy cubes, condensed milk (which jettisoned most of the nutrients), Bird’s custard, fruitless jam, white cardboard sliced bread (at that time un-fortified by added vitamins), spam, Fray Bentos pies, cold tongue, rubber chicken and plastic cheese. And, as Monty Pythion acknowledged, more spam. Not forgetting – how could we, if we lived through those times? – vegetables boiled, with extreme prejudice, for several hours. The medical advice to carefully chew one’s food was mostly redundant where our meat was concerned. In large part indigestible gristle, you could chew it for as long as you liked with no effect on it whatsoever, until you gave up and spat it into the stove.

This woeful state of affairs was, naturally, most apparent to first time visitors and returning ex-pats. In 1954 the distinguished cookery writer Claudia Roden emigrated from Egypt. “I was shocked when I arrived here, because the food was so bad. People in Britain didn’t talk about food; it was a very touchy subject.” Michel Roux agreed. “You didn’t talk about cooks or food, just like you didn’t talk about sex.”

And so, as Don Corleone asked of the heads of the five families, “How did things ever get so far?” In the view of most food historians British cooking in the 18th and early 19th centuries was something of a golden age. Unfussy, well-cooked, well-seasoned food. In which flavour, above all, was important. That sounds rather obvious: it wasn’t obvious to the mid-Victorians.

After the defeat of Napoleon – of course the wars against him had curtailed the import of foreign foodstuffs – the capitulation to a British version of French, or at least, Franglais cooking began to gather pace, if not quality. Before long, we began to suffer from something of an inferiority complex. Or rather, un complexe d’infériorité. Most of the technical cooking terms and dishes’ names were in French — as they still are. As with Italian nomenclature in music, it was a constant slap in the face reminding the British who invented all this stuff in the first place. The very word “cuisine”, at least if considered in a certain mood, leaves a sour aftertaste of smug, rosbif-baiting condescension.

What’s worse, during the 19th century French cooking was without doubt superior to our own — thanks in part to the emergence of the great Antonin Carême, the inventor of grande cuisine, who in the early 1800s codified the “mother sauces”. These – Béchamel, Velouté, Espagnole and Hollandaise — though much adapted, are still alive and well in the kitchens of Michel Jr and Alain Roux, the dynasty’s second generation, today. (“Succession” here was straightforward: Michel Jr, son of Albert, took over Le Gavroche. Alain, son of Michel, took over the Waterside Inn.)

Portrait of Antonin Carême

The problem was that Carême was also flashy. In the hands of admiring charlatans a meretricious ostentation in food followed, and this fussiness and pretentiousness maintained a presence in high level cooking for some considerable time. “Presentation”, not to say “display” became over-prized. And over-priced. French cooks – unengaged after their aristocratic employers lost their heads or fled the country, centime-less, after the Revolution — brought the new idea of the “restaurant” to prominence; many came to set up shop in England. The dastardly machinations involved in trying to lure the chef of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, Anatole, to kitchens new, amply demonstrates how long this obeisance to French cookery lasted.

Perhaps as a reaction to the more egregious tendencies in showy-offy,  indulgent, Frenchified food for the upper classes, mid-Victorian bourgeois cooking decided to go in the opposite direction. No frills; and no flavour either. The biggest influence in this baby-with-bathwater sluicing culinary approach, lapped up by many thousands of domestic cooks, or their owners, in edition after edition, each blander than the last, was of course Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management.

Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management: The 1861 Classic

Published between 1859 and 1861, this was essentially a collection of Readers’ Letters, containing their favourite recipes.  Sharp scissors and adhesive paste, then as now, were an essential part of the cookery writer’s equipage. It’s a field where plagiarism is as rife as it is in the groves of Harvard.

Bluntly, the recipes Mrs Beeton curated were, on the whole, unimaginative and conservative. They are all perfectly nutritious; but dispiriting to wade through, in that little or no love and affection for food communicates itself to the reader. (It is only when discussing natural history that Isabella Beeton – then just 28 years old — comes alive on the page.) The dishes for the most part are insular and betray a seeming horror of strong flavours. The main exception was “chetneys” and other dishes derived from the Raj. With only a couple of exceptions they are the only recipes that use fresh garlic, of which Mrs Beeton greatly disapproved, owing to its strong smell. For her Mullagatawny Soup she recommends just one clove of garlic to be sautéd with six onions. A homeopathic approach — though to be fair, it is possible that the garlic cultivated in her day was more pungent than that eaten by most of us today.

The best of British cooking has, historically, always been strong on fish —  naturally, as nowhere in Great Britain is further than 75 miles from the sea — pies, puddings, and most of all roast or boiled meats. Apart from stuffing for birds, the joints of meat were generally un-mucked about with. So far so good. But from this came the besetting British sin of left-overs from the Sunday joint appearing pretty much every day for the rest of the week, in new but easily discernible guise.

Of course shepherds pie – to take just one example of a dish made up of left-over cooked meat — can be a fine meal. Even Albert Roux claimed to enjoy it, along with tomato ketchup. (And a dash of jus d’agneau in his case, mind). There’s no accounting for taste.  But until recently we British obsessively re-cooked left-over meat or served it cold with some perfunctory garnish – often squirted out of a plastic bottle — as a matter of course. This at the expense of “made-up dishes” — meat cooked from raw, such as any sort of casserole worth its salt.

Shepherds Pie

What’s more, some historians consider that the Joy of Cookery went the same way under Victorian management as did another activity, also previously considered enjoyable, that was also now unmentionable. To enjoy food — worse, to be seen and heard to do so — was considered rather shameful. Certainly vulgar and self-indulgent. For some time to come, cooking could only be discussed in functional terms. Put your apron on and think of England. As for children, they were given the gastronomic equivalent of a good clip round the ear by being served food carefully made devoid of any pleasurable sensation at all. When foreign visitors sat down at Victorian tables, their bouches were left unamused.

But it wasn’t just that we were insular, distrusting “filthy foreign muck, swimming in oil and reeking of garlic”. We simply did not have access to sufficient amounts of fresh, quality ingredients to be able to cook with variety, imagination and flair.

Great Britain is a small island. We were the first society to industrialise. Urbanisation and enclosures cut off what had been a predominantly rural working class from its traditional sources of food: smallholdings, or commons, on which to grow vegetables and keep animals.  Herded into filthy cramped urban tenements, with no time to cook, no equipment and little space to do so, and not enough money to buy good ingredients, not surprisingly misery and malnutrition were the results.

The Depression made food even scarcer for all but the richest members of society. “Bread and dripping” became a staple for large numbers of families of the unemployed. War-time rationing, in contrast, was a form of food redistribution. And what we ate, though lacking in much taste, was nutritious. What might now be called the “nanny state” added Vitamins A and D to margarine, and warned us to be sure to warm the teapot. There was “a war on”: Britain needed a fit, vigorous population, and got one. All sorts of health indices showed so.

Rationing actually became stricter between 1946 and 1948. (The unpublicised reason being that we needed to help feed the starving people of Europe, especially Germany.) But after these restrictions had fallen away in 1954, there would be no return to the status quo ante. A new era in British society — and in British food — had begun.

For one thing, fewer servants were employed. In the 1951 census, only 1.2% households admitted to having a servant. In the other 98.8% of homes the brunt of domestic activities, including maternal duties, therefore fell mostly to those who still called themselves “housewives”. Quite understandably, not having the time or inclination to cook elaborate meals, women often preferred short-cut cookery. All manner of “convenience foods”, often poured straight out of tins and jars rather than cooked from scratch, became for many the staple diet. Lazy, spiv-ish restaurateurs and hoteliers also took the line of least resistance.

But a rearguard action had now begun. The Good Food Guide – the TripAdvisor of its day — was founded in 1951. Passion for food started, softly, to express itself. In 1946 Elizabeth David, then aged 32, returned to England after living in Greece, France, Italy and Egypt. Her first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food, published in 1950, was more a lament for the past, and a dream for the future, than it was a practical cookbook. The ingredients she wrote about  so lovingly – olive oil, saffron, rosemary, wild marjoram, fresh basil, pimentos, aubergines, fresh olives, melons, figs and limes – were practically unknown in the UK except by repute, and almost certainly unavailable to buy.

First edition of ‘The Good Food Guide’

The killer blow for her favoured cuisine was the lack of garlic. In 1951, a bulb of it was the first ever “luxury item” chosen by a castaway on Desert Island Discs. But come the 1955 edition of A Book of Mediterranean Food and Elizabeth David was able to report that a good many of her ingredients could now be sourced, albeit mainly just in specialist establishments in Soho (no, not that kind). Very gradually, these previously exotic ingredients were made more widely available. At last, our vampire cuisine began to fade away and we could once again as a nation face ourselves in the mirror.

In Provincial French Cookery, published in 1960, Elizabeth David elegantly sums up the sort of cooking she was trying to promote in Britain: “This is sober, well-balanced, middle-class French cookery, carried out with care and skill, with due regard to the quality of the materials, but without extravagance or pretension.” French chefs compete for innovation by inventing “new dishes based on the old ones but still using the essential ingredients”. From the world of haute cuisine, this was the exact same mission the Roux Brothers would pursue too, albeit with greater complexity.

Albert and Michel were born in Saône-et-Loire, a department in the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region. Their father was a charcutier; as teenagers they trained as patissiers. Albert, born in 1935, arrived in England in the early Fifties; Michel, six years younger, joined him here early in the next decade. Both worked as private chefs in the houses of wealthy and exacting English clients. In 1967 they borrowed £3,000 from one of them to open Le Gavroche in Lower Sloane Street. In 1981 it relocated to Upper Brook Street, Mayfair. The restaurant went on to become, according to its own website today, “the last bastion in London of classically rich French haute cuisine”. Of course, its style has changed over the decades, in line, for example, with prevailing tastes for lighter, more buoyant sauces.

The brothers 1967

Their success was based on talent allied to sheer hard graft. As teenagers the brothers had worked 12 to 14 hours, Monday to Friday, and all of Saturday, including overnight, up to Sunday lunchtime. At Le Gavroche they worked even harder — and their staff did the same. Gladly. Once they’d moved on and recovered, before opening successful restaurants of their own, dozens of graduates said it was the making of them, learning in one year what would normally take three.

As with the writing of Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson and others, the driving force of Le Gavroche’s cuisine was the obvious one: ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Sourced by extremely early morning trips to Billingsgate for fish, Smithfield for meat, and Covent Garden for fruit and veg.  At Home with the Roux Brothers, published in 1988, gives a flavour of the expansive variety at which they aimed, right from the start: artichokes, fennel, chicory, courgettes, green cabbage, red and green peppers, shallots, sweetcorn, limes, goats cheese, Roquefort, fresh basil, chives, and Dijon mustard. As for more exotic ingredients not to be had in London for love or money, Albert’s wife Monique travelled to France to buy foie gras and smuggle it back in her car.

The Roux Brothers didn’t just teach British chefs how to cook French food; they taught them how to cook authentic British food too. Enthusiasts like Gary Rhodes promoted the forgotten glories of traditional British cooking, with the new twist that it was based on good quality ingredients cooked well. Fergus Henderson, at St John, was at the forefront of the “nose to tail” movement which rehabilitated the use of offal. (In the British culinary dark ages the less expensive varieties of offal – tripe, suet, trotters – had been seen as food for the poor.) Le Gavroche favoured seasonal food where possible; this has also, of course, become a beneficial trend. As has “slow food”. The Rouxs can’t and didn’t take credit for all these aspirations and welcome developments. But they did seed the ground, prime the pump, and helped to foster a native aspiration for good food.

In 2002 they were awarded honorary OBEs. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, observed: “Thirty years ago just the phrase ‘British cuisine’ would have led to a belly laugh. That we can now talk proudly of ‘British cuisine’ owes a huge amount to the outstanding work of the Roux brothers.”

It didn’t happen overnight. While the sort of newly-trendy up-market food featured in Lindsey Bareham’s and Simon Hopkinson’s The Prawn Cocktail Years – your Duck à l’orange, Sole Véronique, Steak Diane – can be remembered with a small tear of nostalgia, not much else about Sixties and Seventies food brings back cheerful memories. Pub grub, for one, in which, as a poem of James Fenton’s put it, “the chicken in the basket was an owl”. In Jake’s Thing Kingsley Amis wrote of “soggy tinned gooseberry flan, and coffee tasting of old coffeepots”. There were Vesta and boil-in-the-bag curries, Toast Toppers, insipid “spag bol” made of fried mince mixed in with a tin of chopped tomatoes, greasy spring rolls, the arrival of the dodgy doner kebab – the list goes on. (Johnnie Cradock’s hope, expressed live on early Seventies TV, that “may all your doughnuts turn out like Fanny’s” is not fondly recalled for strictly gastronomic reasons, one suspects.)

There would come Carême-style excess at the high end of the food chain too. Once exciting innovations like nouvelle cuisine could turn quickly into vieux chapeau. In Mike Leigh’s 1990 film Life Is Sweet the restaurant opened by Timothy Spall – The Regret Rien – offers Black Pudding and Camembert Soup, Liver in Lager, and Quails on a Bed of Spinach and Treacle. Abigail’s Restaurant.

The Goliath of the take-away market in Britain still awaits its David. Home cooking, at least for foodies such as the present author, has been far better served. While what we must now call Celebrity chefs, including the Rouxs, regularly publish cookbooks, sometimes one has the impression that they forget that we hard-pressed amateur kitchen bunglers don’t have a brigade of commis chefs at our beck and call, or all day to prepare the stock for that evening’s dinner. We may be foodies; we are not masochists. In the case of the more labour-intensive recipes, as the old Batman TV series used to warn us, better not try this at home.

As life seems to get busier and busier, time in shorter and shorter supply, this is where successive generations of professional cookery writers — and glamorous domestic divas — have come to the fore. In particular, variants on “good fast food”, “30 minute suppers” and so on — at their best — stress pukka, healthy ingredients, imaginatively combined, and simple but effective cooking techniques to produce flavoursome and satisfying food. This is in line with the Rouxs’ and Elizabeth David’s aspirations. Recent convenience food imports like harissa paste, for example, help here too.

Another, hugely welcome boon to British home cooking was the arrival of the many books explaining the techniques for the authentic preparation of “ethnic” food, which has helped vastly expand the previously insular British palate. They began, notably, with Claudia Roden’s Book of Middle Eastern Food, published in 1968, and Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which followed five years later.

It must be said that it’s easy, far too easy, to be snobbish about other people’s food, and generations of stuffy writers on the subject have decried what they saw as working class, or at least “unsophisticated” victuals, some of them American in origin. Frosties  – “They’re Grrrreat!” – hamburgers, hot dogs …  fish fingers, Bisto, HP Sauce … store-bought sweets, cakes, biscuits, rock cakes  … take your pick. But there is a crucial difference between slating someone’s choice of food for its flavour or texture; and being concerned, as a society, about nutrition.

Two shelves in an old grocery shop (1950s) with packets and tins. brand names, Atora, bisto, bournville, cadburys,

Just as a movement nudging us towards Good Food has slowly come down, de haut en bas, from the expensive restaurants of the Roux Brothers and others, to amateur enthusiasts; so too an insidious expansion of Bad Food, promoted by the forces of Big Food, has made its way into our eating habits from the other direction – the fast food swamp. Ultra-Processed Food is a scourge. Excessive, addictive levels of fat, salt and sugar have had, and are having, a seriously deleterious effect on the nation’s health, causing an obesity crisis — with all the concomitant health problems it brings in its wake, which the health service will have to cope with.

We seem to be re-running the worst days of the industrial revolution and the Slump. Working families lack the time, equipment, money and knowledge to cook at all, never mind cook healthy food. Diseases of the poor caused by malnutrition – such as rickets (triggered by a lack of Vitamin D), even scurvy (insufficient Vitamin C) — that most of us didn’t think could possibly ever return to Britain, have reappeared.

Of course this has nothing whatsoever to do with the subjects of this article. But it does have to do with its subject. Good food. In 1988, Albert Roux remarked: “We know it is not everybody who can afford to eat at Le Gavroche, but if you can educate people then that is the right kind of progress.” It is: but it needs a reboot. Chefs, restaurateurs and food writers are trying to help here. Jamie Oliver, Henry Dimbleby and Jack Monroe, to name but three. It will be a hard battle to win. How did things ever get so far?

Michel Roux Sr died in 2021, Albert Roux in 2020. As for Le Gavroche itself, which served its last meal on 13 January 2024, Michel Roux Jr’s stated reason for shutting the restaurant is simply that he needs a more favourable “work-life balance”. Now 63 years of age, good luck to him. If he was working half as hard as his father and uncle did when they were building the business, he deserves a chance to put his feet up. Other commercial ventures are still in play.

Michel Roux Jr’s Le Gavroche

The paperback edition of David Fleming’s book Hellfire: Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club will published by the History Press in May 2024.

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