With his surname, Michel Roux Jnr must have felt tremendous pressure when he stepped into new kitchens as he was working his way up the culinary ladder. He is the son of Albert Roux and nephew of Michel Roux – the French brothers who took a chance on Britain back when it was in the culinary dark ages, by opening Le Gavroche in London in 1967.
In 1982, it became the first restaurant in Britain to receive three Michelin stars (it now has two). In 1972, they opened a second fine-dining restaurant, The Waterside Inn, in Bray, Berkshire, which has maintained its three-star rating since 1985.
Today, the restaurants are in the hands of the second generation: Michel Roux Jnr, at Le Gavroche, and Alain Roux (son of Michel Roux Snr), at The Waterside Inn.
In the introduction to Le Gavroche Cookbook (2001), Roux Jnr writes, “When Le Gavroche opened, I was seven years old. How could I have guessed that more than thirty years later our family’s restaurant would still be counted among the best in Britain – or that I would be running the show? […] So many restaurants, especially in our major cities, seem to explode on to the scene in a burst of public relations hype, then enjoy a period when they are in vogue and can do no wrong, only to fade away sadly before they have reached even their fifth anniversary.”
Later in the book he reminisces, “Those of you who were around in the barren culinary years of the sixties will recall that finding a good restaurant [in Britain] was difficult: oversized vegetables, poorly stored fish and unimaginative cuts of meat were the order of the day – often the fault of the wholesalers who supplied the restaurant. Albert and Michel decided to go to the markets themselves, setting off at four in the morning three times a week, and sometimes I went, too […] Buying from the market was the only way to guarantee the freshness of the fish; demand in Britain was so low that much of the fish went to buyers on the Continent […] In order to get the cuts of meat they wanted, the brothers did much of their own butchery […] Delicacies such as veal kidneys were next to impossible to come by – but they were equally difficult to sell in the restaurant; in the late sixties and early seventies people didn’t expect to find offal in a restaurant of this calibre.
“Albert and Michel continued visiting the markets for several years and, with their single-minded approach to quality, gradually persuaded their suppliers to change their attitude towards chefs. Some of these same suppliers are still selling to Le Gavroche 30 years later.”
The food culture in Britain has changed tremendously since then, and Roux Jnr writes that Le Gavroche has modified and modernised, too – to an extent. “In my father’s day, the soufflé Suissesse, for example, was served as a double portion with lashings of cream. I serve a single portion and don’t reduce the cream so much, so it is not quite as heavy. It is the same dish, but modified to the modern palate […] However, we also serve some completely classic dishes, such as the navarin of lamb, which hasn’t changed in any way.”
Although the book was published 18 years ago, many of the recipes still seem modern: hot monkfish liver with creamed leeks and red wine vinegar; green tomato tart with caramel ice cream; and seared peppered tuna with caviar vinaigrette. Other dishes are more classic: jellied eels with wine and herbs; oxtail terrine with horseradish cream; Breton fish and lobster stew; duck pot-au-feu with stuffed cabbage; roast Bresse pigeon with fresh peas; and veal kidneys in creamy three mustard sauce.
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