78 The EconomistMarch 28th 2020
T
he sight was so awful that Michel Roux, then only in his 20s
and new to London, quickly turned his face away. Through the
window of the Lyons Corner House near Marble Arch he could see
people eating British peas. The peas were fluorescent, big as quails’
eggs. And there was worse: on each side-plate a piece of sliced
bread, limp as a handkerchief and bleached frighteningly white.
He realised then that he had come to a land that was still in the culi-
nary Dark Ages. And it was all Albert’s fault.
His older brother had persuaded him to come. He had been
working as a chef in London for eight years, and now had plans.
Those eventually led to the founding of two restaurants, Le Gav-
roche in Chelsea and the Waterside Inn at Bray in Berkshire, which
transformed fine dining and the whole food scene in Britain. Each
venue earned three Michelin stars, something the country had
never experienced before. But as Michel stood aghast in the street
that day, he was torn between revolutionary fervour and despair.
Despite the fact that Albert was dark, dumpy and short, and he
was tall, fair and much handsomer, he had always looked up to
him, so to speak. If Albert had been a fireman, he would have been
a fireman too. As it was, Albert went young to be apprenticed to a
pastry-chef, so at 14 he did the same. There at last he surpassed his
brother, becoming so good at pastries and desserts that for many
years he held the title of Best Pastrycook in France. No one could
make an omelette soufflé Rothschild (succulent with apricots, per-
fumed with Cointreau, his tour de force when he was Cécile de
Rothschild’s chef for nearly six years), the way he could. (Albert
was more of a sauce man.) They bickered all the time, doing a tv
cookery show later in which they flirted with filleting each other,
but they made a good team; so in 1967 they bought their 90-seaterrestaurant in Lower Sloane Street and shook up London together.
What they offered was classic French-restaurant cuisine, short
menus cooked freshà la minute; not, as was the custom even in
high-class British restaurants then, dishes reheated from frozen or
cooked far in advance. Every ingredient was fresh too, often
sourced from French suppliers whom they knew as friends. (Later,
they ordered in almost everything from Rungis market in Paris.) As
the business expanded, first with the Waterside Inn, then with two
smaller restaurants in London, then with more down-market eat-
eries that plain folk could almost afford, the same philosophy was
applied to all of them, and a host of eager young British chefs were
trained, some with Roux Scholarships, to run them.
All this made Michel enormously proud, yet it was hardly what
he had expected. He had wavered about being a chef. With his looks
and his deep voice—in his kitchen, he never needed a micro-
phone—he might have made an opera singer. But love of food ran
deep. Growing up as the son of a charcutier, he had learned wheth-
er it was Monday or Tuesday from the smell of boudin or andouil-
lettes on the stairs; and his earliest memory was of beating up egg
yolks which, as if by magic, thickened in the hot stock into sauce
for his mother’s blanquette of veal. To run just one restaurant with
Albert would have been good enough. And it was hard work: so
hard that he was hardly ever at home, and his first wife divorced
him. Though he knew almost no English, he still had to take his
turn at front-of-house while Albert was manning the stove. They
cooked and played host in alternate weeks, knowing well that if
they tried to share service there might be blood.
Both of them came up with ideas, but his strength lay in details.
Precision and patience were a pastrycook’s skills. It mattered to
him, for instance, that commis waiters should not talk to the cus-
tomers and that diners should wear ties (he almost refused entry to
the Rolling Stones when they turned up without them). Every in-
gredient had its right place, too, and as each arrived he would taste
it, unseasoned, to judge exactly where it might sit within a dish.
When he and Albert produced cookery books, spreading the revo-
lution to ordinary British kitchens, he, being a perfectionist, wrote
the words, just as on their cookery shows he was the suave and par-
ticular main presenter. And in 1986 it made sense to split their in-
terests, so that while his brother went bustling after new business
he departed for Bray, to run the whitewashed former pub on the
Thames they had opened a decade before.
There, as the Waterside Inn reinforced its reputation (and kept
its stars) with quenelles de brochet and his own sublimetarte Tatin,
he could make a public virtue of being classic and old-fashioned.
The dining rooms were padded deep with chintz. His wine cellar
was exclusively French, for he loved his bordeaux and burgundies
too well to stray—going to Bordeaux every year to taste the en pri-
meurvintage, and cultivating his own vineyard at his villa near
Saint-Tropez. Nouvelle cuisine passed him by: on his menus butter
featured everywhere, irreplaceable and indispensable. And bad
manners never ceased to infuriate him. The new generation of ce-
lebrity chefs struck him as sadly insecure, even unbalanced, using
dreadful words and treating their underlings like dirt. He himself
was kind to his chefs, and his kitchen was happy. He did not need
to blanch their heads in boiling water to make sure he kept them.
Had Britain really changed, then, since his arrival? He some-
times wondered. By 2020 London could boast three three-star Mi-
chelin restaurants—but Paris had ten. Britain now offered cuisines
from all over the world, but too many new dishes were merely visu-
al, picnic stuff that lacked depth. The best of British cooking was
still the afternoon tea, with treacle tart and sponge cake and scones
with jam and cream, which he and Albert both loved greedily and
which had persuaded them, in the beginning, that there was hope
to be found somewhere. But those peas, alas, were not yet right.
They had to be fresh-shelled, to start with; cooked in butter, never
water; and then, preferably, cut one by one in half before they
could ever grace a plate. 7Michel Roux, transformer with his brother of the British
restaurant scene, died on March 11th, aged 78Cooking with Albert
Obituary Michel Roux