Michel Roux
The Gallic chef whose tongue was as sharp as his knives and who also revolutionised Britain’s restaurants
MICHEL Roux, the chef who has died aged 78, championed the cause of excellence in English restaurant cooking for half a century; with his brother Albert, he was responsible for elevating the national reputation for food which, when the pair of them arrived in London in 1967 to open Le Gavroche, was nothing short of abysmal.
The restaurant, which became synonymous with the name of Michel Roux, was the Waterside Inn at Bray. It was the second restaurant in Britain to achieve three Michelin stars, in 1985 — the first was Le Gavroche, in 1982 — and maintains them to this day.
The achievement of Michel and Albert was not limited to the elite domain of ultra-sophisticated (and ultra-expensive) restaurant cooking. The Roux culinary empire included several cheaper restaurants — notably Gavvers and Roux’ll Britannia — as well as shops, food products and private catering services.
Besides Le Gavroche and the Waterside, another Roux flagship was London’s most upmarket “deli”, a combined butcher’s, patisserie, grocer and traiteur, Boucherie Lamartine, in Pimlico. It sold meat and vegetables flown in directly from the markets of France, and customers could buy fresh foie gras by the pound over the counter without having placed an order.
While the terrier-like Albert had a strong head for business, and relished the role of tough negotiator for the Roux empire, Michel always liked to appear well-groomed and dapper, and to cultivate the reputation of bon viveur. He drank “one or two bottles of wine a day” for most of his life, and had an unquenchable appetite for champagne.
The two brothers took to television. In their first series, The Roux Brothers (1988), Michel and Albert found a remarkable amount to disagree about, considering that they held the joint title of Britain’s greatest gastronomic gurus. The squabbling — for the most part affectionate — over small matters of culinary technique, earned them the epithet “the Row Brothers”, but intense Gallic bickering made for excellent television. Like Albert, Michel was an exacting taskmaster who demanded perfection from his staff — and sometimes, it seemed, a little more.
This approach enabled the Rouxs to pioneer, almost single-handedly, a revolution in the standards of raw materials available to restaurateurs. From the start at Le Gavroche they refused to accept the stale fish, bruised fruit and poorly butchered meat which other restaurateurs allowed into their kitchens. Instead they chose a handful of suppliers and set out to re-educate them where necessary.
Perhaps Michel’s greatest contribution to British cooking was that he impressed on a new generation of young chefs his own high standards and unmatched knowledge. They, in turn, passed on the philosophy of excellence to their sous-chefs.
Michel Andre Roux was born on April 19, 1941, in Charolles, Burgundy, the son of a charcutier. At the age of 14 he became, like his brother before him, an apprentice patissier, at the Patisserie Loyal in Paris. It was an aspect of cooking at which he excelled, even beyond his brother, and which remained an abiding passion throughout his life.
He spent two years as a pastry cook at the British Embassy in Paris, and was then a commis chef with Cecile de Rothschild for a year, in 1959, before military service intervened (part of which was spent in Algeria).
Michel Roux married his Australian wife Robyn in 1984; she died in 2017. He is survived by two daughters and a son from a previous marriage.
Michel Roux died on March 12, 2020.