Great-grandson to reinvent iconic three-star French restaurant
OUCHES, France: The Troisgros restaurant, a veritable shrine to France’s haute cuisine, is pulling out of the town it put on the map thanks to the three Michelin stars it has boasted since 1968.
The move out of the central town of Roanne to a rural village just eight kilometres away may seem modest, but to the Troisgros dynasty it is a sea change.
“It’s not an uprooting,” said Michel Troisgros, 58, who took over the reins in 1996. “On the contrary, we are putting down new roots.”
For Michel’s 30-year-old son Cesar, the great-grandson of the restaurant’s founder who is being groomed to head the new kitchen, Saturday’s move is nothing short of a rite of passage.
“He will be another man in another place,” said Michel, whose father Pierre and uncle Jean helped start the nouvelle cuisine craze in the 1960s. But Cesar “is not an heir like I was,” Michel said, praising his son’s ‘effervescent creative powers’.
“He’ll run a kitchen operation of his own conception.” Cesar, the second of Michel’s three children, admitted: “I feel more at ease than I did in Roanne in a kitchen with more than 80 years of history.”
The bespectacled young man with a short-cropped beard like his father’s began his training at the Paul Bocuse Institute along with his younger brother Leo.
After stints with top chefs Michel Rostang in Paris, the Roca brothers in Spain and Thomas Keller in California, Cesar started work at the family restaurant six years ago.
“I’m really proud of what my parents achieved and... what my grandparents did,” he said. “It’s not easy for me, because I tell myself that if I can’t do things just as well I shouldn’t do them at all.” — AFP