Perfectionist chef’s classic French cuisine revolutionised 1960s British food scene
Albert Roux, the chef, who has died aged 85, championed the cause of excellence in British restaurant cooking for half a century. With his brother Michel, he was responsible for elevating the national reputation for food, which, when the pair of them arrived in London in 1967, was nothing short of abysmal.
The restaurant that would become synonymous with the name of Albert Roux was Le Gavroche. It was the first in Britain to gain a Michelin star, in 1974, and the first to win three, in 1982. The second restaurant to achieve this distinction was The Waterside Inn at Bray, founded by both brothers but later run solely by Michel, who died last year.
Stout and terrier-like in comparison with his suave brother, Albert had a strong head for business, and it was usually he rather than Michel who negotiated deals for the Roux empire. Even after his notional retirement in the early 1990s, he was retained as a consultant by airlines and hotels all over the world.
The NHS sought his advice to improve hospital food in 1995, but as recently as 2015 he lamented: ‘‘We must not think that highquality hospital food is too difficult or expensive to achieve, but meetings, speeches and gimmicks do not work.’’
He was an exacting taskmaster who insisted on perfection, and sometimes, it seemed, a little more. When running the kitchens at Le Gavroche, he was known to stand with a plate that was ready for service, counting down from 10. If the right waiter had not collected the plate by the time he got to zero he would let go, and a souffle´ would go crashing to the ground.
This refusal to accept anything less than the best enabled the family to pioneer, almost single-handedly, a revolution in the standards of raw materials available to restaurateurs. From the start they refused to accept the stale fish, bruised fruit and poorly butchered meat that others allowed into their kitchens. Instead they chose a handful of suppliers and set out to re-educate them where necessary.
Perhaps his greatest contribution to British cooking was that he impressed on a new generation of young chefs – including Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffmann, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing – his own impossibly high standards and unmatched knowledge.
Albert Roux was born in Burgundy, the son of a pork butcher who left Albert’s mother on her own to look after him, his sister and his younger brother. To help support the family, Albert left school at 14 and took up an apprenticeship with a patissier.
At 17 he married his childhood sweetheart, Monique, having considered a vocation to the priesthood – an ambition which, as he explained many years later, was wholly unrealistic: ‘‘I would have made a very bad priest,’’ he told the Daily Mail in 2014, ‘‘because I am – was – a philanderer. And imagining myself visiting a nunnery ... that would have been bad.’’
His second wife, Cheryl, agreed to marry him only, she said, when he had ‘‘unloaded’’ his other seven companions: ‘‘I would not be part of his harem.’’ But that marriage foundered, as gossip columns reported, after an involvement with a cloakroom attendant roughly half his age.
Roux arrived in Britain for the first time in 1952, and worked in the kitchen for Nancy (Viscountess) Astor, then in the French Embassy in London. He opened Le Gavroche (‘‘the street urchin’’) with Michel in the spring of 1967. In those days dinner for two, including wine, would have cost a hefty £5. A year later Le Gavroche was the most chic eatery in London.
Not content with having one restaurant acknowledged as the best in the land, Albert and Michel set about finding a second location. Eventually they settled on a quiet hotel, the Waterside Inn, on the Thames at Bray. They did not change the name, but they changed just about everything else, and opened in 1976.
In 1984 they published their first great work of gastronomy. New Classic Cuisine was one of the first cookbooks to make the top echelon of modern restaurant cookery comprehensible to ambitious home cooks. It became a bestseller.
In 1989, every chef’s worst nightmare became reality after a health inspector decided that the kitchens of Le Gavroche were ‘‘filthy, fly-ridden and at risk from infection by rats and mice’’. Albert faced 15 summonses for breaches of hygiene regulations and five for alleged health and safety offences.
He vigorously contested the allegations, and a magistrate took just two minutes to dismiss all the charges.
Outside the kitchen, he enjoyed fishing in the Scottish Highlands, and going to the races. He was appointed OBE in 2002, and made a Chevalier of the Le´gion d’honneur in 2005.
He is survived by his third wife, Maria Rodrigues, whom he married in 2018, and by his two children. –