Christian Millau
Co-creator of the deliciously cheeky Gault-millau restaurant guides that pushed ‘nouvelle cuisine’
CHRISTIAN MILLAU, who has died aged 88, was, with his fellow gastronome Henri Gault, the originator of the Guide Gault-millau, the bible of the nouvelle cuisine movement.
The pair met as journalists on the evening paper Paris Presse, Millau being the deputy editor and Gault the writer of a lively column, “Promenades”, in which, at Millau’s suggestion, he began to feature lively and irreverent restaurant reviews. The Julliard publishing house commissioned them to produce a guide to Paris, based on Gault’s columns. Published in 1962 it was an immediate success.
The following years saw the publication of bi-annual editions of the guide, a monthly magazine with a circulation of more than a million, and the growth of an imperium that spawned guides to France and other countries and cities around the world, including London and New York.
They aimed to supplant the red Guide Michelin (dismissed by Millau as “a telephone directory inside France and inaccurate outside”) as the foodie’s bible, awarding “toques” (French chefs’ hats) rather than stars, and also rating gastronomic establishments with marks out of 20.
It was possible to achieve four toques but, on the theory that no restaurant was perfect, never 20 points.
In their search for new and exciting young culinary talent, Millau and Gault championed a lighter style of cooking that became known as “nouvelle cuisine”, a term they coined in 1973 in an article which declared war on “the typical bon vivant, that puffy personage with his napkin tucked under his chin, his lips dripping veal stock, béchamel sauce and vol-au-vent financière”.
In 1977 when, thanks to their efforts, nouvelle cuisine was all the rage, they started printing the toques of their favoured chefs in red, leaving their traditionalist counterparts with black-outlined hats.
The Gault-millau guides were less encyclopedic than their Michelin rivals but much more fun, being iconoclastic, deliciously rude and often wickedly funny. From the start they were combative, attacking with gusto what they perceived to be inflated reputations, in the process provoking a series of lawsuits (none successful) from aggrieved restaurateurs.
“A slice of galantine as tough as pemmican paved the way for further culinary atrocities,” they wrote of one London establishment – and that was a comparatively mild comment.
Gault and Millau’s promotion of the aficionados of nouvelle cuisine helped to usher in the era of the celebrity chef. Before them, chefs laboured anonymously in their kitchens. Now, with the help of a horde of publicists, chefs like Paul Bocuse, Jean Troigros and Michel Guérard became media stars.
To keep them on their toes and to maintain public interest, there were occasional spats, as in 1988 when Paul Bocuse failed to win the highest four toque rating. Millau criticised him for travelling around the world rather than tending to his kitchen in Lyon and accused him of turning out the same basic menu for years.
Bocuse responded by accusing Millau of always bringing his dog to the restaurant and not asking for the bill, observing that “my clientele is 80 per cent Lyonnaise. They still like the sea bass in crust, the truffle soup, the chicken poached in a bladder.” The fourth toque was soon reinstated.
Christian Millau was the pen-name of Paul Levy Christian Dubois-millot, who was born in Paris on December 30 1928. After studying at the city’s Sciences Po, he began his career as a journalist in the “interior policy” department of Le Monde, from which he was sacked after misspelling “Mitterrand”.
He had better luck at the journal Opéra, edited by Roger Nimier, leader of a conservative literary group known as the Hussars. In 1999 Millau would win the French Academy’s prize for biography for his account Galloping With the Hussars: In the Literary Whirlwind of the Fifties. He also published a memoir of his time there, Paris Told Me: The Fifties, End of an Era.
Millau’s relationship with Gault was never easy. “It was like being in a couple,” he recalled. “We did not agree on anything except on matters of gastronomy … As for work or politics, we had nothing in common.” The business was sold in the 1980s.
Later Millau wrote a history of the family of his Russian émigré maternal grandparents, Greetings From the Gulag: Secrets of a Family (2004). His other books included A Lover’s Gastronomic Dictionary (2008) and a memoir, Rude Journal (2011).
In 1959, he married Arlette Conrad, who died last year. He is survived by two sons and a daughter. Henri Gault died in 2000.