Roger Vergé
Chef who helped develop ‘la nouvelle cuisine’ by introducing foreign flavours to traditional dishes
ROGER VERGÉ, who has died aged 85, was, with Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard and Pierre Troisgros, one of the most influential French chefs of the 20th century, as well as one of the founding fathers of la nouvelle cuisine.
The movement began in the 1960s as a radical departure from the strictures of the heavily sauced Escoffier canon that had become predictable at best and boring at worst. However la nouvelle cuisine did not really have a name or identity until the French food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau published the “Ten Commandments” of the movement in the October 1973 issue of
Gault-Millau magazine. The chefs of the new movement specialised in creating more delicate dishes, featuring unusual combinations of fresh, preferably local, ingredients, often drawing on foreign cookery traditions and with an emphasis on artistic presentation. Roger Vergé’s contribution was to apply the principles of the new approach to the traditional cuisine of Provence. At his three Michelinstarred 70-seat restaurant, Le Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes, opened in 1969, he developed the “Cuisine de Soleil”, introducing flavours and ingredients he had encountered on his travels around the world.
Intrigued by the fruit he found in north African tagines and other
savoury dishes, he came up with such offerings as Les huitres chaudes au
beurre d’orange (hot oysters on the half shell with orange sections and orange butter), and Le poupeton de fleur de courgette et duxelle truffée, beurre crémeux aux champignons des bois (zucchini flower stuffed with mushrooms flavoured with black truffle and wild mushroom butter).
In his cookbook, Cuisine of the Sun (1978), Vergé explained that his technique consisted of “marrying natural products with one another, of finding simple harmonies and enhancing the flavour of each ingredient by contact with another with a complementary flavour.”
Vergé reigned at Le Moulin for more than 30 years, earning a three-star Michelin rating in 1974. Chefs including Jacques Maximin, Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud and Jacques Chibois trained in his kitchen. So popular was the restaurant in its heyday that during the Cannes film festival season customers would line up outside until well past midnight for the opportunity to taste Vergé’s food. Prices were, of course, astronomical.
Unlike many of the nouvelle cuisine chefs who followed, Vergé was not a sensation-seeker and by the mid-1980s the excesses of some adherents of the movement led him to suggest that it had lost its way. “It is a joke,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “It is nothing serious. Now it looks Japanese: large dishes, small portions, no taste, but very expensive.”
Much of what Vergé and his colleagues stood for, however, was assimilated into mainstream restaurant cooking, while many of the ingredients and techniques in 21st century gastronomy that people take for granted – fresh foie gras, wild mushrooms, extra virgin olive oil, white truffles, exotic fruits and Asian spices – were popularised by nouvelle cuisine. Vergé, however, found it difficult to maintain the pace and by the time he retired in 2003, in failing health, Le Moulin was down to just one Michelin star.
The son of a blacksmith, Roger Vergé was born on April 30 1930 in Commentry, in the Auvergne region. He learned his trade working in the kitchens of restaurants in France, Morocco, Switzerland and Jamaica, though he attributed his culinary style and use of fresh ingredients to the example of his Aunt Célestine, who let him stand beside her at the stove as she cooked family meals, and to whom he dedicated many of his books.
He started Le Moulin de Mougins with his second wife Denise in 1969. Their elevation to three Michelin-star status by 1974 remains one of the fastest ascents to the three star club ever. In 1977 the couple opened a companion restaurant, L’Amandier de Mougins, focusing more on cuisine Niçoise. In the 1980s he teamed up with Paul Bocuse and Gaston Lenôtre to open two restaurants at Disney’s Epcot Center near Orlando, Florida. Later ventures included china, glassware and a Roger Vergé stove. His other cookbooks were Les Fêtes
de Mon Moulin (1993); Les Légumes de Mon Moulin (1994); Les Tables de Mon Moulin (1998) and Les Fruits de Mon Moulin (1999). In 1987, he was appointed a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour and Maître Cuisinier de France.
Roger Vergé is survived by his wife Denise, by their daughter and by two daughters of an earlier marriage. Roger Vergé, born April 7 1930, died June 5 2015