Having a nutritionist in major restaurants has become commonplace and, by serving more meat than vegetables with too rich sauces, today we risk being considered a “has been”.
You only have to look at the fashionable chefs, most of them sporty and slender, to guess that they cook differently from a Fernand Point, the first chef to obtain 3 Michelin stars in 1933, or a Paul Bocuse, who died in 2018 in 91 years old and who liked butter, cream, wine and “not quartered peas”.
“The elders told me this joke: You’re going to eat at Guérard’s, don’t forget your prescription. We laughed at him a little but he was the one who was right. Just open any magazine, only talk about that today”, summarizes for AFP Michel Sarran, one of his students who participated in a tribute to Michel Guérard at the end of November, organized by the La List ranking which lists the 1,000 best restaurants in the world.
“If the cuisine were nobelisable, it would be our first Nobel Prize”, underlines the chef from Toulouse with two Michelin macaroons.
– Well oriented –
Installed in 1974 in the spa resort of Eugénie-les-Bains (south-west), Michel Guérard developed a tasty “slimming cuisine” there which earned him the cover of Time magazine, a first for a chef.
“He introduced sobriety into gluttony by making slimming cuisine non-punitive”, underlines Guy Savoy, “best chef” in the world for the sixth time this year according to La List.
A certain Alain Ducasse, today the most starred chef in the world, was then 18 years old and did his apprenticeship there. He makes a “slimming” cake of fondant carrots with chervil.
Now, do these famous students live up to his “slimming” legacy? Michel Guérard believes that we can do better.
“They don’t want to and that’s a mistake,” he told AFP. “I do not despair.”
If the idea of thinness is today “less highlighted” than those of the balance and the quality of the product, the heritage of Guérard “still comes into full play when we speak of a lighter cuisine, healthy, vegetables, short chains”, nuance Loïc Bienassis, food historian.
At 58, the Spaniard Joan Roca, who runs a 3-star hotel in Girona (north-eastern Spain), twice voted best restaurant in the world at the 50 Best, confides to AFP that he learned with “The slimming cuisine “.
He employs a nutritionist and a scientist to ensure that his “hedonistic cuisine” is well digested, even if some customers come only once a year.
Christopher Coutanceau, 44, 3 stars in La Rochelle, says he “was well oriented” when he joined Guérard at the age of 17. “I don’t see myself working much with butter and cream, we put less sugar in desserts.”
– Complementary delicacy –
The two-star Frenchman Daniel Boulud, based in New York, remembers Guérard’s “avant-garde” mixed salads, at the time when many vegetables were not served in high gastronomy.
“The biggest lesson is his creativity,” he says.
The same goes for Arnaud Donckele, another six-star disciple of Guérard, who learned “a certain freedom and great lightness”…in a figurative sense rather than in terms of nutritional value.
Author of the concept of “naturalness”, which banishes meat and reduces butter to a minimum, Alain Ducasse maintains that counting calories does not interest him.
“Few calories, it is for a given period to regenerate the body and the spirit, we cannot feed ourselves” like this all the time.
And to remember that Michel Guérard had also published “La cuisine gourmande”, “in addition, not in opposition”, to his “slimming cuisine”.
