Michel Roux never did things in haste. Just as he took time in the kitchen over his signature cheese soufflé, so he conducted his life with equal precision.
He was over 40 when he married the great love of his life, and he waited until the age of 59 to write his autobiography.
He adopted the same scrupulous care when it came to weighing the merits, or otherwise, of the TV chefs who had followed in his pioneering footsteps.
But the observations, when they came, were as breathtaking as the prices at the Waterside Inn, his glorious three Michelin-starred establishment on the banks of the Thames at Bray in Berkshire.
Roux, the French-born gourmand and restaurateur who has died aged 78, had every right to pass judgment. With his brother, Albert, he changed the way the world felt about British food.
When he and Albert, six years his senior, opened their first restaurant on London’s Lower Sloane Street in 1967, British cooking was considered a bad joke. Together, the Roux brothers brought Paris-style fine dining to the capital and their culinary influence and gastronomy leaves an enduring legacy.
Michel Roux never did things in haste. Just as he took time in the kitchen over his signature cheese soufflé, so he conducted his life with equal precision, writes Richard Kay
Michel trained some of the best-known chefs in the country, including Pierre Koffmann, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White.
His views on that generation were often as beautifully crafted as his delicious dishes. On Ramsay, famous for his temper tantrums, Roux was clear: ‘Gordon is good, but not a genius,’ adding for good measure that he was ‘no better than anyone else’.
As for Jamie Oliver, he was barely worth commenting on. In an exchange as sharp as his rhubarb coulis, he pronounced: ‘He’s not a chef, so we don’t talk about him.’
So what of Marco, that other enfant terrible of the kitchen? ‘To be a great chef, you have to be a gourmet,’ he opined. ‘Marco Pierre White had the palate so, for me, he was and still is the greatest.’
Praise indeed — but the hot-headed Marco did not always reciprocate. He once reportedly said of his former patron: ‘I don’t like his food, restaurant or person. He’s yesterday’s man and should accept it.’ He even said he hoped Roux’s restaurant — a long-time favourite of the Royal Family — would ‘sink in the Thames’.
However, he was generous in his tribute to Roux yesterday, saying he had ‘created a movement, not a following’.
When he and Albert, six years his senior, opened their first restaurant on London’s Lower Sloane Street in 1967, British cooking was considered a bad joke (pictured together at the 25th anniversary of Le Gavrouche in London, 1992)
Roux viewed Marco’s youthful insubordination with haughty indifference. But then, he had earned his place at the very top of the culinary tree.
For more than half a century, his were the standards any aspiring chef looked up to.
Born in Charolles, near Lyons, Michel Roux’s earliest memory was the smell from the charcuterie run by his father Henri and grandfather, and of what was bubbling on his mother Germaine’s stove.
There were four children — Michel, Albert and their sisters Liliane and Martine. ‘My mother was a marvellous cook,’ he recalled. ‘I was so impatient to get to the table, I’d lift the lids off the pots and poke my nose in to savour the smell. Sometimes I burnt myself.
‘We were all gourmands but Albert and I more than the others. We were the sort of family who would be talking about dinner while we were eating lunch.’
He was very small when he began helping in the kitchen, ‘putting my finger in the dough and pressing it into the mould to make a flan’.
Journalist William Greaves is served a dish From British Airways’ New Cordon Bleu Menu by BA hostess Yvonne Edmond, designed by Chef Michel Roux in 1982
At that time, France was divided and occupied by the Germans. In 1944, fearing the menacing presence of enemy troops, they moved to a friend’s farm, where they remained until the war ended.
They had a shock in store when Michel’s father abruptly abandoned his family and left home. ‘I was nine, Albert 14 and our little sister just a baby,’ Roux remembered. By then Liliane, the eldest, was working in the charcuterie and life was tough.
Because of his father, a gambler who followed the credo of communists and socialists, Roux had a lifelong aversion to Left-wing politics (indeed, in 1992 he threatened to leave the UK over Labour tax plans).
His mother eventually decided to move the family to Paris for a new start. She scratched a living making sausages, hot dogs and hamburgers to sell in a market.
Both brothers knew that food would be their future. At 14, Albert left school and was apprenticed to a patissier. Michel later followed him.
Michel trained some of the best-known chefs in the country, including Pierre Koffmann, Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White
He founded Le Gavroche in London with his older brother Albert in 1967, followed by The Waterside Inn in Bray (pictured) in 1972
While still a teenager, he went to work in the kitchen of the British Embassy in Paris as a pastry cook. It was there that the seeds of his lifelong interest in Britain were sown — and where he was exposed to such culinary eccentricities as kedgeree, Christmas pudding and Stilton cheese.
Soon after, he moved into private catering as commis-chef to the French branch of the Rothschild family. The mistress of this household was the formidable hostess Cecile de Rothschild, the companion and protector of reclusive Hollywood star Greta Garbo.
Albert, who had also gone into private catering, was by then working in England for the family of the Queen Mother’s racehorse trainer, Major Peter Cazalet.
When Albert ended up in hospital after a car crash, the Cazalets sent an SOS to Michel. The Queen Mother was coming to stay at their home near Tonbridge in Kent and they desperately needed a cook.
‘My mother rang up the Rothschilds and they agreed to let Michel come for the weekend,’ Anthony Cazalet recalled yesterday. ‘Everyone was pleased but I do know the Rothschilds were furious when the brothers then decided to open their own restaurant.’
It was 1967 and in Chelsea, in the heart of swinging London, that they brought elegant but formal French cuisine to the capital, working 15-hour days to build Le Gavroche into one of London’s most sought-after destinations. Their first menu contained many of the signature dishes of later years, including soufflés Suissesses (twice-baked cheese soufflés with plenty of cream), roast duck in two servings, and a choice of elaborate desserts. Seven years later they had a Michelin star, the first of many.
In 1972 they acquired an old pub in Bray which was to become the iconic Waterside Inn. A near neighbour was TV’s Michael Parkinson, who recalled that Michel was ‘uncompromising in his attitude to what we should eat. He was a zealot, in a sense, and there was a lot of local opposition… he sailed through it. In the end he educated us all.’
By 1977, both restaurants had secured two Michelin stars. Other establishments were opened but the Waterside and Le Gavroche remained the prize venues. The brothers also launched the Roux Scholarship, hoping to pass on their passion for food and cooking to aspiring young chefs.
Soon after securing Le Gavroche’s new home in Mayfair, they decided to separate their business. While Albert remained with Le Gavroche, Michel retreated to the Waterside Inn, which in 1996 prepared the food for the Queen’s private 70th birthday party. By then Roux was divorced from his first wife, with whom he had two children. On a visit to Australia in 1982 he met Robyn on a blind date. It was something of a coup de foudre. He had told a friend he wanted to meet a nice girl in Sydney, who had ‘something up there’ in the brain department and loved her food and wine.
Four days later he asked the young woman to move to England with him. She agreed, and in 1984 the couple married. (Robyn predeceased him, dying in 2017.)
The brothers were always in great demand on TV, not least because they seemed so different both physically and in their cooking styles; while Albert preferred provincial food, Michel loved gastronomy. And viewers were gripped by their bickering — over the right way to cook eggs, for instance — although the rivalry was always affectionate.
Their show At Home With The Roux Brothers ran during the 1980s and is still available on YouTube. Watching them squabble as they saw through bones is still a joy.
In 2002, Roux handed over the day-to-day running of the Waterside Inn to his son Alain.
It is hard to know where food and restaurants would have been without Michel Roux, an adopted son of this country who brought his very special brand of Gallic flair to titillate and delight the jaded British palate.