Michel Guérard, French chef who advocated lighter dishes

When Michel Guérard was five he decided that he wanted to be a pastry chef. He would walk to the only restaurant in the village — “just a few chocolates from the house where I was born” — and sing until the chef opened the window and passed him a cake (he never knew if it was meant as a reward or a plug for his mouth).
He also wanted to be a doctor and the impact he would have on the culinary world, as one of the first Gallic celebrity chefs, was in many ways a fine pairing of the two. Long before waist-trimming recipes became a staple of the western diet, Guérard was championing a Japanese style of cooking that focused on freshness, lightness and flavour and which put less strain on the belt than traditional French food.
He first began developing his cuisine minceur (slimming cuisine) as number two to the chef Jean Delaveyne at the Camellia restaurant in Bougival in Île-de-France in the early Sixties. There he befriended three other young chefs, Roger Vergé, Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros, who, with Guérard, would break away from the iron-clad rules of French haute cuisine, introduced by the cuisine bourgeoise in the 19th century, to pioneer la nouvelle cuisine, a postwar culinary movement that lightened the French diet by scrapping heavy sauces thickened with flour, using butter sparingly and reducing portions. “I am thinking of new dishes,” Guérard said. “When I’m brushing my teeth, when I’m driving my car, I’m always thinking of new dishes.”
Such a philosophy was the bedrock of his first restaurant, Pot-au-Feu, which he opened in the Paris suburb of Asnières in 1965. The Gault-Millau guide, launched on the wave of the nouvelle cuisine, would call it “the best suburban bistro in the world”, but when he first bought the place it was a gargotte serving sandwiches and rough red wine. In what he called his “alchemist’s laboratory” Guérard began experimenting with simple flavours and ingredients until he came up with such signature dishes as creamed eggs in a scooped-out eggshell with caviar and morelles mushrooms with asparagus tips. He was one of the first French chefs to cook vegetables al dente and was later credited for the fashionable trend for dolloping jus or smudges of foam on top of meals.
His reputation as a food doctor was cemented when in 1974, the same year Pot-au-Feu closed down, he took over the kitchen at Les Prés d’Eugénie, the spa hotel that his wife Christine had inherited from her father Adrien Barthélémy, who bought it in 1961. Located in Eugénie-les-Bains, a stone village in the vast pine forest of Les Landes in the southwest of France — the home of foie gras — the area was a thermal spring known for its therapeutic waters and named after Napoleon III’s wife Eugénie, who was a regular. Guérard wanted diet to be a part of the detox. “At the time, food for losing weight was just a plate of grated carrot, so banal,” he said. “I thought, ‘You can lose weight but also eat well’.”
Everything, he said, should be natural. “I like to be as close to the product as possible. I assume the product has a little more talent than I do” — and he felt a responsibility to “pay tribute” to his ingredients, “making sure a splendid duck didn’t die for nothing”.
The low-fat, low-calorie and no-sugar menu employed tricks such as swapping rice for grated cauliflower and vegetable purée for butter or cream and was composed with the help of nutritionists, biologists, sociologists and behavioural therapists. Guérard wanted to take customers out of their comfort zones, once comparing the delicate notes of his cuisine to Mozart’s compositions. “I like to work with ingredients that can surprise you,” he said. “For instance, once I wanted to create something with oysters and I wondered for many months what taste or what other ingredient I could combine with their very particular flavour. Finally, I decided on green coffee.”
This was duck country and Guérard achieved fame for the bewildering number of recipes he produced for foie gras. The richer recipes he had elaborated in Asnières and at Eugénie-les-Bains formed the backbone of his second book, published in 1978: La Cuisine Gourmande. He maintained that his wife, the daughter of the founder of the Biotherm skincare company, inspired the manual when she told him he was overweight.
One of the most successful recipes to emerge from the manual was the simple “salade gourmande”, where French beans were matched with thin slivers of foie gras, truffles, asparagus, shallots and lettuce, served with a hazelnut oil vinaigrette. The recipe, popularly known as “crazy salad”, scandalised chefs across France but it could be found in virtually every decent restaurant in France 20 years after its creation.
Guérard was awarded three Michelin stars in 1974, 1975 and 1977 and Les Prés d’Eugénie is one of the longest-running Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. Thanks to him, George Taber wrote in Time, which printed the chef on its 1976 cover: “No longer need a Frenchman dig his grave with a fork.” Yet in more traditional quarters — the kind that liked their gravy rich and potatoes slathered in butter — his cuisine minceur caused a stir. “I was at worst an outcast,” he said, “at best a crazy cook.”
Les Prés d’Eugénie, however, soon attracted the crème of French, and global, society. “We’ve had presidents and politicians, celebrities, artists and writers, so a lot of funny things have happened within the kitchen,” he recalled. “Tito, Yugoslavia’s dictator, spent a few days with us. He had his own food taster and everything had to go through him — literally. We once had a delightful princess whose beloved greyhound had disappeared. Everyone looked for it for two days. Thanks to local police reinforcements we ended up finding the dog next to the lobster aquarium, which he was watching intensely. He was apparently used to eating this sort of food.”
Michel Etienne Robert-Guérard was born in 1933 in the Paris suburb of Vétheuil, the son of the butcher Maurice and his wife Georgine (née Boulanger), who took over the running of the shop when her husband was drafted into the army during the Second World War. His childhood involved both wading barefoot in streams to catch trout with his hands and Nazi interrogations about the whereabouts of his family cows.
Good food was scarce but a few months after liberation in 1944 Guérard had his first great gastronomic experience: eating an elaborate Escoffier-style feast at a friend’s house, which involved a strawberry-vanilla-praline bombe. Another inspiration was watching his grandmother bake pastry and, aged 14, he became an apprentice at Kléber Alix’s patisserie in Mantes-la-Jolie near Paris, where he was awarded the Meilleur Ouvrier de France — a title so important to French craftsmen that it is bestowed by the president himself. He was the youngest chef to have received the honour.
After a brief period in Tôtes he enlisted as a chef in the French navy and on demobilisation in 1952 mastered “palace cuisine” at Paris’s Hôtel de Crillon, where he became head pastry chef aged 25, followed by a job at the Lido, a cabaret and restaurant which was frequented by international celebrities.
When the nouvelle cuisine began to look a little stale — as it went mainstream portions got bigger and butter crept in — Guérard added a third string to his culinary bow and offered cuisine du terroir: earthy food offered in a suitably regional idiom and in a rustic ambience. By that stage the Guérards were operating a whole collection of hotels and restaurants in Eugénie-les-Bains including Les Couvent des Herbes, La Maison Rose and la Ferme aux Grives.
In 1979 he opened the short-lived Comptoir Gourmand Michel Guérard on the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Its windows were always filled with a selection of different preparations for foie gras together with his chicken cooked in a pig’s bladder, still one of his signature dishes. Guérard’s commercial acumen never wholly deserted him, but he never wholly deserted his kitchen either, even when he was designing frozen meals for the likes of Nestlé. He remained at the top of the food chain until the generation of Alain Ducasse, who trained in his kitchen, brought in a more eclectic “world gastronomy”.
At his Château de Bachen in the Adour valley, home to acres of grapevine and lemon verbena shrubs, he collected paintings, above all still lives of food. His wife died in 2017 and he is survived by two daughters, Eléonore and Adeline, who run the family spa business, the Chaîne Thermale du Soleil.
Slim, silver-haired and sprightly in old age — a result, he said, of his strict adherence to his slimming cuisine — Guérard was still cooking well into his eighties, usually in an elegant tailored suit beneath his apron. “The white-haired Guérard perpetually furrows his brow,” noted one interviewer, “and speaks with a deliberate eloquence, like he’s quoting a poem.”
His approach to food was both molecular and creative: he was as meticulous as a doctor and he chose ingredients like a painter chooses a colour palette. “I see a restaurant as a theatre,” he said, “which cultivates taste and beauty, and the beauty of tastes.”
Michel Guérard, chef, was born on March 27, 1933. He died on August 19, 2024, aged 91