Ten years ago, when I was still evolving, I did elaborate presentations, as I thought it was important; now I think it is … merde.” As if to prove his point, his house specialty at that time was a simple salmon fillet cooked en papillote with a julienne of vegetables, a spoonful of fish gelée, butter and some fresh tarragon. The dish is perfect in its essential simplicity: as Barrier says, “Another way to betray produce is to do too much. You must not put parsley on something if it makes no contribution.”
THE REBELS It is one of the eternal themes of history: the new order built upon the rubble of the old. And in Paris in May 1968, as students manned the barricades and fought pitched battles in the streets, that rubble was not just metaphorical. Their revolution was short-lived (and the de Gaulle government’s mandate was increased in the election that followed), but even so a new spring was in the air. Radical new ideas, both social and artistic, were sweeping across Europe. Nowhere more so than cinema, which had been invented in Lyon by the Lumiere brothers just two years before Point was born there. Now Godard, Truffaut and their friends, “les copains” as they called themselves, were assaulting the celluloid establishment with provocative articles which claimed that the cinematic conventions should be shattered. Stodgy scenarios shot on heavy, outmoded equipment would be replaced by imagination and ingenuity, using the new cameras which could film on the move. Maybe it was the title of one of the ground breaking works of this new wave of cinema— Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (Breathless)—which helped inspire three young journalists and gourmands named André Gayot, Henri Gault and Christian Millau to begin a crusade against Michelin and its “pompous” stars. At any rate, according to Gayot, “we felt that a new era was looming behind the kitchens of France.”
PRESENTATION
They were to be its polemicists, and in 1969 launched Le Nouveau Guide, a monthly magazine devoted to food and wine. It was the first of its kind in France, and on its first cover it proclaimed in bold type, “Michelin: Don’t forget these 48 stars!” Just as the previous spring, battle lines were being drawn. Those 48 stars were the chefs, largely unknown then, whom Gayot, Gault and Millau believed were in the process of transforming cuisine, and were being completely ignored by the Guide Michelin in the process. The Guide, respected and all powerful, was by its very nature a bastion of conservatism, rejecting anything that had become, in Gayot’s words, “unruly.” For Michelin, dishes such as the filets de sole Brillat-Savarin were the foundations of cuisine, and chefs such as Bocuse, Guérard, Louis Outhier and Alain Senderens who were shaking those foundations were firmly shut out of its pages. Le Nouveau Guide, on the other hand, was purpose-built to embrace them. To that end, the three journalists not only extolled the new way of cooking but set down the rules which were to govern it, a list of ten principles published in 1972 which became the manifesto of nouvelle cuisine.
COLOURS AND FORMS By that time the principles had already been disseminated. “We acted as the federators of these trends, introducing the pioneers to one another and publicising their concepts and compiling our discoveries.” Those chefs who had before been unknown, and unknown to each other, began to all march to the same drum. The soundness of their principles could not be faulted. They realised that modern life required fewer calories—the invention of elevators, cars and central heating saw to that. The development of food processors and other tools cried out for them to be used in new, sophisticated ways. And transport systems meant that anyone might have access to fresh produce, no matter how far from the countryside or the sea they might be.
Opposite: During the reign of nouvelle cuisine, portions grew smaller as plates grew larger. Overleaf: According to Anton Mosimann, food is truly appetising when a meal is laid out artistically so that when guests look at the plate they cannot wait to eat.
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