Albert Roux, genius of Le Gavroche who brought classic French cuisine to 1960s Britain – obituary

Albert Roux, the chef, who has died aged 85, championed the cause of excellence in British restaurant cooking for half a century.

With his brother Michel, Roux was responsible for elevating the national reputation for food, which, when the pair of them arrived in London in 1967, was nothing short of abysmal.

The restaurant which would become synonymous with the name of Albert Roux was Le Gavroche. It was the first restaurant in Britain to gain a Michelin star, in 1974, and the first to win three, in 1982. The second restaurant to achieve this distinction, which it maintains to this day, was The Waterside Inn at Bray, founded by both brothers but later run solely by chef-proprietor Michel, who died in 2020.

The Gavroche held on to all its stars until 1993, when it lost one. Albert had handed the reins to his son Michel in 1991, but the latest Michelin Guide warmly praises the soufflé Suissesse, a signature dish from Albert’s era, and de luxe French classics such as coquilles St Jacques, turbot and lobster, commenting: “It’s a delight to see Michel Roux Jnr in his element, touring the tables and chatting to diners as he continues the family legacy.”

The achievement of Albert Roux and his family in the domain of sophisticated restaurant cooking extended to his grand-daughter Emily, co-owner of Caractère in Notting Hill. It was carried on in establishments including, among others, Roux at Parliament Square and the Langham Hotel’s Roux at the Landau, while in Scotland, Chez Roux opened at Andy Murray’s Cromlix Hotel near Dunblane in 2014.

The Roux culinary empire experimented with cheaper restaurants – one was called  Gavvers – as well as with shops, food products and private catering services.

Another Roux flagship was Boucherie Lamartine, London’s most upmarket combined butcher’s, patisserie, grocer and traiteur, in Pimlico. 

Stout and terrier-like in comparison with his suave brother, Albert had a strong head for business, and it was usually he rather than Michel who negotiated deals for the Roux empire. Even after his notional retirement in the early 1990s he was retained as a consultant by airlines and hotels all over the world.

The NHS sought his advice to improve hospital food in 1995, but as recently as 2015 he lamented: “We must not think that high-quality hospital food is too difficult or expensive to achieve, but meetings, speeches and gimmicks do not work.”

Albert had a reputation for driving a hard bargain. On one occasion, a story relates, a banker dining at Kleinwort Benson’s in-house canteen, managed by the Roux corporation, complained of finding a lead slug from a rifle in a piece of lamb. The unlucky diner suggested that a half-price dinner at Le Gavroche might be appropriate compensation. Albert offered him a voucher for another meal in the canteen.

Albert took to television like duck à l’orange. At Home With the Roux Brothers saw him squabbling affectionately with brother Michel. “Well, zat’s ’ow ’e does it,” he used to say, relishing the role of the cuddly, cheeky Frenchman, “me, ah prefer to do eet like zis.”

In reality he was an exacting taskmaster who insisted on perfection, and sometimes, it seemed, a little more. When running the kitchens at Le Gavroche he was known to stand with a plate that was ready for service, counting down from 10. If the right waiter had not collected the plate by the time he got to zero he would let go, and a soufflé would go crashing to the ground.

This refusal to accept anything less than the best enabled the family to pioneer, almost single-handedly, a revolution in the standards of raw materials available to restaurateurs.

From the start they refused to accept the stale fish, bruised fruit and poorly butchered meat which other restaurateurs allowed into their kitchens. Instead they chose a handful of suppliers and set out to re-educate them where necessary.

Despite his harsh kitchen regime Roux was respected by all, and loved by many, of those who worked under him.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to British cooking was that he impressed on a new generation of young chefs – including Marco Pierre White, Pierre Koffmann, Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing – his own impossibly high standards and unmatched knowledge. They in turn are now passing on the philosophy of excellence to their sous chefs, helping to ensure a bright gastronomic future for the country.

Albert Roux was born at Semur-en-Brionnais, Burgundy, on October 8 1935, the son of a pork butcher who left Albert’s mother on her own to look after him, his sister and his younger brother. To help support the family Albert left school at 14 and took up an apprenticeship with a pâtissier.

At 17 he married his childhood sweetheart, Monique, having considered a vocation to the priesthood – an ambition which, as he explained many years later, was wholly unrealistic: “I would have made a very bad priest,” he told the Daily Mail in 2014, “because I am – was – a philanderer. And imagining myself visiting a nunnery… that would have been bad.”

His second wife Cheryl only agreed to marry him, she said, when he had “unloaded” his other seven companions: “I would not be part of his harem.” But that marriage foundered, as gossip columns reported, after an involvement with a cloakroom attendant roughly half Albert Roux’s age.

He came to Britain for the first time in 1952, and worked in the kitchen for Nancy (Viscountess) Astor, then in the French Embassy in London.

He served in the French army in the Algerian war from 1955, returning to England in 1957. He became private chef to Major Peter Cazalet, at whose dining table the Queen Mother, whose horses he trained, was a frequent guest. He remained in Cazalet’s service for “nine of my happiest years”.

Albert opened Le Gavroche (“the street urchin”) with Michel in Lower Sloane Street in the spring of 1967, backed by his former boss’s son, Edward Cazelet, along with Michael von Clemm, Jacob Rothschild and some other enthusiasts. Ava Gardner, Charlie Chaplin and Robert Redford attending the opening buffet. 

In those days dinner for two, including wine, would have cost a hefty £5. The brothers took it in turns to cook at the stove, the other acting as maître d’. A year later Le Gavroche was the most chic eatery in London, among the cognoscenti at least, and one of the most expensive.

Not content with having one restaurant acknowledged as the best in the land, Albert and Michel set about finding a second location. Eventually they settled on a quiet hotel, the Waterside Inn, on the Thames at Bray. They did not change the name, but they changed just about everything else, and opened in 1976.

To begin with the brothers ran both restaurants as a team, but eventually they split, and Albert focused on Le Gavroche while Michel set about elevating the Waterside to the same standard of excellence.

In 1979 the brothers bought, for £520, a bottle of 1928 Krug champagne: the finest vintage of the century. They auctioned off seats at a table for 14, where they served the Krug and prepared, jointly, a five-course feast at the Waterside. The £682 proceeds were given to charity.

Albert’s toughness was demonstrated in this period when he went into hospital for a hip operation and just a few days after the surgery was back at Le Gavroche masterminding the preparation of a banquet for 3,000 at the Albert Hall.

In 1984 the brothers published their first great work of gastronomy. Called New Classic Cuisine, it was one of the first cookbooks to make the top echelon of modern restaurant cookery comprehensible to ambitious home cooks. It became one of the bestselling such books of the decade.

That year, with sponsorship from Diners Club, Albert and Michel set up a scholarship for young chefs, offering the prize of a three-month, all-expenses-paid apprenticeship at a Michelin-starred restaurant of the winner’s choice. It remains a highly coveted award among aspiring culinary stars.

While running the Gavroche kitchen Albert also found time to experiment with the sous-vide technique of food preparation – vacuum-packing fresh food and cooking at precis temperatures, for reheating later with minimum spoiling.

On the strength of these experiments Albert planned a chain of “chefless” restaurants, the food for which was all centrally prepared and vacuum-packed in a custom-built kitchen near Heathrow.

In the restaurants the dishes, such as boeuf bourguignon or mackerel in gooseberry sauce, were heated-in-the-bag to order. “I hope to be the McDonald’s of the middle class,” said Albert at the time.

The flagship for this experiment, a 300-seater restaurant in Finsbury Square called Rouxl Britannia, was opened in 1986. It was soon followed by a restaurant in Chelsea, Les Trois Plats.

Though Rouxl Brittania quickly became a popular haunt for business lunchers, high rates and rents meant that it struggled to make a profit. Les Trois Plats was a disaster. Plans for more restaurants were shelved.

By 1988 the Roux business empire was not flourishing, but the contract catering side of the business, started by Albert in 1986, was to see the Roux brothers through the recession. City bankers Kleinwort Benson, N  M Rothschild, Banque Paribas, Credit Lyonnais and Dean Witter all signed up for Roux catering.

However, every chef’s worst nightmare became reality for Albert in 1989 after a health inspector decided that the kitchens of Le Gavroche were “filthy, fly-ridden and at risk from infection by rats and mice”. Albert faced 15 summonses for breaches of hygiene regulations and five for alleged health and safety offences.

He vigorously contested the allegations, embarrassing the inspector who had brought them by pointing out that he had asked Roux to sign a copy of his cookbook and had discussed bringing his wife to the restaurant. “Perhaps he wanted to poison her,” remarked Roux wryly.

After a long-drawn-out legal action, during which the press had a field day with jokes of the “Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup” variety, a magistrate took just two minutes to dismiss all the charges, and Roux’s £100,000 costs were paid.

Meanwhile, on the politics of food production, Albert made his views felt in no uncertain terms. He was a staunch critic of the government’s slow and incompetent reaction to two food-scare crises of the late 1980s and 1990s: salmonella from eggs and “mad cow disease”. He lobbied for a complete ban on the recycling of condemned animal meat into feeds for other animals.

Outside the kitchen Roux enjoyed fishing in the Scottish Highlands, and going to the races. Roux Restaurants sponsored a number of events including the Peter Cazalet Memorial Chase, as a tribute to his former boss.

Roux was appointed OBE in 2002, and made a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2005. He was a Maître Cuisiniere de France, and a member of the Académie Culinaire de France.

Albert Roux was thrice married. With his first wife Monique he had a son, Michel, now the chef patron of Le Gavroche, and a daughter, Danielle, an English teacher. The marriage was dissolved in 2001. In 2006, he married Cheryl Smith, a Zimbabwean businesswoman. In 2016 that marriage ended in divorce.

He is survived by his third wife Maria Rodrigues, whom he married in 2018, and by his children.

Albert Roux, born October 8 1935, died January 4 2021