What has become of the new kitchen since 1973?

The kitchen in 1973

It was an oil shock, but the thirst for freedom and the desire for change had been underway for ten years for baby-boomers, with 1968 as the symbolic episode. We hit the road, we went on vacation, we stopped along the way, at random, in inns and village cafés. To choose a table, you trust your instincts, the advice of motoring magazines, sometimes a newspaper article. Conservatives - already - who are looking for a prestigious stop, consult the Red Guide, relying on its stars. And yet, just as when we buy a new David Bowie album, we want to exchange, communicate and feel the emergence of a community in which we recognize ourselves. Henri Gault and Christian Millau have arrived at just the right moment: they tell us what's going on in restaurants, they explain the whys and wherefores, and they take a stand. Under their pens, the chef becomes an essential player. He's not always the one who decides on the name of the dish, but he's the one who garnishes the plate, with his know-how, his sense of seasoning, his choices and his mastery of cooking. Gault and Millau talk about dishes more than curtains, giving them meaning - which is new. Above all, "nouvelle cuisine" is all about cooking, liberated from domestic traditions and emphasizing its human and cultural dimensions. If the success of these books with readers is considerable, it's also because they've been relayed by cooks themselves. At last, people who take an interest in their profession, in their desires and even in their moods, who turn them into sensitive, thinking human beings, not just porkers and robots applying to the letter instructions weighed down to the gram by a hierarchy that's still too military. Paul Bocuse was the first to get them out of their kitchens, and Gault et Millau turn them into chefs of flesh and spirit, capable of thinking and advancing their profession. This incentive reveals vocations and personalities, and gives rise to dialogues. From these fruitful exchanges, Gault et Millau generated the ten commandments that constitute the first manifesto of nouvelle cuisine. Of course you have to cook less and use less fat if you want to keep the right, healthy taste in your food. Everyone knows this, but nobody said so because tradition dictated. From now on, it's the customer who dictates the law, and his name is Christian Millau or Henri Gault, those who sit at the table and give their opinion on the contents of a plate. An important semantic shift: the name of the owner, who pays the salaries and decides everything, is beginning to take a back seat to that of the chef. Firstly, because it's increasingly the same person - chefs are starting to become entrepreneurs too; and secondly, because Gault&Millau has made it clear that, if there's an artist in the house who needs to be talked about, it's the one at the piano. Michel Guérard symbolizes this wave that is sweeping the landscape: an upright craftsman with a fabulous culinary culture, he reinvents the classics and asserts himself as a creator, a commodity that didn't exist in the world before.

The kitchen from 1973 to 2000

The restaurant is a stage where you learn. Not just how to eat, but above all how to taste. Every year, we wait impatiently for the Gault&Millau guide, on the lookout for new chefs, up-and-coming talents and trends. Every year, Gault&Millau announces and represents what's new. France is a magnificent playground, an inexhaustible source of gastronomic discoveries. As early as 1979, the guide awarded a new label, the Lauriers du Terroir, reminding us, without being accused of conservative franchouillerie, that the chef's raw material must (already) come from a source of origin and quality. In 1980, the title of Cuisinier de l'Année (Cook of the Year) was launched, and the first winner was Alain Chapel, who, along with his friends and contemporaries - Georges Blanc, Bernard Loiseau, Marc Meneau, Jean-Michel Lorain, Jacques Maximin, Joël Robuchon - represent the first great figures of a cuisine, but also of a less rigid, less codified catering, that Gault&Millau accompanies and promotes. Less than a decade later, following in the footsteps of its predecessors, the status and aura of the Gault&Millau guide continued to grow as readers discovered Pierre Gagnaire, Marc Veyrat, Michel Trama, Alain Passard, Guy Savoy, Régis Marcon, Michel Bras... In 1996, such was the enthusiasm and the breeding ground that the guide opened a new category, the Grands de Demain, which announced to the public the great names that the other guides would later take up, following the adage that dates back to the 2000s: "Gault&Millau discovers and Michelin consecrates. Among the "Grands de Demain" of this era were Éric Frechon (1997), Thierry Marx (1998), Philippe Etchebest (1999), Frédéric Anton (2000)... Others would appear a little later, future "Grands de Demain".Others would appear a little later, future Cuisiniers of the Year, such as Pascal Barbot (2002), Arnaud Lallement (2005), Alexandre Gauthier (2007), Alexandre Couillon (2008)... Traced by the pioneers, cuisine has naturally evolved over the last thirty years. Whatever their origin, terroir, training or convictions, every great chef has jumped on the bandwagon, if not of novelty, at least of renewal, including Paul Bocuse, Roger Vergé, the Troisgros brothers and Paul Haeberlin, among other guardians of the temple and visionaries. The lessons of 1973 were not only assimilated, but developed in all directions: Marc Veyrat invented peasant and pastoral cuisine, Régis Marcon his mushrooms, Michel Bras his herbs, Alain Passard his vegetables; each, like Pierre Gagnaire or Alain Trama, created his own universe. More than any other success story, nouvelle cuisine has changed cooks. From handymen and soldiers, it has turned them into artists and poets.

Cuisine from 2000 to 2023

Catering is now an international scene. Alain Ducasse defends French cuisine in a globalized world, trips to Japan are a two-way street, Yves Camdeborde abandons his stripes to cook high-flying bourgeois cuisine in a bistro, like Michel Guérard thirty years earlier in the opposite direction. The first world rankings appeared, as absurd as they were flawed, and they would go on to make Ferran Adrià and René Redzepi famous. Jamie Oliver hosted joyful shows in which he seemed to improvise a market cuisine, setting the lasting trend for a form of right to laziness and ignorance. The first environmental scruples crept into the pantry, reinforced by the public's desire for transparency and traceability, after various health episodes such as the so-called "mad cow" crisis. The first organic products appeared in the 1990s, but it was only political discourse, scientific warnings and threats - mainly climatic - that eventually weighed on the commitment of chefs and restaurateurs, particularly among the younger generation. These years saw the emergence of fashions that didn't exist, in the sense that they didn't invent anything that wasn't already known: fusion" (nikkei cuisine, inspired by Japanese emigrants to Peru, was born in the 19th century); "molecular" (cooking an egg is molecular cuisine, and the use of alginate in cooking is molecular cuisine).using sodium alginate to make marbles or soy lecithin for foaming is not a new and remarkable advance); even "bistronomy", so overused that some believe they are practicing it, like M. Jourdain, by "revisiting" the culinary tradition. Jourdain, by "revisiting" a lemon tart. In 2023, happy Parisians can eat hummus every 3 meters, and pizza, ramen and mochi almost as often. This is both pleasing and worrying, insofar as they have less access to simple French cuisine that requires a minimum of knowledge and preparation. What about tomorrow? As a researcher in the sociology of food put it, no, we won't be eating capsules, because biologically, humans need to salivate and enjoy eating. If human beings have five times as many taste buds as dogs, it's no doubt because they can't be satisfied with eating croquettes every day. The need for a form of enjoyment through food is inseparable from its social dimension. Where, how, with whom? The restaurant is the ideal place to conjugate the verb "to love" in all tenses and with all people, giving diners sincerity and identity, the pleasure of choosing and sharing. Back in 1973, Henri Gault and Christian Millau celebrated nouvelle cuisine. Fifty years on, we're helping young people to set up in business via the Dotation, we're focusing on 109 chefs who have opened their own restaurant within the year, on the Jeunes Talents and the Grands de Demain, a whole new generation, more responsible and much more mixed (finally!), of those who practice a new, virtuous cuisine, proud and respectful of producers and flavors, yet who never forget their roots or their culture.