Gilles TOURNADRE

Chef : 3 restaurants

Presentation

" I make my own food. I don't know if it's good or not, if it's trendy or not, but it's my cooking! "When it's a stubborn kid talking, we smile gently. When it's Gilles Tournadre, with his fifty years in the business, everyone listens and takes their hats off. As a true Norman, he never asserts, never pretends, never rejects. But time has long since proven him right. Throughout France's self-respecting chefs, the mention of Normandy among the best is often punctuated by " Ah! oui! là-bas, vous avez Tournadre! "

Yet his position was not acquired by chance or without effort. As with every career, a combination of circumstances - both those that steer you in the right direction and those that resist you - has built this story. He experienced and made a name for himself during the " roaring eighties" in Rouen, the roaring 1980s when the city experienced a gastronomic boom never seen since. The " nouvelle cuisine " had come and gone, and every year Gault&Millau revealed a number of conquering young chefs. Gilles Tournadre was one of them, and never before had Rouen seen such a concentration of astonishing chefs, all flirting with 3 and 4 toques: Bertrand Warin, Marc Tellier, Pascal Saunier, Gilles Tournadre and Dorothée L'Hernault, who, at Le Beffroy, was seen as the godmother of these four musketeers.

Only one remained. Time went by, they scattered, and Gilles remained, with his 4 toques for thirty-five years, defending a noble cuisine, already visionary, of well-worked products with a technique above the norm, and a great extra-community culture, forged in particular by numerous trips to Japan. The adventure that began on rue Saint-Nicolas in 1985 with Sylvie, a winemaker's daughter and attentive, sunny hostess - the kind who enchants you during a meal with her smile and natural ease - continued on the quai de la Bourse, in this vast contemporary building that has become the one and only haunt of connoisseurs.

Even today, many Parisians on a Normandy weekend make the detour to the city of a hundred steeples to sample the hare à la royale, one of the best in France, the pigeon à la rouennaise, which he mischievously modifies according to the season.and the famous vanilla mille-feuille, often praised by Gault&Millau as " legérissime " or " zéphyrien", depending on the moment.

The Gill house has grown over the years, with a bistro on Place du Vieux-Marché, always valiant, always fair, a brasserie for several years on the same sidewalk, and an ideal annex, Le 37, behind the restaurant, both of which have since been sold. Today, his latest creation is flourishing and symbolic: Café Hamlet, in the magnificent Gothic austere Saint-Maclou, a historic building that is an extension of a patisserie on rue Martainville... Loyal to his city and its history, loyal to his friends (including friends (including Jean-Pierre Vigato, whom he met half a century ago at Albert's and to whom he is still very close), Gilles Tournadre is a great chef, human and respected, who " does his own cooking ".