Michel Roux has announced Le Gavroche is closing early next year. A landmark on the British culinary map, The Evening Standard takes a look back at a titan of London restaurants
The Roux family are rightly synonymous with Britain’s gastronomic revolution. Under their watch, this country went from a nation of meat-and-two-veg to one of Francophilia and food-fuelled hedonism.
The sixties were a decade of wonder: the Beatles were singing atop a roof on Saville Row, Concord was taking travellers across the pond at supersonic speed, and in a pokey restaurant on Lower Sloane Street, two brothers were making history in a kitchen called Le Gavroche.
Opened in 1967, Albert and Michel created a place which would redefine the UK’s relationship not only with restaurants, but with food. It’s no overstatement to say that London simply didn’t have a restaurant scene at the time. There were caffs, there were hotels. But no awards, no accolades; just a smattering of restaurant guides aimed to consolidate the good from the merely open. Britain’s dining rooms trundled on like a bus without a destination.
Albert and Michel were a lightning rod (as Fay Maschler once reflected: “Who knew until the brothers Roux that chefs had names?”). They relentlessly pursued excellence and provenance, taking weekly trips to France, smuggling in the very best ingredients, many of which were simply were unobtainable in London. This was a time when the finest French Dijon mustard didn’t leave the country, and if you wanted foie gras the closest you could get on British shelves was spam.
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