How Michel Guérard influenced my taste as a food journalist

Michel Guérard passed away on the night of Sunday, August 18. He was 91 years old. A three-star chef at Prés d’Eugénie, he was the last living legend of Nouvelle Cuisine, a movement also supported by Paul Bocuse, the Troisgros brothers and Alain Chapel that revolutionized French gastronomy in the 1970s and made it shine throughout the world. In the spa town of Eugénie-les-bains, once frequented by Empress Eugénie, he combined dietetics and epicureanism by offering visiting spa guests a cuisine that was light, creative and terribly gourmet. Over the years, he trained countless great chefs there: Alain Ducasse, Gérald Passédat, Michel Troisgros, Arnaud Donckele, Alexandre Couillon, Daniel Boulud, etc. We owe him the “great slimming cuisine”, the principles of which he deployed in several bestsellers. And I owe him the career as a food journalist that I have been pursuing for about ten years and that never ceases to amaze my mother. It’s because, when I was little, I hated eating. Unless it contained fries, I could sit in front of a plate for hours without touching it. I didn’t like anything. Nothing, except La Ferme aux Grives.

Going to La Ferme aux Grives was a whole thing: my mother and grandmother in the front, me in the back, we would drive for a good hour through the Landes countryside to dine there, almost every summer, to celebrate a birthday, good news, or simply life itself. Michel Guérard had created this chic and welcoming Gascon restaurant right next to his Michelin-starred hotel-restaurant. Because my mother and grandmother wanted to be able to drink wine without moderation but spending the night at Prés d’Eugénie was beyond our means, we would go there in a camper van that we would park a few steps from the establishment. Imagine three generations of women bursting out of a minivan decked out in their finest shoes, their finest jewelry, touching up their makeup in the rearview mirror before parading towards the restaurant as if they were getting out of a Jaguar.

Everything about this chic and welcoming Gascon restaurant, created by Michel Guérard right next to his Michelin-starred hotel-restaurant, fascinated me. Its gougères served as appetizers. Its cold tomato soup with old-fashioned mustard ice cream. Its light on summer evenings, the kindness of its waiters, the sound of footsteps on the immaculate gravel, the rustic tables overflowing with seasonal vegetables. It was when I returned as an adult that I understood how La Ferme aux Grives had shaped my taste for going to restaurants. My grandmother was no longer there, but everything else was: the pâté ménager of pork, poultry, foie gras and pickles; the lush gardens of the Prés d’Eugénie that we toured before going to dinner; the magical atmosphere; and even the parking for camper vans. The kind of permanence that only family homes can create and from which emanates a ritual power that is inscribed in the memory of their guests, one generation after another. That evening, my mother and I got out of the van looking so stylish that the occupants of the neighboring camper van mistook us for the backing singers of the group Emile et Images who were playing at the Eugénie-les-Bains celebrations. My grandmother would have loved it.