Pierre Troisgros, restaurateur and leading figure of the nouvelle cuisine movement – obituary

Pierre Troisgros, the restaurateur, who has died aged 92, was one of the last of the generation of young French chefs whose names became associated with the “nouvelle cuisine”, the aesthetic approach to cooking which ejected heavy sauce-laden, garnished classical fare from the temple of Gallic gastronomy.

His cookery book of the same name, co-authored with his brother Jean (who died in 1983) and translated into English by Caroline Conran (Macmillan, 1980), encouraged adventurous British cooks to try their hands at everything from partridge with green lentils to salmon escalopes with sorrel (saumon à l’oseille).

The latter, a small fillet of salmon barely cooked with a chiffonade of sorrel, became so famous a “signature dish”, that when the mayor of Roanne decided that the railway station across the road from the three Michelin-starred Restaurant Troisgros needed to be repainted, the colours chosen were pink for the salmon and green for the sorrel.

In fact the Troisgros brothers (Pierre, the chef, roly-poly, mustachioed and outgoing, and Jean, the master saucier, skinny, bearded and solemn), were mainly concerned with making the traditional dishes of Lyonnais cuisine better, rather than changing them for the sake of novelty. The exception was saumon à l’oseille, a clear precursor of nouvelle cuisine which justified their inclusion in the ranks of the nouvelle cuisine chefs.

In recounting his invention of the dish in the 1970s, Pierre Troisgros would always credit the Teflon-coated frying pan with making it possible; before that, a chef would have had to use oil in an iron pan, which would have affected the clean flavour of the fish and sauce.

For Pierre was always open to new approaches and techniques. His fellow star chef Michel Guérard recalled how, one afternoon in the late 1960s, Pierre phoned him in great excitement to tell him that had “plated” (i.e. assembled) a dish in the kitchen.

Until then, convention demanded that cooked ingredients be taken out of the kitchen on silver platters and plated in the dining room. Pierre’s change, quickly adopted by others, shifted the balance of power from the waiters back to the kitchen, refocusing attention on the food rather than gastro theatre.

In 1974, wanting to find a new way to cook his foie gras, which shed 30 to 50 per cent of its original weight in cooking, Pierre enlisted his neighbour and fellow chef Georges Pralus to help. Pralus found that by wrapping the foie gras in layers of plastic then poaching it at 65 C, quality, consistency and yield improved, with the foie gras losing only five per cent of its weight. The introduction of what became known as “sous-vide” alerted other chefs to the benefits of low-temperature cooking.

Pierre Troisgros was not a sensation-seeker and, unlike other chefs associated with nouvelle cuisine, resisted the temptations of celebrity. The story was told of how, when Restaurant Troisgros won its third Michelin star in 1968, Pierre, aware of how much more stressful it would be retaining the three stars than it had been winning them, observed grimly: “C’est une catastrophe.” (In fact it has retained its three star billing until the present day.)

Under his down-to-earth stewardship, Restaurant Troisgros never outgrew its regional identity and was notable as the only three-star in France with a public bar, where people could walk in off the street and have a drink.

He always enjoyed chatting with diners who appreciated his keen sense of humour – an American restaurant critic and regular client recalled being greeted by Pierre scat-singing a personalised version of the Marseillaise.

While he stayed out of the kitchen most of the time after his son Michel took the reins in the 1990s, when Michel was away he would always help out “so there will be a Troisgros in the kitchen, as always”, as he put it.

The second of three children, Pierre Troisgros was born on September 3 1928, two years after his brother Jean, in Chalon-sur-Saône, Burgundy, where his parents, Jean-Baptiste and Marie, owned and ran the Café des Négociants.

In 1930 the family moved to Roanne, in the Loire region, where they bought the Hôtel-Restaurant des Platanes opposite the railway station.

Jean-Baptiste and Marie Troisgros were entirely self-taught, and, even before the nouvelle cuisine movement got going, their cuisine placed the emphasis on bringing out the flavour of good local produce – eels, river fish, young vegetables and simple meat and game dishes. “Our father, Jean-Baptiste Troisgros, always said that cooking should be a carefully balanced reflection of all the good things of the earth,” the brothers recalled.

Jean and Pierre both entered the kitchen at the age of 15 and before taking over the family restaurant in the mid-1950s spent 10 years travelling from kitchen to kitchen throughout France mastering the culinary arts. They trained with Paul Bocuse at Lucas-Carton in Paris and in the early 1950s went to work for Fernand Point at La Pyramide in Vienne near Lyon, the longest running Michelin three-star restaurant in the world and a place where the dictums of classic cuisine were giving way to lighter, spontaneous cooking.

“The Points [Fernand and his wife Marie-Louise] took French cooking from the era of the horse and cart to the automobile age,” Troisgros recalled. “Fernand was the first to go against Escoffier. While everyone else was stuffing fish with heavy, old-fashioned mousse, Fernand used fresh vegetables. While the rest of the world used heavy flour sauces, Fernand used butter. He was a revolutionary.”

To relieve the pressures of kitchen discipline, the Troisgros brothers developed a reputation as practical jokers. Once they painted the postman’s bicycle pink while he enjoyed a glass too many as Point’s guest.

On another occasion they dismantled the grandstand for Vienne’s Bastille Day parade and put it back together the wrong way round so that the spectators faced away from the marchers.

Back in Roanne, with Pierre and Jean in the kitchen and their father Jean-Baptiste as butler and sommelier, the Restaurant Troisgros began notching up the awards.

It won its first Michelin star in 1955, its second in 1965 (by which time it was known as the Frères Troisgros), and its third in 1968. In 1972 the brothers were awarded the title of “Best Restaurant in the World” by Gault Millau.

From 1983, following the death from a heart attack of his brother Jean, Pierre Troisgros ran his restaurant with his son Michel and daughter-in-law Marie-Pierre, formally handing over the reins to Michel in 1996.

In 2017 Michel and his sons Cesar and Leo moved the restaurant to new premises at Ouches.

In 1955 Pierre Troisgros married Olympe Forté, an Italian woman he had met in Paris. She died in 2008 and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter, all of whom became successful restaurateurs.

Pierre Troisgros, born September 3 1928, died September 23 2020