Obituary: : Joël Robuchon, chef

died August 6th 2018

Joël Robuchon, who has died aged 73, was by some measures the most successful chef of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He operated dozens of restaurants around the globe, which between them notched up 32 Michelin stars, the most ever accumulated by a single cook. The rival Gault-Millau guide named him “Chef of the Century” in 1989.

He chaired the committee for the Larousse Gastronomique, the essential guide to and arbiter of classical French cooking, and was widely acknowledged to have produced the best method and recipe for mashed potato – or at least for purée de pommes de terre, which is not quite the same thing.

Robuchon, while greatly admired by foodies, had, until the 1990s, little of the fame of the first generation of superstar chefs such as Paul Bocuse, Alain Ducasse, the Troisgros brothers or Louis Outhier, all of whom had trained directly under Fernand Point, and who collectively pioneered what became known as nouvelle cuisine.

He did not, for example, feature in the index or Who’s Who section of The Official Foodie Handbook of 1984, though his restaurant, Jamin, which had then just got its third Michelin star, was listed first in the suggestions for eating in Paris. But his subsequent reputation outstripped even the predictions of the cognoscenti.

Robuchon was perhaps the greatest of the post-nouvelle-cuisinards. He trained, amongst others, the young Gordon Ramsay, who annoyed the master enough to make him pitch a plate at his head. (Ramsay’s langoustine ravioli wasn’t up to scratch.)

Joël Robuchon was born on April 7 1945 in Poitiers, one of four children in a devout Catholic family. His father was a stonemason, his mother a cleaner. His family had no particular culinary background, and young Joël first realised his interest in food when, aged 12, he went to the Châtillon-sur-Sèvres seminary to train for the priesthood, but spent more time in the kitchen than he did on his devotions.

At 15, he left to become an apprentice pâtissier at the Relais de Poitiers and the following year won his first cookery competition, with a dish of stuffed hare. Always intensely competitive, at 21, Robuchon won a scholarship which enabled him to travel around France, learning regional specialities and in 1969 he won the Prosper Mérimée prize for cooking. At the age of just 28, he gained a post as head chef, at the Harmony at the Hotel Concorde La Fayette, and two years later won the Meilleur Ouvrier de France for his cooking.

He opened Jamin, his first restaurant, in 1981 in the 16th arrondisement. It won immediate plaudits from the Gault-Millau and its first Michelin star in 1982, adding a second the following year and its third the year after.

Robuchon’s talent was matched by his immense capacity for hard work and an attention to detail which bordered on mania, and led to his fearsome reputation. Robuchon claimed Ramsay was the only cook who had driven him to physical assault, but he had a reputation as a hard taskmaster. For his part, Ramsay claimed it would have been easier to serve with the SAS and that Marco Pierre White was, by comparison, a “f***ing pussycat”.

Robuchon’s culinary style was a step back from the minimalist excesses of nouvelle cuisine, focusing instead on quality ingredients – he believed four was the maximum – combined to produce hearty, intense flavours. For his potato purée, for example, he specified a kilo of ratte or Yukon potatoes brought to the boil in cold, salted water, then peeled and fed through a mouli-legumes. To this, he stirred in butter and then very hot full-fat milk, whisking assiduously, then salting again. His recipe specified 250g of butter; those attempting to reproduce his results at home found around twice as much was required.

In 1989, Gault-Millau named him “Chef of the Century”. A string of restaurants bearing his name opened up around the world. Of these, five held three stars at one time or another, an extraordinary achievement. Yet at the age of 50, in 1996, Robuchon astonished the culinary world by declaring his retirement from the kitchen. He maintained he had seen too many of his peers die early from overwork, strain and unhealthy living, and that he intended to spend time with his family and relax.

His retirement was somewhat half-hearted and short-lived, though he managed to lose a fair amount of weight and to calm down a little. He appeared regularly on the French television station TF1.

His travels fortified his view that Michelin Guide-style French restaurant dining, was excessively formal and stuffy. In particular, he liked the casual atmosphere of sushi bars and tapas restaurants and, in 2003, launched the first of his “ateliers” in Tokyo, where the customers sat at a bar with utilitarian crockery and the chefs in full view. There were no tablecloths, reservations or dress code.

He then reimported the idea to Paris, where even this pared-down notion of haute cuisine immediately picked up a Michelin star. Restaurants and bistros followed around the globe: he had three in Tokyo alone (with 7 stars between them), while in Hong Kong, even the atelier version of his brand acquired three stars.

Robuchon produced scores of cookbooks, in several languages. In English, Simply French (1991) by Patricia Wells, but drawn from his recipes, and The Complete Robuchon (2008) provide a sample of his best work.

He died following treatment for pancreatic cancer last year. He married, in 1966, Janine Pallix, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

Andrew McKie