ALBERT ROUX was the godfather of modern British cuisine. When he and his brother Michel arrived in Britain, it was to a drab culinary landscape where even the finest restaurants competed on the elegance of their service rather than the quality of their cooking. The brothers were to change all that. In 1967 they launched the legendary restaurant Le Gavroche, where imaginative ingredients combined with exquisite technique to create an entirely new sense of what food could be.
Le Gavroche became the first restaurant in Britain to gain first one, and soon three, Michelin stars. It was the place to be: film stars, rock royalty, actual royalty, came flocking, and regulars included everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Princess Diana.
The brothers did not stop there, opening a string of daring and award-winning restaurants from whose kitchens an entire generation of star chefs emerged
- Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Marco Pierre White, Rowley Leigh and Monica Galetti among them. The Roux legacy changed the way we think about food.
Albert passed away in 2021, but not before setting down his story. From a wartime childhood in rural France where love, danger and scarcity taught him respect for the simplest ingredients, through an apprenticeship in the exacting world of the Parisian pâtisserie, military adventures in Algeria, and formative encounters in British domestic service, here in his own words is the journey of British cooking's greatest pioneer, a visionary who transformed the tastes of a nation.