Star chef married ‘natural products with one another’
Roger Verge, who died on June 5 at 85, was, with Paul Bocuse, Michel Guerard and Pierre Troisgros, one of the most influential French chefs of the 20th century, as well as one of the founding fathers of la nouvelle cuisine.
The movement began in the 1960s as a radical departure from the strictures of the heavily sauced Escoffier canon that had become predictable at best and boring at worst. However, la nouvelle cuisine did not really have a name or identity until the French food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau published the Ten Commandments of the movement in the October 1973 issue of Gault-Millau magazine.
The chefs of the new movement specialized in creating more delicate dishes with an emphasis on artistic presentation. At his three Michelin-starred 70-seat restaurant Le Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes, opened in 1969, Verge developed the Cuisine de Soleil, introducing flavours and ingredients he had encountered on his travels around the world.
In his cookbook Cuisine of the Sun (1978), Verge explained that his technique consisted of “marrying natural products with one another, of finding simple harmonies and enhancing the flavour of each ingredient by contact with another with a complementary flavour.”
Verge, who was born April 7, 1930, reigned at Le Moulin for more than 30 years, earning a three-star Michelin rating in 1974. So popular was the restaurant in its heyday that during the Cannes Film Festival season, customers would line up outside until well past midnight. Prices were, of course, astronomical.
Unlike many of the nouvelle cuisine chefs who followed, Verge was not a sensation-seeker and by the mid-1980s the excesses of some adherents of the movement led him to suggest that it had lost its way.
“It is a joke,” he told an interviewer in 1985. “It is nothing serious. Now it looks Japanese: large dishes, small portions, no taste, but very expensive.”
Much of what Verge and his colleagues stood for, however, was assimilated into mainstream restaurant cooking, while many of the ingredients and techniques in 21st century gastronomy that people take for granted — fresh foie gras, wild mushrooms, extra virgin olive oil, white truffles and Asian spices — were popularized by nouvelle cuisine.
Verge is survived by his wife Denise, by their daughter and by two daughters of an earlier marriage.