Cuisine Minceur

I have just experienced two new treats: cuisine minceur, as cooked by its inventor, chef Michel Guérard, and Régine’s New York establishment, where Guérard recently spent a week in the kitchen. Régine’s is a restaurantdiscotheque gorgeously done up in silvery, shimmery Art Deco; stunning, extremely high-fashion girls flit around like exotic butterflies. Cuisine minceur is the new kind of French cooking that has stirred up such a commotion, here as in France; it means slimming cookery, as practiced in M. Guérard’s spa at Eugénie-les-Bains in southwest France, which, from what I hear, is an enchanting place where taking it off is a pleasure, not a sorrow.

What cuisine minceur boils down to is a removal of calories by using little or none of those sacred cows of haute cuisine—butter, cream, eggs, sugar, and flour—which make it so rich, albeit often so good. Within the last few years, it has occurred even to the great chefs of France that too much is too much. Thus the less elaborate nouvelle cuisine came into being, and is now practiced in most of the famous restaurants of France: simpler meals, less rich, lighter. Then came Michel Guérard, born in 1933, and undoubtedly the most creative and innovative chef of his generation.

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Nika Hazelton

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I have just experienced two new treats: cuisine minceur, as cooked by its inventor, chef Michel Guérard, and Régine’s New York establishment, where Guérard recently spent a week in the kitchen. Régine’s is a restaurantdiscotheque gorgeously done up in silvery, shimmery Art Deco; stunning, extremely high-fashion girls flit around like exotic butterflies. Cuisine minceur is the new kind of French cooking that has stirred up such a commotion, here as in France; it means slimming cookery, as practiced in M. Guérard’s spa at Eugénie-les-Bains in southwest France, which, from what I hear, is an enchanting place where taking it off is a pleasure, not a sorrow.

What cuisine minceur boils down to is a removal of calories by using little or none of those sacred cows of haute cuisine—butter, cream, eggs, sugar, and flour—which make it so rich, albeit often so good. Within the last few years, it has occurred even to the great chefs of France that too much is too much. Thus the less elaborate nouvelle cuisine came into being, and is now practiced in most of the famous restaurants of France: simpler meals, less rich, lighter. Then came Michel Guérard, born in 1933, and undoubtedly the most creative and innovative chef of his generation.