If you like your stories simple, then dismiss news of the impending closure of Le Gavroche as nothing more than a small, painful rupture in Mayfair’s luxe economy. A restaurant, famed for its cream-boosted soufflé suissesse and its butter poached lobster, where the bill for dinner will break £150 a head without pausing for breath, shuts its doors in January after 56 years. People with deep pockets, big appetites and a taste for the old things done very well, will mourn.
I’m one of them. I was fortunate to attend a couple of Gavroche events, where there was no bill. But I was also equally fortunate to be able to slap down the plastic and wait for it to combust in payment for my own dinner. I never begrudged a penny of it, for woodcock served in the traditional style, or an Omelette Rothschild, as fluffy and sweet as an icing sugar-dusted summer cloud. The three-course lunch deal (ended by staffing issues related both to Brexit and the pandemic) was famously one of the best value in London. I have always loved the hilariously plump room; a space that held the world at bay. Chef-patron Michel Roux, who took over from his father 34 years ago, lightened the food but somehow managed to keep Le Gavroche very much itself.
Roux says he’s closing because running such a restaurant is exhausting. He has been in charge for longer than his father, who died last year. At 63, there are other things he wants to do: businesses to run, events to stage in the Gavroche name, books to write. His daughter has her own restaurants, and without a Roux at the helm it isn’t Le Gavroche. Better to go out on a thumping high. In a business as capricious as hospitality, endurance should be celebrated.
But there’s another way of telling this story. Le Gavroche can close now because its job is done. It was never just a restaurant. It was a school. Various establishments were vital to the food revolution in this country: places like George Perry-Smith’s Hole In The Wall in Bath, Joyce Molyneux’s Carved Angel in Dartmouth, and Sharrow Bay in the Lakes. But Le Gavroche, the first to win one, then two, then three Michelin stars, stands proud among them. It blew on the flickering kindling of an interest in good food in this country; celebrated it for its own sake.
Equally, the roll call of those who worked there is extraordinary, from Rowley Leigh to Monica Galetti, Pierre Koffmann to Jun Tanaka, Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Bryn Williams and so many more. Some opened equally fancy restaurants, but they also created many much less formal places, and trained up their own brigades who went on to train others. A restaurant family tree with Le Gavroche as its trunk would be a mighty oak indeed. Some will now dredge up a story from a few years back around wages, quickly settled. And yet the family has inspired huge loyalty. Many have worked for Le Gavroche for decades. Michel Roux has promoted more women in the male-dominated world of classical restaurant kitchens than most.
Talking up the inherent value of an undeniably expensive, old-school Michelin-starred restaurant during a cost of living crisis is a challenge. Still, I’ll have a crack. We really can hold more than one thought in our heads at the same time. We can care about social justice while also giving a damn about our cultural life; about the things that make life better. A thriving restaurant sector is a key part of any country’s cultural life. Le Gavroche played a vital part in creating ours.
