nouvelle cuisine

Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented.

He’s not one to complain in restaurants — imagine the despair it would cause — but Pépin is no fan of “punctuation cooking,” nouvelle cuisine run amok with squeeze-bottle calligraphy.

That changed in the early 1960s with the arrival of nouvelle cuisine, Mr. Pépin reckons.

This was the man often credited with spearheading “la nouvelle cuisine” in the early 1970s — lighter, more sensual fare that, as Bocuse once said, liberated food from “lots of sauces hiding the ingredients.”

This movement became known as nouvelle cuisine and was championed by a new guide that hoped to overthrow Michelin’s regime.