Michel Roux’s wife, he says, wasn’t convinced when their only daughter, Emily, wanted to follow her old man into the family business. “Giselle told her: ‘Look at your dad! He’s always tired. He’s grumpy! He spends all day Sunday sleeping. He stinks when he comes home! Look at his hands!’” The chef himself was more philosophical, bowing to the inevitable. “Cooking is what we Rouxs do.””
The proof of that particular millefeuille is Caractère, the smart Notting Hill restaurant in a former corner boozer in which he and I are having lunch. Emily is in the kitchen, with her husband, Diego Ferrari – former head chef at Roux’s own restaurant Le Gavroche. Emily and Diego opened Caractère in 2019, and they are showing particular devotion to duty today, Michel suggests, because it is their son’s third birthday. Emily is too busy at work on her perfect desserts to come out and chat with her dad, but a couple of times she forwards pictures of his grandson, eating birthday cake at nursery, from her phone. Does he show signs of the family passion for puddings? “He does seem to have a bit of a taste for it, yes.”
If Michel thinks back to his own madeleine memories of his own formative years, it is inevitably food that is the trigger. “My first real memory I think is at five or six and Dad [Albert Roux] was making vanilla ice-cream,” he says. “He had a creme-anglaise custard flavoured with fresh banana. And that was poured into a cast iron cylinder which had wooden paddles, and that was put into a wooden pail with crushed ice. In my memory I was turning the paddle, though probably with a bit of help. And then I distinctly remember that first delicious scoop of churned ice-cream.” Before that, he says, in the black and white pictures of him as a toddler he is always playing with pots and pans rather than cars and toy soldiers, and bits of dough, rather than plasticine.
His daughter was the same. Despite her mother’s misgivings, there was never any doubt what she would do. They educated her palate from a young age, at home and in Michelin-starred restaurants around the world. There was nothing she didn’t eat, from highchair onwards – tripe sausage, smelly cheese, braised ox cheek in red wine. If restaurants didn’t welcome toddlers then the Rouxs didn’t go. Emily would have a starter, then disappear under the table for a nap.
Emily is now 32. The menu at Caractère shows some of the influence of that rarefied growing up, mixed with that of her Italian husband. We are presented with a delicious procession of signature dishes – pasta-like strands of celeriac in a sauce of pecorino romano and parmigiano reggiano, Cornish cod with delicately stuffed morel mushrooms, a work-of-art banana and caramel tart. Michel Roux’s English becomes a little more French-inflected when he talks about food: “She knows what I like,” he says.
On TV, he often seems genially self-contained, someone who has overcome a natural shyness, but as he sits and eats he is quite emotional about the generational progression that this restaurant represents. In particular because in the last couple of years he and his cousin, Alain, have both lost their fathers, and taken full possession of the businesses they created together – Le Gavroche and the Waterside Inn, at Bray.
Albert Roux, the elder of the brothers, died a little over two years ago. After the most convivial of lifetimes he could hardly believe he had been confined to quarters by the pandemic. “There was no doubt. For Dad, lockdown was very, very difficult,” recalls Roux. “He couldn’t really get his head round it. It was incredibly painful to witness. He would say, ‘Why the hell am I here?’ And, ‘I’ve had enough of this.’ By which he meant he’d had enough of life.”
It’s 30 years since Albert handed over the reins of Le Gavroche to his son, but every dinner service remains something of a homage to what the brothers originally created. “We have third generation guests coming in to order the cheese souffle,” says Roux. “Which has been on the menu for 50-odd years.” Michel – he dropped the “jnr” part of his name on the death of his uncle – learned from his father the importance of in-person hospitality, the sense of a restaurant as part of the family. He is a youthful 63 now, but rarely misses a shift at the restaurant.
He still also delights in telling the origin story of how the two brothers who grew up in a family of charcutiers, raised mostly by a formidable mother, came to London in the 1960s and brought French cooking with them. Many of the luminaries of the subsequent English restaurant revolution earned their spurs – and their stars – in the kitchen of Le Gavroche – Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Monica Galetti.
One stands out to Roux, in retrospect. “Both Marco and Gordon were exceptionally gifted chefs,” he says “but I didn’t work that much with Marco. Gordon was there for several years when I was head chef. And I can happily say hand on heart that Gordon was the most naturally gifted cook I ever saw coming through. An incredible talent.”
Having been at that vanguard of that golden age of British cooking Roux expresses some anger and sadness at the current existential struggles faced by the British restaurant industry. “When you talk about what my father and uncle achieved, and what happened after that, in the 1990s,” he says, “it’s hard to avoid the B-word – Brexit – when you look at the situation today.”
Since the pandemic he has been unable to restart a lunch service even at Le Gavroche with its two Michelin stars and its loyal clientele. Some of that, he suggests, is the demise of the long City lunch, but primarily it is a lack of staff. Many of his young chefs and waiters went home and have not returned. “We’re seeing more young Brits coming through the ranks, front of house,” he says, “which is great, and if they are good they climb the ladder incredibly quickly.” But what has been lost is that ease of cross-Channel cross-fertilisation, the depth of experience that young chefs and waiters can gain by working in France or Italy – as the likes of Ramsay did – as well as the movement in the opposite direction.
“We now have to get a work permit for individuals – that costs about £5,000 before you start. That’s bonkers,” says Roux. “I know for a fact that if freedom of movement was reinstated tomorrow, I could fill the 15 vacancies I need to reopen for lunch, probably within a week. But what really upsets me is that a whole generation of British talent can no longer go to Europe and knock on a door and pick up a job, like just about all the Michelin-starred chefs in the UK did at one time.”
In this regard he is especially grateful that his parents insisted he take up dual nationality in his teens – even though it meant he had to go and do a year’s national service in France. To be fair, the posting he ended up in was not the most arduous of all possible billets: he was recruited to the kitchens of the Élysée palace, where he provided for the banquet tables first of Giscard D’Éstaing and then of François Mitterrand. (Everyone assumed, he recalls, that there would be greater parsimony in the latter’s incoming socialist administration, “but far from it …”).
His daughter, Emily, also used her dual nationality to gain experience abroad and met her husband while working alongside him in the kitchen of Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV restaurant in Monaco. The only aspect of her family’s traditions that she is yet to acquire is a Michelin star or two, but you don’t have to eat many courses at Caractère to know that the accolade is surely only a matter of time. “I’m obviously biased,” says Michel, “but,” he gestures at his marvellous pudding, “I think I can be objective enough to think – come on …”
Before we have a chance to express that in person, Emily and Diego are hurrying out to make it to the nursery gates in time to pick up their son. As Michel also knows better than anyone, you have to squeeze in as many family moments as possible, before dinner service swings into action.
