We’ve Never Had It So Good
Michel Roux says the British food landscape is unrecognisable from the early days of his family business
By Michel Roux
October 17 2024
It’s a time I’ll never forget. A story that showed, demonstrably, that British produce had undergone a revolution. My old man [the late Albert Roux], in the months before he passed away in January 2021, would ring me with his shopping list and send a car round to Le Gavroche — the restaurant he started with my uncle Michel in 1967 — to collect everything. This time, in addition to the usual vegetables and fruit and maybe some lamb, he asked me to include a little cheese. “I want some blue cheese,” he growled down the phone. So I added a cheese I had recently come across; a rich and creamy cheese, like a Gorgonzola, but an English one, called Beauvale. And while it might sound French and was inspired by the rich and buttery cheeses of Europe, it’s actually produced in Nottinghamshire. He called me up later. “Bloody hell, that blue cheese was good,” he said. “Where is it from?” I told him it was English and he started swearing. He didn’t believe me. In fact he didn’t believe me for days, and not until I had visited him at home and showed him the invoice. It goes to show how much produce has changed in this country — and no one appreciated that more than him. When he and uncle opened Le Gavroche, British produce was dire. They had to smuggle goods across the Channel and I remember friends and family from France frequently visiting us at home in Kent.
Sure, Dad grew vegetables and fruit and reared chickens and rabbits, caught fish, and even gathered snails, but the real food, the treats, arrived when uncles, aunts, and grandparents visited. They would open their suitcases and out tumbled garlic sausages and ripe Camembert, stinky cheeses and special butters. And so Albert and Michel struggled in the late Sixties and Seventies. As a young chef working in the kitchen, I could hear them cussing and swearing down the phone at farmers and producers. “This isn’t good enough, we need to do better,” they said, because they wanted to source British ingredients and support British farmers. While they knew there would always be some items to import — olive oils, poultry, duck — they wanted British meat and vegetables. But you literally couldn’t get a tasty carrot, only those massive, overgrown donkey carrots. They tasted woody and the leaks were worse. Yet they persisted. It was a slow process but they helped it happen: they helped to create a revolution. And today, as people look back at the influence of my Dad and uncle, they always talk of how the Roux brothers raised the bar in British catering, how they trained generations of chefs, how they taught people to cook beautiful food and how they also helped to make British produce great.
As a chef, I have witnessed those changes, relished the improvements, and am dazzled at, for example, how the British cheese industry is now so extraordinarily good. My love of British produce persists to this day, particularly as I have worked with so many suppliers over the years and I appreciate the difficulties they face. The struggles of the hospitality industry — every hour of every day, month, and year — are even tougher for food producers and suppliers, with diminishing margins and impossible pricing competition from imports. I’ve watched with great sadness as many, particularly fish merchants, have gone out of business. There is much to celebrate, however, especially when it comes to British game which, from grouse to venison, is the best in the world. I love cooking with it: it’s something we should all celebrate, although as a country we don’t eat enough of it. Venison, for example, is lean, good protein and eating it helps farmers as deer roam the land in far too large numbers, with detrimental effects to land and woodland.
As I prepare our catering businesses for the summer season, I’ll see a large number of customers for the first time since we closed Le Gavroche in January of this year. I know they’ll want to talk about Le Gavroche, but there’s something exciting that they’ll be eating and that’s what I want to talk about: strawberries. They are the most delicious British fruit and they’re at their best during the Wimbledon fortnight, when I’ll be cooking for tennis lovers. But I’ll also be eating the strawberries. In fact I’ll pig myself on them. I’ll live off them! When they’re perfectly ripe and just picked, they need nothing more than a good dollop of cream, not even sugar. And that’s the sign of great produce, when the chef doesn’t need to do too much. That’s something, given my family’s influence, that I’m deeply proud of: that we’ve helped support fine British produce, so a chef like me need do nothing but stand back and let Mother Nature do the talking.
