Alain Senderens, a Chef Who Modernized French Food, Dies at 77
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Version 0 of 1. Alain Senderens, one of the most adventurous of the founding fathers of nouvelle cuisine, who made L’Archestrate and Lucas Carton in Paris two of the world’s most celebrated restaurants, died on Sunday at his home in St.-Setiers, a village in south-central France. He was 77. Gilles Pudlowski, a food critic and guide writer, announced the death to Agence France-Presse, which did not report the cause. Like his fellow culinary explorers Michel Guérard, Paul Bocuse and Pierre Troisgros, Mr. Senderens (pronounced sand-RAHNS) envisioned a more modern version of French cuisine, less reliant on buttery sauces, more international in spirit and more insistent on high-quality, fresh ingredients. “I, like other chefs, didn’t want to do traditional cuisine anymore,” he told The Unesco Courier in 2001. He put his ideas into practice at L’Archestrate, a seven-table restaurant that he opened in 1968, naming it after Archestratus, a gastronome of Greek antiquity. Dishes like lobster with white peaches and cooked oysters with leeks enchanted critics and earned him a Michelin star in his first year. In 1978, Michelin awarded him three stars. His experiments could entice and, on occasion, shock. Baked lobster in vanilla sauce — “a triumph of taste over logic,” the restaurant critic Craig Claiborne called the dish in The New York Times — was regarded as scandalous when introduced in 1981. So was the use of soy sauce in a beurre blanc, an idea inspired by a trip to Asia in 1978. Two years after taking over the kitchen at the venerable Lucas Carton in 1985, Mr. Senderens introduced menus that suggested wines by the glass to accompany each dish, an innovation that soon became standard at restaurants around the world. Ignoring the rule that cheeses demand a red wine, he appalled some critics by suggesting a white Vouvray to go with a goat cheese from Touraine. Adding insult to injury, he flippantly remarked, “Nine times out of 10, a red wine doesn’t work at all.” In 2005, Mr. Senderens acquired majority ownership of Lucas Carton and reopened it under the name Senderens, cutting prices by two-thirds, doing away with tablecloths, simplifying the menu and giving back the restaurant’s three stars to Michelin. “I dialed down the tra-la-la and the chichi,” he told the magazine Le Point, arguing that modern diners had grown weary of excessive luxury. Out went expensive ingredients like lobster, turbot and truffles; they were replaced by dishes like roast lamb with curry, mango and lemongrass and monkfish with Spanish mussels and green curry. “We do things with sardines that will make you forget turbot, and at one-tenth the price,” he told The Times in 2006. Business boomed. Michelin, ignoring Mr. Senderens’s wish to drop out of the race for stars, awarded the restaurant two. In 2013, Mr. Senderens sold his shares in his namesake restaurant, which is now once again known as Lucas Carton. Alain Senderens was born on Dec. 2, 1939, in Hyères, east of Toulon, and grew up in Maubourguet, near the Pyrenees. His father was a barber, his mother a dressmaker. After earning a secondary school diploma in Labatut-Rivière, he apprenticed in the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel in Lourdes and then made his way to Paris. In time-honored fashion, he worked from station to station — salad chef, sauce chef, fish chef — at La Tour d’Argent and Lucas Carton. When Hilton opened a restaurant at Orly Airport outside Paris in the mid-1960s, it installed Mr. Senderens as sous-chef. He opened L’Archestrate on Rue de l’Exposition, near the Champ de Mars, and moved in 1971 to Rue de Varenne, near the Rodin Museum. By then, he had emerged as a driving force in nouvelle cuisine. “Almost nothing on L’Archestrate’s menu is available anywhere else,” the restaurant critic Raymond Sokolov wrote in The Times in 1972, singling out the restaurant’s tête de veau en tortue, or mock turtle, for special praise. “This is the epitome of an artificial dish constructed wittily out of almost gross materials.” Immediately after Mr. Senderens assumed command at Lucas Carton, the restaurant recovered the three stars it had first earned in 1933, buoyed by innovative dishes like warm foie gras in savoy cabbage and duck Apicius, a signature that Mr. Senderens invented after being challenged by two magazine editors to prepare a menu based on ancient Roman cuisine. The duck was poached in a caraway-accented vegetable broth, crisped and lacquered with a spiced honey glaze and served with compotes of quince and prunes. The wine-pairing menu evolved from a setback in the early days of L’Archestrate, when Mr. Guérard turned up for lunch and informed Mr. Senderens that the food was extraordinary but that the wine list was — here he used an unprintable term — less than adequate. Stung, Mr. Senderens embarked on a strenuous program of self-education, taking courses in Dijon and Bordeaux and developing a close relationship with the wine expert Jacques Puisais. Mr. Senderens trained a long list of top chefs, notably Alain Passard, who took over L’Archestrate in 1985 and reopened it as L’Arpège, earning three Michelin stars in 1996. His other protégés include Alain Solivérès (Taillevent), Christian Le Squer (Le Cinq) and Christopher Hache (Hôtel de Crillon). In 1981, Mr. Senderens became a consulting chef at Maurice, in the Parker Meridien hotel in Manhattan, and named Christian Delouvrier, who had cooked under him in the late 1970s, his lieutenant in the kitchen. Mr. Delouvrier went on to earn four stars from The Times at Lespinasse in the St. Regis Hotel in 1994. Mr. Senderens was the author of “The Three-Star Recipes of Alain Senderens: The Extraordinary Cuisine of L’Archestrate, the Most Prestigious Restaurant in All Paris” (1982), written with his wife, Eventhia; “The Table Beckons: Thoughts and Recipes From the Kitchen of Alain Senderens” (1993); and, most recently, “Alain Senderens and Jérôme Banctel in Your Kitchen” (2012), a collection of homey recipes written with his wife and Mr. Banctel, his executive chef at Senderens. |