Michel Roux Jr interview: ‘Restaurants may only open three days a week because staff won’t work the hours’

If you had strolled past the back door of 61 Lower Sloane Street in the summer of 1967 and timed it right, just as it swung open, you’d have been hit in the face by a tantalising cloud of browning butter and garlic. A new restaurant had just opened, the menus written in French, its food stylish, luxurious, full of flavour – a gamble in an era when the offering in most London restaurants was still largely beige and stodgy.

Michel Roux Jr. was seven when his father, Albert, and uncle, Michel – the Roux Brothers, as they were known – opened Le Gavroche; some of his first memories are of pushing through that back door after school and heading down into the engine room of a kitchen. “It was the smell and the heat of the kitchen, and then walking down the steps and it gradually getting hotter and hotter and noisier and noisier,” recalls Roux.

“All these unbelievable smells. Because the ventilation was terrible – the hot air would be coming up the stairs as if it was a chimney. And then getting to the bottom and seeing Dad and Uncle running around sweating. And Uncle invariably giving me a freshly cooked madeleine.”

It was the restaurant that fundamentally changed the way the British ate out in the Sixties, earning three Michelin stars, training chefs including Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing and Monica Galetti, and serving the late Queen on her 90th birthday. Roux captained the ship from 1991 until the very last service in January when, after losing his father and uncle in the pandemic, he served his final Soufflé Suissesse and closed the doors for good.

Now, on a sunny afternoon in Marylebone, he is preparing to begin again. It has been three months since Le Gavroche closed, and at the Langham on Portland Place, he is gearing up to take over the old dining room, to be renamed Chez Roux. The menu sounds unlikely – it’s to be short, simple, British, but with the occasional French tweak. Welsh rarebit, steamed pudding and cheeses from this side of the Channel will lead the way rather than the classic haute cuisine French fare he is known for (though the original grilled lobster with garlic butter from Le Gavroche will have a place, alongside four other mains). The aim isn’t Michelin stars – it’s good, hearty food. “No frills, no froths, no foams, no flowers. Not tweezer food.”

The concept, he explains, is “my childhood memories of food”. Roux was born and raised in Kent, where his father worked as a private chef to the Cazalet family at Fairlawne, a Grade I listed house in Shipbourne. “The style of food that my father was cooking at that time was very much for the private house. He was learning how to cook English dishes – these great British dishes such as steamed puddings and pies.”

Roux Senior fell in love with those nursery classics “when they were done properly”, foraging for walnuts on the estate to pickle and make his own walnut ketchup (a version of which will be on the menu at Chez Roux). “I suppose he did add a little bit of French technique to some great British classics. The family absolutely adored it – they loved Dad’s food and loved Dad.”

When Albert opened Le Gavroche with his brother, they were “pioneers”. “They were so brave back in 1967 to open up,” says Roux.

Nearly 60 years on, “brave” is how he describes anyone trying to open a new restaurant in 2024. British food might be unrecognisable from the days when it was regarded, he says, as “bland and brown and boring”, but the climate couldn’t be worse. “I really feel for anyone that is brave enough to open up a restaurant now. It’s incredibly difficult. The market is very very tough.”

The risk is lower, in some ways, for his new venture at the Langham – his name will be above the door, but it’s more of a takeover than a brand new opening. Roux will shepherd the existing restaurant into its new life, but he won’t be behind the stove as head chef. He was in the kitchen at Gavroche every day. Now, he says, “I’m not cooking everybody’s steak. But I still enjoy being in the kitchen with the team.”

At the time of Le Gavroche’s closure, he issued a statement saying that he was closing the doors to “make time for a better work/life balance, so I can spend more time with my family and on my other business ventures”. Given he is about to open Chez Roux and spent the Bank Holiday weekend working at his restaurant at the Newmarket racecourse, he isn’t exactly looking like a man who is slowing down.

“I’m still working on [it],” he laughs. “I promised that this time next year I will have nearly got there.”

Looking healthy and trim in a denim shirt and black jeans, Roux, 64, seems energised by his new project. He arrives at our interview in a private dining room in the hotel with a phone in hand, glued to his emails.

He is excited about his new menu, but ask him about the state of the industry he has lived and breathed all his life and his face changes. Across the industry, he says, footfall has “drastically gone down”. “People are very careful about what they spend, and quite rightly so.”

The UK “used to be one of the places where people ate out the most”. “It was 2.8 times a week. [...] Now it’s gone to just over once a week which is below the average of Europe.

“That’s [the] financial crisis. And that’s definitely hurting everybody.”

It means that however good the restaurant, the “customers are not there”, though if the bustling dining room in The Langham today is anything to go by, the hotel seems to be thriving. Generally, though, Roux says diners “have less to spend and there are less of them”. “And running a restaurant is just incredibly expensive. [...] To actually finance it – borrowing money is expensive, whereas it used to be quite cheap. In hospitality we’ve always had to deal with these hurdles, but it’s certainly got harder.”

He feels for his contemporaries who have had to close. “You hear of the amount of closures that are going on on a daily basis. And some very well-established names. Simon Rimmer up in Liverpool. His place had been there for nearly 30 years. I’m guessing the rent isn’t quite the same as Mayfair and if he can’t make ends meet up there you think, shit.”

Staffing is also a problem, says Roux. Even more so as a younger generation with a more dogmatic idea of what constitutes a work-life balance enters the workplace. Kitchens still run on a knife edge; restaurants have historically been built on the shoulders of chefs and front of house staff willing to be on their feet for long hours, six days a week. The real “problem”, says Roux, began presenting itself after the pandemic. “After Covid – and it’s not just in hospitality, it’s in lots of different careers and industries – people don’t want to work on the weekend. Don’t want to work unsociable hours, and would rather work delivering parcels as and when they want to. It’s as simple as that.”

Does he worry the next cohort of young chefs don’t want to slog it out as he and his peers did? “Just because I worked 80 hours a week or more doesn’t mean the next generation should,” he says. “Quite the contrary. That is something that we have to address in our industry. We could still do more. But it will mean ultimately that going out is going to be more expensive, and that maybe your favourite restaurant is no longer open seven days a week – it’s only open three or four days a week.

The industry is simply going to have to become “a lot more flexible”. “If somebody only wants to work three shifts a week, well, let’s make it work. That’s three shifts covered, I’ve got another four shifts, somebody wants to do four shifts. Ageism was a big thing in our industry as well. You had to employ youngsters. Why?”

Roux’s father died in 2021, his uncle the previous year.  He must miss them terribly. “There’s not a day where we don’t think about them.”

What would they have made, I wonder, of his decision to close Le Gavroche this year. “I did speak to Dad at length about the future before he passed away,” says Roux. “ I didn’t actually say I was going to [close] because I didn’t know what my decision was going to be, but we did talk openly about it. I know he would have been 100 per cent behind the idea.”

“One thing is for sure – he would not have wanted me to sell the business and the name. That is something which I would never do. And I’ve had ridiculous offers. But that would be like selling my right arm. No, it’s not for sale, at any price. I just couldn’t live with that.”

For Roux, home is a “nice-sized” flat in Clapham, where he has lived with his wife Gisele, who worked as the secretary at Le Gavroche, for 36 years. His daughter Emily is also a chef (she runs her own restaurant, Caractère, in Notting Hill with her partner Diego) and has two small children who he clearly adores. When you ask Roux about how he feels now what happened with the restaurant, so tied to both his family and his career, he seems visibly uncomfortable. There are “still very mixed emotions”, he says. “Sometimes very difficult to… to compute.”

He thinks about his Gavroche team a lot. “I’m constantly asking head chef Rachel and the office team to check up on everybody and see what they’re doing, how they are, are they alright? I had news this morning that one of them it’s not going very well where he’s working, he’s not very happy, so I’ll be having a word with him.”

He claims not to have had time to sit and think about it “in depth”, but it’s clear there is a certain amount of sorrow beneath it all. “It is tinged with sadness. But it’s also a weight off my shoulders. Running a Michelin-starred restaurant for so long really does take its toll. It’s very very hard, tiresome, and stressful.”

For years, marathon running was his way of dealing with the strain “for my mental health”.

“There’s the pressure of running a business, there’s the pressure of running a restaurant. Then there’s the pressure of running a Michelin-starred restaurant, then there’s the pressure of running somewhere like Le Gavroche. It had been open 57 years. So it’s huge.”

Would it be fair to add to that list the family name he also had to uphold? “Absolutely. Second generation, so it’s a huge…” he pauses. “Yeah, I mean when I first took over that was a huge responsibility, and that was very very tough because the old man didn’t want to let go. He said he’d retired but he hadn’t. [...] So it was very difficult. But I was at the helm for 35 years which is longer than my father was. And when I say that, that makes me think ‘wow’.”

It’s a “heck of a long time” to cope with that daily pressure, he says. “And it is – it’s daily. And dare I say even every breath. Sleepless nights and tossing and turning and thinking, was that right? Did I do this right? Can I do better? It’s just relentless.”

Was there financial pressure too? “No, Le Gavroche was doing okay and there was nothing untowards in that respect,” he says, though Brexit “certainly put a spanner in the works”. “Honestly, I think we could have carried on until I keeled over.”

Emily and Diego didn’t want to take it on. And so it was, quite simply, time. “I’m 100 per cent behind their decision, because they’re doing their own thing and they do it very well.”

He is clearly extremely proud of his daughter. “Her restaurant is called Caractère – character – for a reason. She’s got character.” It isn’t the easiest industry to be a woman, he says. “She certainly experienced that on her way up. But she’s a tough cookie, and she’s talented.”

However complicated his feelings around Le Gavroche, whatever challenges the industry is facing, there is undoubtedly energy behind a new opening, and Roux is still as excited about restaurants as ever, particularly in London which these days “rubs shoulders with Paris, New York, Tokyo as a place people look up to go and eat,” he says. Which does he consider the more interesting place to eat out at the moment, London or Paris? “London. Although Paris has changed immensely over the past few years. And strangely enough it’s because French chefs came to London and went back with lovely ideas.”

Restaurateur friends in France “got helped out a lot more during the pandemic – I mean a heck of a lot more”. The Government needs to support the British hospitality industry, he says. “They need to realise the hospitality industry brings in so much to the UK. I think I’m not mistaken in saying it’s the third largest employer.” British food used to be “the laughing stock”. “But now people come to London not just to go to the museums, they come to eat.”

At home, though, the French still eat better than the English, says Roux, who has a house in the Ardèche in south east France which he plans to spend more time in now. “We eat more fresh fruit and vegetables than in the UK and there’s still a market culture.”

He despairs at the state of the nation’s health here. “Ultra processed foods for me are the worst things you can put in your mouth. And the understanding of what processed and ultra processed food is – sadly, they tend to be the cheapest foods out there. Added sugar, added salt – that for me is worse than fats.

“For many many years we were told fat was what was going to make you fat. It was bad for you. So eat these other fats instead. And if you look at the label of any kind of processed vegetable fat it makes you shudder.

“Read a label and if there are words on there that you don’t understand then generally it’s not going to be that good for you.”

Fake meats – in his words: “bloody expensive”, “full of bizarre ingredients” and “ultra processed” – are a bugbear. “There must be a better way, and what’s wrong with just eating vegetables? Rather than eating meat substitutes, which I can’t get my head around.”

Roux himself is loosely flexitarian. “Not because I want to be [...] but just because I don’t think we need to eat animal protein every day of the week.”

He thinks healthy eating should be “taught from a very young age at school. I think it should be part of the curriculum. To get the message to kids what it is that they’re putting in their mouths. Children should “know how to cook. They should be taught maybe ten recipes, just basic. Even knowing how to cook an egg.”

His own grandchildren, Julian, four, and Luca, nine months old, have, as you might expect, discerning palates. “I wouldn’t be surprised if the eldest ends up being a chef. He loves his food, and he knows good from bad.”

Last year, Roux went back to Fairlawne, where he lived until he was not much older than Julian. “The garden is still there, the cherry tree is still there, and the front lawn.” Archive photographs of Fairlawne will hang in the new restaurant, along with a portrait of his father. I wonder if he feels, at 64, and with the behemoth that was Le Gavroche with its Michelin stars behind him, that he has already done his best work? He looks momentarily stumped.

“Yeah, what next? Do I really want to open another Michelin-starred restaurant? No. Do I still want to create lovely restaurants where people are happy and enjoying the moment? Yes. But I suppose most importantly do I want to be happy in what I’m doing? Yes. And where am I most happy…? It feels like I’m lying on a couch now.”

It sounds rather nice, this idea he could just be happy bringing people lovely, relaxed food. I’m not quite sure I buy it – Roux is clearly a perfectionist. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a day in the kitchen where I could say everything just went absolutely 100 per cent perfect,” he says.

“In some respects it’s a good thing but in others it’s terrible because it eats you alive. It’s horrible. But it does keep you going.”

We stroll over to the dining room. Roux has a few things to finish up before heading to meet his wife for dinner at a Portuguese restaurant in Battersea. “We’re definitely trying to catch up on eating out,” he says. He has more time on his hands now, and plans to spend it taking his wife out for dinner, enjoying the handiwork of other chefs, rather than sweating behind a stove.

He waxes lyrical about a little French place called Ploussard he discovered in Clapham recently. “It made me really feel positive about the restaurant industry. It’s a 30 seater – to see it busy, rammed… it’s been open a year now so they’re obviously doing okay. You think: okay, there’s hope.”

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