Nouvelle Cuisine

Perhaps no trend in cookery has incited as much controversy and confusion as nouvelle cuisine, called “one of the splashiest social and artistic events of the postwar period” by the restaurant critic Henri Gault. Developed in France in the early 1960s and exported to America by the 1970s, nouvelle cuisine seemed a bit like pornography: hard to define, but people knew it when they saw it. Although it sounds trite (and a bit pompous) in retrospect, nouvelle cuisine was more an approach to cooking than a tightly structured cuisine. It encouraged each chef to invent personally distinctive dishes, artistically presented, showcasing the best-quality, seasonal ingredients.