The Story of Roger Vergé: The Chef Who Brought Sunshine to French Cuisine is the latest episode in the Fabulously Delicious Story of French Chefs series — and it tells the full story of one of the most important and most joyful figures in the entire history of French gastronomy. Roger Vergé, founder of Le Moulin de Mougins on the Côte d’Azur, creator of cuisine du soleil and one of the founding fathers of nouvelle cuisine, is a chef whose influence shaped an entire generation of cooks — and whose name deserves to be far more widely known than it is.
We start at the beginning — Commentry in central France, the blacksmith father, the aunt Célestine who gave a five year old boy a wooden bench so he could stand next to her at the stove and watch her cook. From there we follow Vergé through his classical training in Paris at the Tour d’Argent and the Plaza Athénée, his extraordinary years working in Morocco, Algeria and Kenya, and the experiences that gave his cooking a perspective completely unlike anyone else in his generation. In 1969 he opened Le Moulin de Mougins with his wife Denise — a converted seventeenth century olive oil mill near Cannes — and within five years it had all three Michelin stars.
The chefs who trained at the Moulin de Mougins went on to define fine dining across the world — Alain Ducasse, Daniel Boulud and David Bouley among them. We cover the full story of the restaurant, the cooking school Vergé founded to share his cuisine du soleil philosophy, and the extraordinary 1982 project that saw him partner with Paul Bocuse and Gaston Lenôtre to open Les Chefs de France at Walt Disney World’s Epcot Center in Florida — bringing serious French gastronomy to an audience that would never otherwise have encountered it. Because Roger Vergé believed that French food should be for everyone.
He retired in 2003 and died in June 2015 at his home in Mougins, aged 85 — in the village he had made famous, where the sunshine was always brightest. The Gault Millau described him as the very incarnation of the great French chef for foreigners. His own description of his cooking was simpler and more beautiful — cuisine heureuse, happy cooking. This episode is the full story of the man behind that philosophy, and why French gastronomy was warmer for his presence in it.
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