Le Gavroche

Coordinates: 51°30′39″N 0°9′18″W / 51.51083°N 0.15500°W / 51.51083; -0.15500

Le Gavroche (The Urchin) is a restaurant at 43 Upper Brook Street in Mayfair, London. It was opened in 1967 by Michel and Albert Roux although the original premises were at 61 Lower Sloane Street until 1981.

Overview

The restaurant offers classical French food, although some dishes come with something of a modern twist. Notable dishes are Soufflé Suissesse (cheese soufflé baked on double cream); Le Caneton Gavroche (whole poached duck in a light consommé served with three sauces for two); and Omelette Rothschild.

Albert's son Michel Roux Jr is the current chef patron having taken over the kitchen in 1991. Under his stewardship Le Gavroche has been consistently placed in Restaurant's Top 50. The current head chef is Rachel Humphrey.

Chefs who have worked in the kitchen of Le Gavroche include Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay, Marcus Wareing, Bryn Williams, and Michael Smith.

Le Gavroche is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having served the most expensive meal per head when three diners spent $20,945 on one meal (including cigars, spirits, and six bottles of wine costing $19,248) in September 1997.

Gavroche

Gavroche Thénardier (French pronunciation: ​[ɡavʁɔʃ]) is a fictional character in the 1862 novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. He is a boy who lives on the streets of Paris. His name has become a synonym for an urchin or street child, in French gamin. Gavroche plays a short yet significant role in the many musical adaptions of Les Misérables, sharing the populist ideology of the Friends of the ABC and joining the revolutionaries in the June 1832 rebellion.

Gavroche in the novel

Gavroche is the eldest son of M. and Mme Thénardier. He has two sisters, Éponine and Azelma, and two unnamed younger brothers. Hugo never provides his given name but says Gavroche has chosen his own name. His parents show him no affection and send him to live in the street, where he is better off than at home.

The Thénardiers sell (or lend) their two youngest sons to a woman named Magnon.

Due to a freak accident, the two boys are separated from Magnon without identification, and encounter Gavroche purely by chance. They are unaware of their identities, but Gavroche invites them to live with him and takes care of them. They reside in the hollow cavity of a giant elephant statue, the Elephant of the Bastille conceived by Napoleon as a fountain, but abandoned unfinished. This was no imaginary construction; located at the Place de la Bastille, it had been designed by Jean-Antoine Alavoine. The two boys soon leave him the next morning. They are last seen at the Luxembourg Garden retrieving and eating discarded bread from a fountain. It is unknown what has happened to the two after that.