When chef John Williams first tasted sauce périgourdine at nineteen, he was captivated by the combination of earthy truffle, sweet Madeira and Port, and savory veal stock. “That experience has stayed with me nearly 50 years later,” he explains. “It was a defining moment of my life and relationship to food.”
At The Ritz in London, where he is executive chef, Williams makes a version of this, which “brings depth, luxury, and a signature character to the dish,” he says. 2025 was a momentous year for the restaurant—as it finally gained the two Michelin stars many felt warranted for a decade, and was awarded number one spot in The National Restaurant Awards—an indicator of the current appetite for classical French cuisine in the city.
“Sauces are central to this,” he says. “In French cooking, they are everything. They bring the components of a dish together and elevate the experience.”
The driving force in the mythos of French cuisine, a sauce can conjure olfactory loops and Proustian moments. A sublime sauce is pure alchemy, capable of delivering rapture. But just a decade ago, sauces like albufera, zingara, and Américaine were seen as relics—too rich, too baroque, and too labor-intensive for the produce-led minimalism that has come to define modern dining.
“For a long time, sauce was criticized, as it was associated with heaviness,” explains Arnaud Donckele, the executive chef of Plénitude in Paris, where sauces are given the spotlight. “It was neglected, as it was not considered a space for creativity.”
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Elaborate sauce-making declined under the bistronomy movement’s simpler ethos, rising health consciousness, and the New Nordic insistence on ingredient purity—ripples of influence that extended far beyond Paris and Copenhagen. But above all, it was about the cost—of time, labor, and precious ingredients.
Yet in recent years, something shifted. Classical French cuisine found a new audience across London, Paris, and New York—and once-fusty sauces were something worth naming on the menu again. Today, a new generation of chefs is returning to the craft of sauciering. From airy emulsions and shimmering sabayons to seductive béarnaise and brooding demi-glace, classic French sauces are reappearing—not just in fine dining restaurants and traditional bistros, but also in natural wine bars and small-plate restaurants.
64 Goodge Street in London is one of the city’s newer restaurants that has a menu built around the architecture of sauces. A lobster vol-au-vent might feature the coral tye-dye luxuriance of the crustacean’s tail and claw, and a quail forestière might include meat cookery that’s technically dazzling, but on eating both of these dishes, it’s the velvet restraint of an umami-sweet sauce Américane, and the corrupting depth of the foie gras-layered sauce albufera that linger on the tongue and etch into memory.
There are seven sauces like that at the restaurant, and each one takes a minimum of two days. Chicken bones go into the oven on Tuesday night, and the sauce is built up over Wednesday, Head Chef Stuart Andrew explains. The albufera, for instance, starts with wing stock enriched with drumsticks, shallots, and button mushrooms, plus two bottles of Madeira reduced to a single glass with vinegar. Finally—to achieve its sensuous lushness—caramelized foie gras is blended with cream and the chicken reduction, finished with Chardonnay vinegar, white pepper, and salt.
Some dishes don’t carry the French names of their sauces, like a dish of brill, shellfish, and Breton cider, where sauce Normande could just as easily have been mentioned. When they are named, the aim is to seduce with a touch of whimsy and decadence. “I think in some ways it’s a nod to the past, but it s also, it sounds a little bit, for want of a better word, camp,” Andrew explains. “These grandiose sauce names are a sort of direct contrast to some of the minimalist menus from ten years ago.”
It’s not merely a marketing ploy, though. In a dining culture shaped by efficiency and the chase for Instagram-ability, the return to intricate, laborious sauciering feels almost subversive.
At Plénitude, Donckele takes things a step further, treating sauces as the “verb” of French cuisine. He’s built on Yannick Alléno’s mid-2010s innovations, like concentration and cryo-extraction, a technique that uses extreme cold to capture and intensify flavors.
His elaborate preparations—often aged like vintages and served in carafes tableside—are the center of the dish, not its accompaniment. “My true passion is sauce,” he says. “It is the art of blending, a little like grape varieties. At Plénitude, we understood that we could infuse, harmonize, and find a delicate balance.” They create broths, emulsions, and sabayons, with new tools allowing them to give even more light-footedness to their preparations. “Guests are more receptive today,” he reflects, “as sauces have gained in lightness and subtlety—they are even floral.”
The exciting thing about sauce-making in Paris today is that it doesn’t always follow the formulaic canon of Larousse Gastronomique. With Plénitude leading the charge, it’s now evolving into something far more fluid, expressive, and cross-cultural. At Maison Sota, for instance, Japanese chef Sota Atsumi dresses a courgette and green bean salad with sauce albufera, while Korean-born chef Jihyun Kim, who is opening Ébène later this year, combines vegetable-led cooking with sauciering and subtle Korean flavors, with dishes like grilled baby gem, bone marrow sauce Bordelaise, and rhubarb-apricot cheong.
Sauce is also making its way back to the center of bistros, as bistronomy returns to its classic roots. “Sauces resonate so strongly in the bistro context—this is where the great French preparations began and where they belong,” says Alice Newman, head chef at Cadoret. “At Cadoret, I think beautiful sauces made with care elevate dishes and ground the restaurant in tradition.” Her approach begins by drawing on the canon of L’Aide-Mémoire Culinaire by Auguste Escoffier, then layering in unexpected flavours to classic sauces—like verbena-infused béarnaise, and jus de viande spiced with Kampot pepper.
Not everyone is leaning into elaborate complexity. As the revival pollinates kitchens, debates stir over the quintessence of a sauce. One Paris chef at Geoélia pursues sauce fundamentalism, using only animal bones—no vegetables, and minimal aromatics. “It s the same as oak with wine,” he says, noting it can distract from the raw material.
While London leans classical and Paris experiments and renews, New York embraces both approaches. Le Coucou helped lead the charge with its success in the late-tens, with newer openings like Essential by Christophe, and Le Veau d’Or pushing it forward more recently — the latter serving old-school dishes like veal with sauce moutarde.
But at Daniel, obscure sauce-making has continued to remain central, with the red wine sauce served alongside a paupiette of sea bass 30 years ago still featuring on the menu in reinvented forms.
With the five classic mother sauces forming the “DNA” of the restaurant, you’ll now see variations like black garlic bordelaise and sauce oseille (a creamy sorrel sauce), or lièvre à la royale in game season. “The trend of classic cuisine is ‘indémodable’ and forms the foundation of our culinary approach,” says Daniel Boulud, the restaurant’s chef and owner. “It will always serve as a guideline for current and future chefs to express their creativity.”
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This is what’s happening at new openings like L’Abeille and Maison Passerelle—which are framed by French sauces, but where sauce serves as a vessel for individual expression. Earlier in his career, culinary director of Maison Passerelle Gregory Gourdet worked as a saucier at classic New York-French restaurant Jean-Georges. He remembers the moment the kitchen stopped adding butter to the sauces—an early realization that tradition can be kept and modernized at the same time. Sauce, he discovered, is “a vehicle to incorporate dimension, flavor, acid, heat,” and an “integral part of a dish, oftentimes reinforcing flavor.”
At Maison Passerelle, classic French jus are transformed through the prism of the French diaspora, the ethos of the restaurant. Poured tableside, duck jus delivers a zingy lift from tamarind, while veal jus unfurls in layered notes of Haitian coffee, cinnamon, star anise, and vanilla alongside steak frites.
As for their revival, “there’s an element of comfort and nostalgia, and people appreciate that right now in a very tense world,” Gourdet says. In an era of speed, technology, and abstraction, the return to sauces offers something visceral and human—a reminder of the value of patience, and the hand that stirs the pot. “People are coming back to that knowledge-based learning through repetition, which is very tangible,” Andrew adds.
The resurgence of French sauces is more than gustatory—it’s a statement about heritage and the craftsmanship of cooking. Across London, Paris, and New York, chefs are reviving century-old recipes while embracing innovation, rediscovering what the French have known all along—and can get away with saying. "A sauce is a state of mind, a sensitivity,” Donckele adds. “It is the infinite unknown, touching on instinct."