Michel Bourdin, maître chef de cuisine at The Connaught hotel in London for 26 years and one of the last exponents of the grand French hotel gastronomy established by Escoffier, has died at the age of 80.

Bourdin, who grew up between Paris and Normandy and retired to Grasse in Provence, was a traditionalist much loved by the younger chefs he trained. His favourite ingredient was the truffle, and his seven-course truffle dinners that opened with a truffle-infused cocktail were the stuff of legend.

Although Bourdin maintained he was happy to retire in December 2001 at the relatively early age of 58, Harden’s expressed outrage at his departure in the next year’s guide, under the headline ‘Vandals at The Connaught‘.

Its restaurant was, we wrote ‘in a very real sense the living embodiment of the grand Victorian dining room. If it needed anything, it needed evolution not revolution. Yet crass short-termism has robbed London of one of its few great culinary institutions. If this was Paris, there would have been rioting in the streets...’

Bourdin, whose half-brother Guy Bourdin was a leading and often provocative fashion photographer, was a co-founder of Britain’s Academy of Culinary Arts and a prime-mover behind its promotion to a ‘Royal Academy’, putting his profession on a level with the Royal Academies of Art and Music. An unabashed royalist from a republican nation, he was thrilled when the late Queen Mother opened his revamped kitchens at The Connaught in 1992.