Haute cuisine
The elaborate, highly skilled cooking of top French restaurants and the tradition that grew from it.
Also: grande cuisine, fine dining
Haute cuisine is French for high cooking. It describes carefully prepared, finely presented food made by large teams of trained cooks using costly ingredients. It began in the kitchens of the French court and nobility and moved into restaurants after the French Revolution. Around 1900 the chef Auguste Escoffier set down its recipes and organised the kitchen into stations, a system still in use. Nouvelle cuisine in the 1970s made the style lighter and simpler.