nouvelle cuisine

American  

[noo-vel kwee-zeen] / nu vɛl kwiˈzin /

noun

(sometimes initial capital letters)

1. a modern style of French cooking that emphasizes the use of the finest and freshest ingredients simply and imaginatively prepared, often with fresh herbs, the artful arrangement and presentation of food, and the use of reduced stocks in place of flour-thickened sauces.

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nouvelle cuisine British  

/ ˈnuːvɛl kwIˈziːn /

noun

1. a style of preparing and presenting food, often raw or only lightly cooked, with light sauces, and unusual combinations of flavours and garnishes

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Etymology

Origin of nouvelle cuisine

Literally, “new cooking”

Example Sentences

It’s the moment when old-school French — think white tablecloths, heavy sauces and snooty maitre’d’s — faded into the background, allowing nouvelle cuisine and what we now call New American to take its place.

From Los Angeles Times • Mar. 19, 2026

He’s not one to complain in restaurants — imagine the despair it would cause — but Pépin is no fan of “punctuation cooking,” nouvelle cuisine run amok with squeeze-bottle calligraphy.

From Washington Post • Oct. 1, 2022

That changed in the early 1960s with the arrival of nouvelle cuisine, Mr. Pépin reckons.

From New York Times • Aug. 5, 2022

But, when I interviewed him in the nineteen-eighties, he took pains to distance himself from nouvelle cuisine.

From The New Yorker • Mar. 18, 2019

Bratovž is the godfather of nouvelle cuisine in the former Yugoslavia – the first to introduce carpaccio and rare steak to a land of delicious but well-done cutlets doused in cream sauces.

From The Guardian • Mar. 24, 2018