Scarpetta 's comfortable, warmly lit dining room with its retractable roof offers an eye-opening Italian take on eclectic nouvelle cuisine.

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His speechwriter, Mark Salter, prepares him elegant texts that he stumbles through like a man of homely tastes choking on nouvelle cuisine.

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But he was drawn to nouvelle cuisine, favoured by GaultMillau (which may have made its recent criticism hard for him to take).

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Here, too, there was a backlash in the last quarter of the century, with the birth of nouvelle cuisine, the rise of celebrity chefs and the proliferation of ethnic restaurants serving dishes from all over the world.

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Nouvelle cuisine especially impressed him.

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