Nouvelle Cuisine is a term coined by two food critics Henri Gault and Christian Millau in France of 1973. Rooted from haute cuisine, nouvelle cuisine is evidently an evolution from traditional France. While haute cuisine describes the method and concepts of elaborate food preparation, meticulous and careful presentation of food, generally exchanged for a high price alongside expensive wines, nouvelle cuisine is a modern take of the former. For instance, haute cuisine invented the ideas of thickening sauces with butter, cream, or flour, but nouvelle cuisine offers a contemporary spin of the initial idea from haute cuisine, thickening sauces by reducing them or by the addition of pureed vegetables. Accordingly, nouvelle cuisine brought the emphasis of using less and lighter ingredients, producing simpler preparations that ultimately paved the way towards new cooking methods and equipment such as microwave ovens and sous-vide.
Nouvelle cuisine excited more than just the sense of taste, as skilled nouvelle chefs were meticulous and precise with their unique, artistic depiction of how their food was conveyed on the plate. To finish, nouvelle cuisine took advantage of oils and fresh herbs and spices to bring out various aromas, tastes and flavours of the dish, ensuring to leave both a first and lasting impression on the diner, thus not underselling the core meaning of novelty cuisine, as every bite, with the accompaniment of all senses, are involved and are as important with nouvelle cuisine.
References and resources:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878450X11000084
http://www.streetdirectory.com/food_editorials/cuisines/european_cuisine/what_is_nouvelle_cuisine.html