Out went expensive ingredients like lobster, turbot and truffles; they were replaced by dishes like roast lamb with curry, mango and lemongrass and monkfish with Spanish mussels and green curry.

“We do things with sardines that will make you forget turbot, and at one-tenth the price,” he told The Times in 2006.

Business boomed. Michelin, ignoring Mr. Senderens’s wish to drop out of the race for stars, awarded the restaurant two.

In 2013, Mr. Senderens sold his shares in his namesake restaurant, which is now once again known as Lucas Carton.

Alain Senderens was born on Dec. 2, 1939, in Hyères, east of Toulon, and grew up in Maubourguet, near the Pyrenees. His father was a barber, his mother a dressmaker.

After earning a secondary school diploma in Labatut-Rivière, he apprenticed in the kitchens of the Ambassador Hotel in Lourdes and then made his way to Paris. In time-honored fashion, he worked from station to station — salad chef, sauce chef, fish chef — at La Tour d’Argent and Lucas Carton. When Hilton opened a restaurant at Orly Airport outside Paris in the mid-1960s, it installed Mr. Senderens as sous-chef.