Christian Millau, a founder of the influential Gault-Millau restaurant guide, which led the way in making nouvelle cuisine a global force in the early 1970s, died on Saturday at his home in Paris. He was 88.

Côme de Chérisey, the managing director of Gault & Millau, announced his death.

Mr. Millau was an editor at the afternoon newspaper Paris-Presse in 1969 when he and one of his writers, Henri Gault, started Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Millau (pronounced go-mee-YO), a monthly magazine filled with restaurant reviews.

“We agreed on nothing,” Mr. Millau said in an interview last year for the Gault & Millau website. “Neither politics, nor religion, nor music. Nothing except taste.”

The upstart guide, aimed at younger readers with a yen for culinary adventure, took dead aim at the sedate Michelin Guide, which Mr. Millau liked to dismiss as “a telephone book.” He and Mr. Gault, who died in 2000, knocked revered dining establishments off their perch; elevated unknown, often humble bistros and cafes; and offered their readers freewheeling reviews, rather than Michelin’s terse lists of dishes.