In 2006, when Rachel Khoo moved from her home town of Croydon to Paris, aged 25, she had a dream. “Me, racing around Paris on the back of a scooter, chasing after a mysterious, handsome French guy, skipping stones on Canal Saint-Martin.” She roars with laughter. “I’d definitely watched Amélie too many times.”
Khoo spoke no French (not even GCSE) and had only a tiny amount of savings. Her plan was to work as an au pair while studying patisserie at Le Cordon Bleu.
For this she’d quit her seemingly fabulous job as a PR for the shirtmaker Thomas Pink. Her immigrant parents — her dad’s Malaysian, her mum Austrian — were worried. “I’d been ticking all the boxes parents love — on track for promotion, a secure financial future. But I knew in my gut that if I didn’t leave right then, I’d stay in London and never, ever get out of my comfort zone and have adventures, and everyone should have as many adventures as possible while they’re young.”
Adventures there certainly were. After six years of grafting, Khoo also achieved international fame through her pop-up restaurant in her minuscule flat in picturesque Belleville. Two customers a day would squeeze into the 22 sq m space to lunch on the likes of blanquette de veau prepared on two gas rings and tartelette aux pommes baked in the toaster oven.
La petite cuisine à Paris was the hottest ticket in town, namechecked in The New York Times, fully booked within seconds of each new release. Khoo went on to star in the hit BBC2 show The Little Paris Kitchen, while the accompanying cookbook was an international bestseller, optioned by a large French publishing house. “Not even [the American French-cookery writer] Julia Child had that,” Khoo says.
Now 45, Khoo lives in a seaside village near Malmo, Sweden, with her Swedish husband, Robert Wiktorin, and three children aged nine, seven and three. Over two decades there have been countless more TV shows, cookbooks and cooking collaborations. For the past three years she has been judging The Great Australian Bake Off: “My kids say, ‘Mum, your job is eating cake and crisps.’”
As upbeat as ever, still with her trademark red lipstick (more on which later), Khoo is sitting in the recently opened central London branch of her friends’ Middle Eastern restaurant Honey & Co. She’s in town to mark the publication of her memoir (interspersed with recipes) The Smallest Restaurant in Paris. “It’s not exactly Eat Pray Love, more Eat Bake Make with a French flag and lots of Croydon sass. I’m celebrating the pleasures in the small things Paris taught me: grocery shopping, queuing up for the cinema on Sunday night or sitting by the canal with everyone drinking their aperitif. There’s so much darkness in the world right now, it’s nice to keep it light.”
Khoo’s new bookMarie Constantinesco
Still, Khoo doesn’t gloss over the harder times. “Everyone has this Emily in Paris vision — you can show up in Paris, learn no French and live in a glamorous apartment, wearing fabulous clothes. But for the first three years I was Rachel No-Mates, broke, the Parisians were rude, and when I stopped au pairing I was living in the banlieues with no fridge and sleeping on a mattress on the floor.”
Armed with her patisserie diploma, Khoo hustled relentlessly as she tried to make headway in the competitive world of food styling. “I did anything and everything to pay bills,” she says. She juggled teaching English, working in an art gallery and selling Comme des Garçons perfume at Printemps department store, where a colleague introduced her to Chanel Rouge Coco Flash lipstick: “When I wore it, my sales went up, so it became an integral part of my branding.”
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The turning point was finding a job at a cookery bookshop. “I’d attend all the book launches and produce my card: ‘Hi, I’m Rachel! Do you need somebody to work on your cookbook?’ I just had that determination. A friend compared me to one of those little dogs, tiny [she’s 5ft 2in] but ferocious.”
Social media was in its infancy; Khoo was an early adopter of the likes of MySpace, where she blogged about her culinary triumphs — and fails (“People liked those more”), building a global following. “Back then it was easier, you did a lot more in the real world. Now there are so many platforms — I have so many friends doing similar work to me who have burnt out because they have to keep feeding them all.” Plus, back then there was little trolling. “As a young woman I would have struggled mentally dealing with that.” Is she often trolled? “I get a lot of dirty comments. Things people definitely wouldn’t say to my face at an event.”
Shopping in a Parisian marketMarie Constantinesco
She was already a foodie, but Paris took Khoo’s gourmandise to the next level. She straight away realised how seriously Parisians took food when the family she was au pairing for failed to collect her from Gare du Nord station because they’d gone to the other side of the city hunting for “the best” foie gras.
“The eight-year-old I was looking after told me off for eating baguette in the street and for cutting cheese wrong — you had to cut it so you got a bit of its heart and a bit of the outside to get all the flavour. I felt so awkward.”
Unlike in the UK, eating well felt accessible to all. “Even on my au pair wage, I could find a nice piece of cheese, seasonal fruit and vegetables. The wine guy would grill me about my cheap bottle, asking what I’d be eating with it, telling me when to take it out of the fridge. If I bought a croissant, I learnt to only waste calories on one that left butter grease stains on its paper bag. It makes the mundane so much more elevated than going to the supermarket and staring at food in plastic wraps.”
Khoo’s pop-up, one of the earliest of its kind, came about after she signed a book deal and needed recipe tasters. She’d roll up her futon to make room for a dining table. “There was the odd American couple saying, ‘We’re on our honeymoon.’ I said, ‘I can’t hide in the bathtub, we’re eating together.’”
Everyone advised her the best way to learn French would be to meet a Frenchman. There were a few liaisons, “but they were all hopeless. This isn’t a story about romance. I knew back then that my career would reward me more.”
In fact, love came later, unexpectedly in 2014 when her Swedish friend Thomasine Barnekow, glovemaker to the likes of Beyoncé and Rihanna, introduced her to Wiktorin. Pros of Scandi life include its family-centred culture and everyone speaking English; cons are the long, dark winters.
“It suits me now, but who’s to say, I might be living in another country in 15 years times,” Khoo says. “I’ll never want to stop experiencing life. I’d tell anyone with no responsibilities to get out from behind their screens and do the same. What I did in Paris was so hard but so worth it.”
The Smallest Restaurant In Paris by Rachel Khoo (Maison Khoo £18.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
Dining and Cooking