“Little Paris Kitchen” means success for the British chef

From au pair to TV chef of the moment, Rachel Khoo has come a long way since landing in Paris from London six years ago, armed with a French schooling and a love of cooking. With a best-selling cookbook and a BBC series, The Little Paris Kitchen, now under her belt, the 31-year-old looks well-placed to be the next big thing on the TV chef scene. Or rather, the next little thing. For Khoo’s newfound fame comes courtesy of the micro-restaurant the man-filled brunette ran in her tiny 21 square meter studio in the city’s bohemian Belleville district. Hosting AFP at the small apartment, Khoo explained that her gem was a side effect of research for what would become the recipe book “Little Kitchen in Paris”, her third after two volumes of cake recipes for a French publisher. “It was because I’m single! I live alone and if you test 120 recipes — there’s so much food that goes to waste,” she said. “I wanted to be able to test recipes, not waste food and have some money to cover the ingredients.” So last January, the young chef decided to tap into the worldwide trend for home restaurants. Very popular with hipsters in the past few years, these lunch or dinner clubs see amateur chefs play chef at their tables for invited guests in exchange for a donation to cover costs. There was no shortage of Parisians willing to help with the scraps of her experiments in bringing a British twist to the Gallic classics. Dishes such as croque madame muffins made with Anglo-style sliced ​​white bread and French lamb stew with quintessentially English mint sauce were so popular that word of mouth and blogosphere buzz soon had people clamoring for a seat at her table. Despite the fact that even after folding her sofa bed to make room for the table, Khoo could only accommodate two guests at a time, 1,000 people joined her mailing list. “It kind of went crazy,” she said. “Some people were so desperate to come here, it was unbelievable. People were sending me their life stories, saying please let me come, it’ll make my week — it’ll make my year!” On the back of this success, a deal with the BBC followed, and Khoo’s Anglo-French fusion dishes are also proving a hit with British audiences, with the series debuting with one and a half million viewers. Her cookbook, published last month, went to number one in the UK hardback charts last week and has been translated into nine languages. Khoo has had to put her kitchen on hold for now as she embarks on a book tour of Europe. Raised in the London suburb of Croydon, the daughter of an Austrian mother and a Malay-Chinese father, Khoo studied at the prestigious Central Saint Martins art college before deciding to follow her dream of living in Paris. Once there, she became an au pair and worked in a cookery bookshop, before enrolling at the Cordon Bleu school in the capital to study pastry. Central to her gourmand concept is the simplicity of recipes and decor — Khoo can touch both walls of her kitchen if she stretches out her arms and gets flawless food on a double-burner stove. Khoo believes much of her appeal lies in her shabby-chic approachability, a good proposition for a lifestyle show during a recession. Pointing out the cracks in the kitchen ceiling and her old stove, she says she wants to “show people that you don’t need an amazing kitchen to cook delicious French food.” And with the French version of the book due out in October, bringing her little adventure into the kitchen, she laughed that her proudest achievement so far was “being an English girl telling the French how to cook !”