“Don’t call me ‘chef’, that’s not my name,” quips Helen Darrose, a reaction she has when people address her using her profession as an honorific.
However, most will be in awe of someone who has won six Michelin stars, is a cornerstone of the French edition of the culinary competition “Best Chef” and who was named the best female chef in the world in 2015 by the annual “Top 50” list.
Nearly three decades after she burst onto the culinary scene as a rising — and rare female — star, Darroze’s recipe for success remains unchanged.
“Be honest with the product, work with local foods and seasonality,” she says. “My job is to put the product at its best, around taste and emotion.”
That’s what she credits to a meteoric rise that began long before she arrived in Paris a quarter of a century ago to open her first eponymous restaurant, now called Marsan par Hélène Darroze after its 2019 renovation.
A 1990 graduate of the Sup de Co business school in Bordeaux, she had her sights set on hospitality management, but her experience in Alain Ducasse’s Louis XV kitchens at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo led her to turn to kitchens.
Five years later, she took over the mantle of the family restaurant “Chez Darroze” in southwestern France. Nominations for Young Chef of the Year and Great of Tomorrow from foodie guides followed within 12 months, and in 1996 she was chosen to serve lunch to then French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl.
At Hélène Darroze in the Paris district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, she dazzles with ingredients from the southwestern regions of France transformed into a gourmet yet elegant dish. The first Michelin star came in 2001, the second in 2003, but was lost in 2010.
“Nothing is won,” she says. “Every day is a new day to question ourselves and that’s what we do.”
But the restaurant’s post-pandemic reopening brought change — and the return of that second star in 2021.
“It’s a result of maturity,” she feels.
And this makes Marsan not only the “restaurant of her dreams”, but also the core of her group, which includes the Parisian bistro Jòia, her one-star Michelin restaurant at Villa La Coste in Provence and the three-star “Hélène Darroze at The Connaught” in London. where she also oversees every culinary aspect of the property.
Then, as now, her philosophy is simple.
“I cook as a woman, as a mother – for generosity, for happiness – not to show off or to be the best at [a] technique,” she says. “I just cook to please people.”
And that led to a challenge she shares fondly: getting her team to call her “Ellen” rather than Chef. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to get my employees to call me by my first name,” she says.
But after two decades since her name was spelled out literally and metaphorically, the restaurant reopened as Marsanne, the name of the southwestern French region that encompasses the town where she was born and where four generations of her family have been established as restaurateurs since 1895 . over here.
“I really felt like I had to change the name,” she says. “It was my way of paying homage to my roots, my family.”
For all the Michelin stars she’s earned, Darroz’s trajectory is one of “no professional life and no personal life,” so intertwined are the two realms.
This was evident in her first book, an autobiography of sorts, published in 2005; it came with love letters and recipes, and friends tried to dissuade her from publishing it. “It was so personal, they felt it opened me up to criticism,” she recalls.
And the kitchen, in all its establishments, remains at the center of family life, as it has been for generations of Darrozes.
Her daughters Charlotte and Quiteri, now 16 and 14, spent many moments after school or on Saturday nights sitting in their mother’s office, watching the ballet unfold in the kitchen.
“So many days, nights, moments – even my parents spent many Christmases in my office in Connaught – there’s a mix of everything,” she recalls. “My girls were talking about it recently and there was regret in their voices.”
If each opening is a professional milestone, Darroze is more inclined to talk about what she’s learned from them. Take Jòia, which she opened in 2018. “For me it was a new way of cooking, of welcoming people,” she says. “It was the first time I interacted with bistronomy rather than fine dining.”
The same is true of her latest project, which saw her take on the culinary direction of La Grande Brasserie and La Grande Table Marocaine, two of the restaurants at the famous Royal Mansour Hotel in Marrakech.
On paper, they promise an intoxicating journey through French and Moroccan cuisine respectively. On Darroze’s Instagram, her experience reads like a great journey through the recipes and know-how of the female chefs she met and the country’s produce. “I’m coming back as an apprentice to learn,” says the chef.
The participation and transfer of knowledge led her to the French edition of the culinary competition “Top Chef”.
Initially reluctant to join the judging panel—she lived in London and wasn’t much of a TV watcher—she joined when the production explained that it wanted culinary leaders to serve as coaches, not judges, and really connect with the contestants.
“It was an opportunity to do my job in a different way,” she says. “I also accepted because it was something new and different and funny in my career, but mainly because it was for broadcasting.”
What prompted her to join the 15th season, on French screens from mid-March and her ninth appearance, is that the two-month shoot became “a matter of friendship, of surrender and a little interlude in my daily life”. she says. “And with [fellow chefs] Dominic [Crenn] and Stephanie [Le Quellec]that’s just the icing on the cake.”
Then there is something to share with the candidates. Hearing Danny Kezar, a finalist from the 2023 edition, say that Darroz made him understand the importance of emotion and displaying that little more than stellar technique moved her.
“I was very happy to hear that because I believe that cooking with your heart is much more important than cooking with your skills.”
