Hélène Darroze’s office in the basement of The Connaught hotel feels more like a cubbyhole than the centre of operations of a three-Michelin-starred chef. Nevertheless, she has made the tiny space feel like home.
Behind her desk is a picture frame holding snapshots of the two daughters she adopted from Vietnam and the sons of her brother Marc, the CEO of Darroze Armagnac. Books from the world’s greatest chefs – Michel Troisgros et l’Italie, Pierre Koffmann’s Memories of Gascony – stand wedged on shelves between lever-arch files of admin and French-English dictionaries. The Landes-born chef might be far more fluent in English than when she opened Hélène Darroze at The Connaught in 2008, but her pronounced Gallic accent will still be recognisable to anyone who has seen the film Ratatouille, in which the character of chef Colette was based on Darroze.
Needless to say when there’s a plaque for three Michelin stars half hidden among the cookbooks, Darroze’s office catering is a step up from a builder’s brew and biscuits. Gyokuro green tea from Japan is poured from a glass teapot into a blue-patterned Hermès cup and saucer, while a smartly suited waiter brings a plate of freshly baked canelés, the fluted vanilla pastries that are a speciality of southwest France, here laced with Armagnac instead of rum. As ever with Darroze, fine-dining finesse is combined with a comforting flavour of home.
In wine, this attachment to a sense of place would be called terroir. Does Darroze think the term applies to food as well? ‘For sure,’ she says, pushing her glasses over her head as a makeshift hairband. ‘But what do we mean by terroir? Is it simply the quality of the soil? For me, it also means the culture of an area.’
It is not the chef who is the star but the produce
How does Darroze define that culture? ‘It is much bigger than what’s on the plate,’ she says. ‘It’s about sustainability and the environment. But it’s also about your individuality reflecting the place where you were born. I grew up in a family of chefs in an area of France that is rich not only in local produce but also in sharing the local cuisine around the table.’
Darroze, 58, was born in Mont-de-Marsan, the capital of the Landes department, surrounded by the vineyards of Bas-Armagnac. She grew up in nearby Villeneuve-de-Marsan, where her father Francis ran the family restaurant, L’Auberge Le Relais, opened by Darroze’s great-grandfather in 1895. Francis wasn’t only a Michelin-starred chef, however. He founded Darroze Armagnac in 1974, though it was food not drink that really caught his daughter’s attention each morning as she watched fish from the local rivers and lamb from the surrounding fields delivered to the restaurant door.
Every Wednesday, Darroze would accompany her grandfather Jean – who had won the restaurant two Michelin stars – to the weekly market in Villeneuve, renowned for the quality of its milk-fed veal and duck destined for confit de canard. ‘I grew up in an environment where farmers would share their best produce,’ Darroze says. ‘It’s in my DNA. You cannot be a good chef without a good supplier. That is so obvious to me that it almost doesn’t need saying. It is not the chef who is the star, but the produce.’
Darroze lists corn-fed Landes chicken – ‘Very different from the one from Bresse’ – line-caught fish from the Atlantic coast and white asparagus among her favourite items from southwest France. ‘I’m very lucky, because these are amazing ingredients that are recognised all over the world. They are what I grew up with and what I am most used to cooking with. I’ve spent years building relationships with my suppliers, who are like my family. Without them, I would never be the chef that I am today.’
Yet despite the passion for ingredients instilled in her from an early age by both nature and nurture, Darroze graduated in business studies from Bordeaux Business School rather than going straight into a chef apprenticeship. A restaurant kitchen was never far away, however, and it was while working in the office of Alain Ducasse in 1990 that the man often called the godfather of French gastronomy spotted Darroze’s potential and encouraged her to start work as a chef at his three-Michelin starred Le Louis XV in Monaco.
Three years later, Darroze returned to Villeneuve to take over the family restaurant, maintaining its Michelin star, before spending her life savings to open Restaurant Hélène Darroze on Rue d’Assas in Paris’s sixth arrondissement in 1999, winning two Michelin stars after four years.
The chef marked the restaurant’s 20th anniversary in 2019 by reopening after an 11-month refurbishment as the 30-cover Marsan. Why the new name? ‘To honour my family,’ Darroze explains, ‘but also to honour the place where I was born and raised. Villeneuve-de-Marsan is where I learned about hospitality, generosity, quality, respect, authenticity and the desire to be the best and please people.’
Darroze describes Marsan as ‘the mothership. Everything I have achieved is because of this restaurant.’ That includes the five Michelin stars for Marsan and The Connaught and another for Hélène Darroze à Villa La Coste, a luxury hotel set within a sculpture park and the Château La Coste vineyards near Aix-en-Provence.
Darroze was admitted into the Légion d’Honneur in 2012 – the French equivalent of a knighthood – for a hospitality portfolio that now also includes the Jòia bistro in Paris and two restaurants at the Royal Mansour hotel in Marrakech. She also describes Marsan as ‘home’. Mementos of her life are on display everywhere in the restaurant – not just the expected Hélène Darroze cookbooks and Darroze Armagnacs for sale but a black-and-white portrait of the young Hélène in a floppy chef’s toque, framed reviews of the family restaurant clipped from old guidebooks, photos of Darroze’s daughters as young girls on holiday and drawings they did of their mother.
Charlotte and Quiterie – now 16 and 14 – are a presence on the menu, too, in a signature dish called Le Retour de Hanoi, a consommé of wild shrimp marinated with Thai basil, spring onions and lemon caviar. The menu describes it as ‘like a Proust madeleine’, a conduit for arousing nostalgic associations through food. What memories does it provoke in Darroze?
‘I created this dish when I came back from Hanoi with my baby for the first time. There was a little restaurant near my hotel where I would eat pho every night. And the pho was extraordinary,’ she says, her voice faltering with emotion. ‘When I created the pho dish, it didn’t feel calculated. It felt instinctive. Two years later, just before I returned to adopt my second daughter, I dreamed that the restaurant had been demolished and a tower put in its place. And I was so sad,’ she says, her eyes filling with tears.
I sense that Darroze’s ability to be moved by a dream she had almost 15 years ago comes from the same instinctive urge as her need to pay tribute to what the pho represents for her. ‘When I went back to eat the pho, it was one of the best days of my life. The waiters came to see my baby; they understood that it was an adoption and that she was going home with me. I had become a mother, and everyone was so happy for me.’
My team’s happiness comes from that creative process
Travel has always been a touchstone for Darroze’s creativity. The dish that appears in all her restaurants is a tandoori of carrots, coriander and pepper in a rich beurre noisette sauce, inspired by a holiday to India 20 years ago. But the dish has become specific to each location: lobster is the focus in Paris, scallops in London, wild prawns in Provence and lamb in Morocco. ‘More than ever, my concern is to work with local producers,’ Darroze says.
For instance, she and her executive chef at The Connaught, Marco Zampese, have a motto of ‘Seek and ye shall find’, replacing French produce wherever possible with the UK equivalent and adapting dishes to British ingredients. One of the few things Darroze insists on importing is the poulet des Landes. ‘I have never found a chicken of the same quality,’ she says, ‘so we bring it over.’
‘My team’s happiness comes from that creative process,’ Darroze says, ‘whether it’s working on new dishes, a new step of service or how to change the guest experience. Running the business would be meaningless to me without that creativity.’ Zampese has been with her since starting as a sous chef at The Connaught in 2014, as has Thomas Pezeril, now executive chef at Villa La Coste; both chefs are instrumental in devising new dishes for each restaurant. ‘But if I’m being totally honest,’ Darroze adds, ‘90% of the creativity at Marsan is down to me. I’m not ready to delegate that yet, because Marsan is my home. As long as I’m in Paris, I am in Marsan. Last night I was at the pass until 10:30.’
The St-Germain restaurant recently celebrated its 25th anniversary. Its relaunch as Marsan is the most obvious change over the past quarter of a century, but how has Darroze herself evolved? ‘These past 25 years have been so important to me,’ she says. ‘I opened the restaurant when I was 32. I’ve changed so much because of the responsibility I have to this restaurant – as a chef, of course, but I’m also much more mature as a woman and as a businesswoman.’
Darroze often talks in specifically feminine terms: her life as a businesswoman, Marsan as the mothership, the Moroccan women cooks who have inspired her menus at the Royal Mansour. In March, she attended the Parabere Forum in New York, an annual gastronomy summit for women in hospitality. But it is not only Ratatouille that has immortalised Darroze as a symbol of female culinary achievement. The week before we met, she was at a dinner in Paris with Mattel, the manufacturer of Barbie; in 2018, a chef’s-whites-clad Darroze was created in doll form to illustrate the Barbie motto that ‘you can be anything’.
What’s more, Darroze was named Best Female Chef at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants ceremony in 2015. Such gender-specific awards, however, are coming under increasingly negative scrutiny. When the 2025 Michelin stars for Britain and Ireland were announced in February, a film celebrating women chefs provoked an open letter to The Daily Telegraph from 70 female chefs calling for an end to gendered awards and the eradication of sexism in hospitality.
Darroze says that she has never experienced sexism herself, but she equally admits that she was initially regarded as ‘a curiosity.’ When she won two Michelin stars, she says the French press chose to focus on her, ‘a 30-year-old blonde lady’, rather than the new three star in the guide, Le Cinq. But she points out that she was awarded the stars because the restaurant deserved it – and not because she was a woman. And she insists that her career came with difficult decisions. She waited until she was 40 to adopt her first daughter because she was building her business. ‘That wasn’t a sacrifice, it was a choice.’
Have things changed now? ‘There are not enough women in hospitality,’ Darroze says. ‘But is it because men are keeping the doors closed? I don’t think so. It takes a lot of work to reach this level of fine dining: you can’t go out with your friends every night; you are not at home to read the bedtime story. I’m not sure how many women are ready to make that choice. I think a lot of women put restrictions on what they are prepared to accept as happiness. But you can find a balance.’
One senses that Darroze hates restrictions. She gets bored with signature dishes. The pho has only recently reappeared following a long absence from the Marsan menu after Darroze discovered a shellfish supplier from Le Grau-du-Roi near Montpellier with the quality of prawn required to evolve the dish. Another signature dish of oyster tartare began life in a Martini glass topped with caviar jelly. Now it is presented as a bowl of oyster with cocoa-bean velouté, and the caviar is eaten off the hand. ‘It’s like a game for guests,’ Darroze explains.
The guest who was most impressed by the dish was three-Michelin-starred chef and nouvelle-cuisine pioneer Michel Guérard. ‘He was our neighbour, so I’d known him since I was a little girl this high,’ Darroze says, placing her hand at hip level. ‘Everything he did was my idea of perfection – from his cuisine, to his way of welcoming people. One day, he came to Marsan and he had the oyster in the Martini glass. He told me that he had never eaten so well balanced a dish. That was the best compliment I have ever received in my life.’ She says this with a nervous laugh, as if worried that she might sound arrogant. But years after the praise, Darroze is still beaming with pride, like a little girl at hip-height.
I remember evenings at home when my father was cooking and Jean-Claude Berrouet would bring the wine – a lot of Petrus
Another regular visitor to the Darroze home was Jean-Claude Berrouet, her father’s best friend who also happened to be the head winemaker at Château Petrus. ‘I grew up with this figure who was the face of the most amazing wine,’ Darroze says. ‘I remember evenings at home when my father was cooking and Jean-Claude would bring the wine – a lot of Petrus, of course, but also other bottles from the Moueix family.’
When Darroze was a teenager, Robert Parker was a frequent guest at L’Auberge Le Relais. ‘I was introduced to him because I was interested in everything that happened in the restaurant. But now I leave food and wine matching to my sommeliers.’ At Marsan, that might mean Château Revelette Le Grand Blanc 2015 poured by the magnum – the restaurant always aims to have one magnum of white and red served by the glass – with the salinity and acidity to match a scallop tartare dusted with Espelette pepper, the signature seasoning of the French Basque Country. If it is a surprise for diners to be drinking a biodynamic white wine from Provence with the pure Chardonnay flavour of somewhere cooler, the non-alcoholic pairing is equally eye-opening: Nepalese tea infused with apple, star anise and beetroot, in which the apple fulfils the acidity of the wine, while the star anise matches the pepper in the dish.
Working with Armagnac, of course, is a different matter for Darroze. ‘Armagnac is part of my terroir,’ she says. ‘I was seven when my father launched the Armagnac business, but before that my grandfather had many barrels of Armagnac in the cellar of the restaurant.’ She is not involved in the running of Darroze Armagnac, but she speaks to her brother Marc – who has been CEO since 1995 – every day. He is helping her on a book on the cooking of southwest France, which will include recipes based around Armagnac. ‘My brother wants to share the knowledge about my cuisine, and I want to support what he’s doing.’
Their father wasn’t quite so supportive when Darroze swapped rum for Armagnac in the baba at her restaurant. ‘It was sacrilege for him – he couldn’t imagine using Armagnac in the cake. But in the end he was happy.’ Darroze says it is hard to select a vintage for the baba, ‘so I always choose 1967, my birth year. But now I am constantly surprised by how the young Armagnacs combine vivacity with complexity of flavour. My brother has brought his personality to the Armagnac. He’s very talented.’
As for her own family business, Darroze says that her daughters have no interest in following their mother into a career in hospitality. But she turns in her chair and gestures to a photo behind her of a small smiling boy with dark hair. ‘My nephew Clément has a similar story to me. He graduated from business school last June, exactly as I did. He came to see me and said, “Nina” – that’s what he calls me – “Nina, I think I want to learn to be a chef.” Now he’s working in the kitchen at Jòia.’
Does Darroze like the thought of passing her business to her nephew at some point in the future? ‘It’s not so important,’ she says. ‘What will make me happy is that my daughters are happy and my nephews are happy. I also like the idea that one of my children at work – perhaps Marco or Thomas – will one day take over what I started.’
For Darroze, family doesn’t only mean the people she grew up with; it is also all those who share her food philosophy. Just as terroir for Darroze is not a narrow geographical definition but a limitless expression of creativity.
