Hélène Darroze: two cities, two children and two Michelin stars. My mum says I'm insane

Lucy Cavendish10 April 2012

Hélène Darroze is in her restaurant in The Connaught. The room is buzzing with waiters and everyone looks excited - she and her team have just won a second Michelin star. She is the only female patron in the UK to have two stars. And considering that when she opened at The Connaught in 2008 her cooking was panned by most restaurant critics, it's some feat.

"Yes," says Darroze, calmly sipping water. "It's wonderful. I am very happy." As she is French, it comes out as "very 'appy". And that's not the only reason - she has been joined by her two adopted daughters, Charlotte, three, and Quiterie, nearly two. They are, in turn, accompanied by the most glamorous nanny I have ever seen.

So Darroze, 43 - who herself is extremely stylish and a self-confessed lover of designer clothes such as Sonia Rykiel and agnès b - has much to be happy about. She has a highly acclaimed restaurant in London and a similar restaurant, called Hélène Darroze, on Paris's Left Bank. The slight fly in the ointment is that her Paris restaurant lost one of its two Michelin stars last year. Darroze just shrugs. "It's life," she says. "I will work hard to get it back."

She has, by anyone's standards, a pretty stressful life. She and her daughters, who are both from Vietnam, spend one week here and one week in Paris. Every Sunday, they all get on Eurostar and head for one or the other capital. The children are fine with travelling, she says. "They are used to it. It's their life," she says. Apparently Charlotte is happy playing on her iPad and Quiterie looks out of the window. "They are so well behaved," says Darroze. I am not sure if I believe her. Her daughters are certainly unbelievably cute but, right now, they are running around scoffing exquisite-looking handmade chocolate and raspberry macaroons.

But then Darroze says something that takes me aback. "If I had fallen in love when I was 30 or something," she says. "I wouldn't be here. I wouldn't have done any of this. I was in love with a man in Paris and if this guy had asked me to marry him and have a family, I would have done it like a shot."

But she's been so successful, I splutter.

"Yes," she says dreamily. "But a marriage, a family I would have given it all up. What would all this have meant?" Then she puts her arms in the air as if to say, Bof! Nothing.

But it is obvious to me that, despite her calm exterior, Darroze is very ambitious. She is renowned as being not only an inspirational and confident chef but also someone who can cope with everything else involved in two separate restaurants. At The Connaught she is responsible for fine dining - lunch and dinner - the banqueting menus and room service. She works out the menus, has tasting sessions of new dishes she wants to put on the menu and also manages the staff and the finances.

"That is just for the London business," she says.

She also had to put up with a lot of back-stabbing when she came over from France.

"Yes, it was hard," she says. "I didn't know if I should take the job. I had one child. I couldn't even see the restaurant because The Connaught was wrapped in plastic because it was being refurbished."

She had also been warned in Paris that her food - rustic, strong, earthy south- west-style French - was too full of strong flavours for sophisticated tastes. "Alain Ducasse (the fêted chef who runs the three-star restaurant at the Dorchester) told me when I went to Paris that I should be careful. He said the Parisiens might find my flavours too much, let alone Londoners."

In London, reviewers described her flavours in dishes such as lobster, scallop and chorizo in squid ink rice as confused and messy. But then she was awarded still the two stars.

"Ducasse called me up and left me a message," she says. "He said: 'Well done! You are my main competition now.' " She says she felt vindicated.

But it wasn't just the lukewarm reception that was the problem. As a French person in London, she felt isolated. "I didn't really know anyone and it all felt so different. I had one daughter with me and soon there was Quiterie to think of."

How does she cope with it all - two restaurants, two children, the moving hither and thither?

"I'm a very organised person," she says. "I have two flats, both near my restaurants - one in St Germain and one in Mayfair. I have two sets of nannies, two playgroups the children go to. At the moment, Charlotte goes to a nursery in Paris and she will start one in London soon."

But how will Darroze cope with that? "I'm hoping she can swap from one school to the next every week," says Darroze. Will the schools let her? I ask. "Why not?" she says. She looks completely unfazed by the whole thing.

But maybe it's because she went to such lengths to adopt the two girls. "Each process takes about a year," she says. The tide turned for her four years ago when she was about to hit 40. "By then, I was single. My relationship with this man in Paris had come to an end and I couldn't see how I was going to find someone and have a baby that quickly. It was very difficult for me. I have seen so many talented female chefs come and go. I have worked with some women who were far better than the men. I'd watch them in the kitchen and think 'that girl's going somewhere' and then suddenly they meet a man, they want babies, they quit and they don't re-emerge. It is very hard to balance a job like the one I do, that requires so much energy and determination and time, and the needs of a man and a young family."

However, Darroze is made of pretty stern stuff and so, when a friend adopted a Vietnamese baby, she felt maybe she could follow suit.

"I had it all organised," she said. "I'd really worked out how I'd be able to work and have a baby." She joined a foundation that dealt in the adoption of orphaned and abandoned Vietnamese babies and, once she had passed many inspections by healthcare experts and social workers, she was cleared to have Charlotte.

"She was two months old when I got her," she says. "She was so tiny and suddenly there she was and she was mine and I couldn't believe it." She says she had an immediate and strong bond with Charlotte. "We are almost inseparable," she says. "We are so close."

This is why she decided, a few months later, to adopt another baby. This time she went through a different agency and they soon found Quiterie, who had been abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage.

"I thought Charlotte might find it tough having a sister and not having my attention but she's been amazing. I took her to Vietnam with me to pick Quiterie up and she held her and was very happy. Family is so important to me. It was my main aim to have children. I could not have carried on without them."

She chose to adopt her daughters from Vietnam because her much-loved great aunt had lived there. "She told me so many stories of Vietnam, I really started to believe I had actually been there."

But Darroze admits it is hard having two small children and now two demanding jobs. Her days are packed; she gets up at 8am and breakfasts with the children. She is in the kitchen in the Connaught at 9.30am when she has a conference call with her staff at the Paris restaurant. She then does lunch service and all the other business she needs to attend to. At 5.30pm she goes home for an hour to see the children and then she is back for dinner service. By the time she gets home at midnight, the children are in bed.

"But I don't work Monday nights, Saturday daytime or Sundays so I balance them both."

Darroze comes from a tight-knit family in the Aquitaine region of south-west France. Her grandfather had a hotel and restaurant and she grew up eating foie gras sandwiches and watching him cook. "Then my father took over and, eventually, I took over from him." Her only training was a stint at Ducasse's Louis XV restaurant in Monte Carlo. "I was in the office half the time."

So what has made her so successful? "You know," she says, "if I knew what I know now, I would never have done the things I did. I would not have followed a man I loved to Paris and just opened a restaurant there to be with him. I am glad I did but I really didn't know what I was doing."

In the end, she thinks she's probably just someone who doesn't see stumbling blocks where other people do. "My mother looks at my life and she says 'two big jobs, two cities, two children. You're insane.' I probably am. But it's fine. I don't find it a problem."

Just as she says that, Quiterie crumbles a chocolate truffle down her mother's chef's whites. Darroze doesn't turn a hair.

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