The end of 2021 was difficult for Hélène Darroze. The popular 54-year-old star chef lost her father, Francis Darroze, in November. She then announced the sad news on Instagram. “Have a nice trip my daddy“, she wrote in the caption of a photo of him.
His disappearance was a real heartbreak for Hélène Darroze who learned everything about cooking thanks to her father, himself a professional cook. “It’s an emotional void today. We did the same job, his opinion, his advice were important. We talked, he knew what I was talking about, I liked that he was happy with what I was doing. There was more than an emotional complicity, there was also a professional complicity. He was an example because he worked with so much passion“, she confided during an interview for Gala published this Thursday, February 10, 2022.
Although she was not necessarily predestined to a life behind the stove, the star of Top chef always followed her father’s path with admiration and she is happy today to have inherited some of his best qualities. “I inherited his generosity. This propensity to want to share, give happiness, please through cookingshe listed for our colleagues. He gave me values. Look for the best of the product eg. (…) He also passed on to me the cult of taste and then the sense of sharing and emotional cooking.”
He always had a hard time telling me he was proud of me
Values that made him love the job. And then, by becoming a successful chef, Hélène Darroze is certain to have made her father Francis proud, although he always kept his feelings to himself. “When I decided to do this job, I think thathe was very happy but he didn’t express it at all. He just warned me that it wasn’t easy and that I was always going to work when the others were having fun. (…) My father always had trouble telling me that he was proud of me. He said it to others but not to me. He wrote it to me at some point. He kept the articles dedicated to me and watched Top Chef“, she still shared with tenderness.
Francis Darroze, however, had split his shell when his daughter received a great reward. “I don’t remember what he said to me for my first star, but it was he who told me the second. I was in New York for an event and he called me in the middle of the night, crying, he couldn’t speak“, she remembered.