Just before Rachel Khoo’s TV show The Little Paris Kitchen first aired in 2012, her mum gave her some sage words of advice.
“Ok, a lot of things are going to come your way – a lot of opportunities – but the most important thing is to listen to yourself, to your gut, and stay true to yourself,” she told her daughter.
More than 10 years on, it’s something the Great Australian Bake Off star still lives by every day.
“I think if you stay true to yourself, then no matter what you do, you can always look back and say, OK, that might not have worked out exactly how I wanted, but… I can still be proud and stand by that decision,” Rachel told The Independent in a 2024 interview.
Indeed, the now 44-year-old has found that trusting her gut has allowed her to forge her own unique path in life.
Is Rachel Khoo a trained chef?
While Rachel is now a familiar face in the culinary TV space, her career didn’t follow the same trajectory as the likes of Gordon Ramsay and Jamie Oliver who cut their teeth working for many years in commercial kitchens.
After completing an arts degree, Rachel worked in PR for a luxury fashion brand before moving from her home in the UK to Paris at the age of 26, where she trained in patisserie at the famous Le Cordon Bleu cooking school.
“I started off in the bakery/restaurant world, but I wasn’t drawn to that,” the star candidly reflected in The Independent. “I’ve ended up doing cookbooks, then consulting, then catering and events. There’s so many different areas within the food industry.”
There’s no denying Rachel was drawn to the creativity of working with food, but the reality of working in commercial kitchens didn’t appeal.
“It’s tough. It’s a real slog. I didn’t like the atmosphere,” Rachel previously told Tyla. “For me, it was like, ‘You know what? I don’t necessarily want to run a restaurant, but I want to be creative with food’.
”It was learning those technical skills I could do at culinary school, of making a pain au chocolat, all the French patisserie that I wanted to learn,” she added. “I did end up working in a restaurant, worked in a couple, but it wasn’t what I ultimately wanted to go for.”
Why is Rachel Khoo famous?
In the end, Rachel found fame working in a very different kind of venue – one dubbed “the smallest restaurant in Paris” because it was her own, charming 21sqm Parisian apartment where she’d whip up a feast for a maximum of four guests.
What type of cuisine does Rachel Khoo cook?
Viewers of The Little Paris Kitchen, which aired in Australia on SBS, would see Rachel demonstrate her unique twists on classic French dishes from her own home.
“In essence, French cuisine is about celebrating the seasons in a simple way,” Rachel told Indy100 in May 2025. “People want simple recipes. If you look at the things on TikTok and Instagram, they’re all 10 minutes or two ingredients. People want simple but good tasting, and that’s what the history of French food is, and that’s what I learned when I moved to Paris.”
The star added that the rise of social media meant that viewers no longer had to go to France in order to experience the country.
“So, I think that is breaking down the barriers of that misconception…especially because you can follow all these French influencers and content creators who are like, ‘This is how I cook at home with my grand mère,’ whereas, beforehand, what we mainly saw in the media was this haute cuisine, Michelin-starred French food,” she added.
Khoo herself has an eclectic approach to cuisine, partly thanks to her upbringing as a child of immigrant parents – Rachel’s mother is from Austria and her father is Malaysian – and after she met chef Robert Wiktorin at a party in 2014 she ended up with a passion for Swedish culture and cuisine too.
Is Rachel Khoo still married?
“I married a Swede. Not a vegetable kind! That’s how I ended up in Sweden – it’s as simple as that,” Rachel told Delicious in 2018, having moved to Stockholm.
“I’ve always been one to embrace living in different countries. I’d moved back to London from Paris and thought, let’s give it a go. It’s humbling moving to another country. You start from zero, you don’t understand people. I speak Swedish like a two-year-old, but I give it a try,” she added.
Is Rachel Khoo still living in Sweden?
Rachel and Robert remain together and are parents to three bilingual children aged seven, five and one – with the family calling Sweden home for now.
Rachel’s book, The Little Swedish Kitchen, is a culinary exploration of her new life chapter.
“My husband, Robert, took nine months off work after the birth of our son, which gave me time to write [it],” Rachel told Daily Mail in 2018. And life in a new country comes at a slower pace that Rachel enjoys.
“You’re encouraged to take a lunch break, to get out and enjoy nature,” the star told Delicious of life in Sweden. “One of my favourite things to do in summer is to pick berries – lingonberries, forest strawberries, blueberries, cloudberries, wild raspberries. It’s a lot of work, but it’s such a joyful experience.
“You appreciate the seasons more when the winters are so long,” she added. “But that’s what I love about Swedish culture – it doesn’t matter what’s happening, they embrace it and make the most of it.”
Related stories
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
Native ad body.
