Celebrity chef Manu Feildel reunites with his father after seven years
He is one of Australia’s most famous chefs but French-born Manu Feildel has kept his family pain hidden – until now.
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Until recently, celebrity chef Manu Feildel hadn’t laid eyes on his father in more than seven years – except seeing his face every day when he looks in the mirror, of course.
Their relationship had been strained his whole life. His father Patrick – a chef – left his mother Evelyne when Feildel was a boy of four and his sister a toddler of two. His beloved mother worked hard as a single parent to raise her children in Nantes in the west of the country famous for its culinary flair, and as a 15-year-old, with food in his blood, Feildel spent a year as an apprentice in his father’s restaurant.
It was a good year – but since then his father has remarried and had another family. They’d lost touch – and it’s incredibly painful for the normally jovial TV personality to talk about.
“That’s what’s so sad – because the reason why I left (home) so young is because I wanted to distance myself from him not being there, and seeing my mum struggling all the time,” he says.
“I wanted to distance myself to the negativity and I wanted to go away, make something of myself and come back and help.”
So that’s exactly what he did. The determined French chef cooked his way through London first before Australia called. It was 1999 and he worked in several restaurants before Tony Bilson approached Feildel in 2004 to open his new venture, Bilsons in Sydney’s Radisson Hotel. In its second year, it was awarded two chef’s hats. A year later, it won three. A year after that is when Feildel first graced our screens on Ready Steady Cook.
In the years since, the 50-year-old father of two has become one of Australia’s most popular television personalities as co-host of My Kitchen Rules with fellow chef and mate Colin Fassnidge – and as promised, he’s taken care of his mum, who was treated for the early stages of breast cancer in 2020 – by paying off her home in the French countryside.
“I suppose I did (make it on my own) – but would never be who I am without my mother’s strength,” he says, between tears.
“The way she brought me up made me who I am, and that’s why I’ve been able to do what I’ve done.
“I think we had an understanding – she was happy because I was happy,” he says of their geographical distance.
“Obviously, the distance is a horrible thing – like she doesn’t see my kids growing up, and
so on.
“But you can’t have it all, I suppose.
“Unfortunately, or fortunately, I decided to make my life on the other side of the world.
“But I’ve got a great life and think that alone is good enough for her.
“To be honest, if I was living there we would probably be at each other’s throats – the small amount of time we spend together we cherish it and have a good time,” he laughs.
The Maroubra-based honorary Aussie goes back to his deep French roots to kick off the moving new season of SBS series Who Do You Think You Are? which premieres on Tuesday. In the emotional episode, Feildel reunites with his father. They greet each other with a hug that brings them both to tears.
Talking about his family – which he soon discovers includes a bloodline of 175 years in the food industry – Feildel becomes visibly emotional.
“It’s been funny because pretty much all of my life we disconnected then reconnected very slightly and disconnected again, and so on,” he says of his father.
“So to be honest with you, I rarely thought about him because he was never really part of my life. And every time I thought about him, I was like, ‘F--k, I need to call him’, but then I wasn’t calling him because – excuse my French – (I was thinking) ‘F--k it, I’ll just let it go.’
“So when we filmed last year, he had become a different person as well, in the fact that every time I picked up the phone, he would pretty much ask me to pardon him for what he had done.
“And I always said to him, ‘You’ve done nothing, mate.’ I didn’t want him to feel guilty.
“Life is life. You split up with your wife and so on – it is what it is – but the thing is, it doesn’t matter if you split up with your partner, if you’ve got kids you should always be there for them regardless.
“But I didn’t want him to feel guilty.
“This time around, when we caught up, after filming, we spent a day together – and there was nothing mentioned.
“It was just two mates having a beer, two mates having dinner, two mates having a couple of whiskies and two mates going home – and that was the first time that I felt that we reconnected without the bullshit surrounding it.
“We’ve only spoken to each other four or five times since, but that’s a lot more than we have in the last 10 years – and the thing is, I’ve always been scared that he would pass away without us having reconnected properly – I mean TV is TV, but I think this show really brought something special for me.
“It really changed a lot for me, so I’m very grateful that I’ve been able to do that.”
Today, he’s found peace.
“I think that’s what’s happened now,” he says. “I think it’s what I was waiting for, for a long time, and I didn’t know how to make it happen.
“And as stupid as it is, a TV show made it happen – I don’t think it’s often that a TV show makes things real.
“Because I don’t even remember growing up with my dad at all.
“I was four years old and my sister was two and my dad was rarely at home apparently,
so he was always gallivanting as it was – so I only remember growing up with my mum and my sister.
“But I’ve never blamed my dad for anything.
“I worked with my dad when I was 15, for a whole year, and that was a decent connection and we had a great time together that year.
“And for some reason, when I left, that connection was broken again.
“I think this is the reason we’ve never been close enough to keep a proper connection.
“But I’ve never blamed him for anything, I’ve never hated him. I’ve always got some love for him.”
When they talk, the camera is on so he sees his grandchildren – Jonti, 19, who Feildel shares with former partner Veronica Morshead, and little Charlee, 8, who he shares with wife Clarissa Weerasena – but Feildel admits his father and children have very little connection.
“I know my dad is also very proud of what we’ve become – but it’s hard because my dad
got remarried and had his own family, I suppose,” he says.
“So that’s what he’s dealing with – he’s got grandkids and so on – because we weren’t close together, that hasn’t happened as such.
“But for the last 10 years, I suppose I’ve been getting older, and I see him in myself when I look at myself in the mirror.
“And my kids have said it – they saw a picture of my dad when he was younger and said, ‘Is that you, Dad?’ and I said, ‘No, that’s Grandad.’
Back in 2009, Feildel opened his first restaurant L’etoile in Paddington, which was given a chef’s hat just five months later. It closed in 2014. That same year he opened Le Grand Cirque in Melbourne with MasterChef’s George Calombaris – which closed four months after opening.
In filming Who Do You Think You Are? he found out the stress of business, the drive for success and depression when it fails is something he shares with his ancestors, who were also forced to close the doors to bakeries over the years.
His great-grandfather Louis Adolphe Fernand Gréteau, a renowned patissier, demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the wake of the 1929 stockmarket crash and the deprivations of World War II.
In the show, Feildel discovers Louis Adolphe not only invented a famous cake called the délice Chalonnais, he also demonstrated true grit by clawing himself out of financial strife after his business almost collapsed.
“When your business goes down, or any type of negativity is in your life, you feel alone at the time,” Feildel admits of his own experiences.
“You think, ‘Oh shit, I’m a failure and I haven’t succeeded in that.’
“But then you realise that whoever runs a business, go through the same shit. But I love the strength of my great-grandparents and not giving up,” he says. “I think at that time, I think people were stronger than the people today – because they had nothing, so they had to fight to get something.
“Nowadays we have everything regardless – the government is helping us or we can always get some money from somewhere, but at that time, they just had to fight.”
He kept fighting too. He’s written four cookbooks – Manu’s French Kitchen in 2011, Manu’s French Bistro in 2012, French for Everyone in 2014 and More Please! in 2016. He launched The Sauce By Manu – a sauce range created on the back of his MRK catchphrase, ‘Where’s the sauce!’ – and opened La Botanique in Botany, Sydney in late 2020, a warehouse studio he co-designed that includes a fully equipped studio and commercial kitchen. He’s also been a judge on Australia’s Got Talent, won the 2011 season of Dancing with the Stars and last year tried his hand at SAS Australia.
“Life is just a crazy thing – you just get on with your life, but there are so many people around you that mean a lot that you don’t necessarily see often enough, but it was an amazing experience to find out a lot of things about my past,” he says of learning about his family tree.
“You always think you know who you are, where you come from and who your parents are, but there are more questions,” he says, “and to find out there was a long line of food in the family line, that was really cool to know.
“There was so much to discover.”
Craving connection with his father’s family, Feildel also learns about the remarkable story of his great-grandfather Eugène Perrussel, who endured multiple life-threatening injuries as a soldier in World War I. He was heartbroken to discover Eugene died in poverty at age 42 and was buried in a mass grave.
“I mean, on my mother’s side, it was a crazy time for my great-grandparents. I don’t know which one I enjoyed the most – I can tell you the one I didn’t enjoy is my dad’s grandfather went through the First World War and he was so uneducated and got used and abused and had a really terrible life, I suppose,” he says.
“And until the time he died – even then he wasn’t even recognised, he was just in a hole with another 20,000 people – I felt that was really bad and made me quite angry – but everything else, it was just nice to hear what happened and who I was and where I came from – it was really amazing.”
Even though they didn’t spend much time together, Feildel remembers his father telling him as a child that his paternal family descended from Vikings. Determined to get to the truth of this family folklore, the show sees him travel to the ancient walled city of Saint-Malo, where he learned that his 14-times great-grandfather Josselin Éberard thrived as a marine merchant.
With a Germanic surname and roots dating back to the 15th century, they did in fact descend from the Vikings.
Feildel also discovered that his passion for food was strongly rooted in his ancestry, with the celebrity chef representing the sixth generation to do so. His three-times great-grandfather was a hardworking baker, followed by his great-grandfather, the renowned patissier who invented the famous French cake, the Délice Chalonnais, which he tastes for the first time on the show.
“I’ve known about the cake and it still exists in the village – but I’ve never had it,” he admits.
“And compared to what pastry I have today it’s really, really rich and heavy and sweet – and one spoon of it was like drinking 10 cups of coffee,” he laughs.
So – will there be a seventh generation of the Feildel family to work in food?
“Jonti – definitely not,” he says of his firstborn, who plays rugby league for the junior division of the South Sydney Rabbitohs.
“He eats a lot but it’s a lot of very boring food and can barely cook eggs in the morning, so probably not.
“But Charlee is very good actually and Charlee comes back from school and complains about the food at school – she’s got the palate – and if one of the kids was going to do it, she would be the one.”
To keep up with them, Feildel’s physical health is good again after a recent knee reconstruction. He was swimming every morning throughout March at his local Maroubra ocean pool as an ambassador for Cure Cancer’s swimming challenge, Swim for a Cure.
“The knee is getting better – but it’s taking its toll,” he says.
“The knee is good, it’s just all the muscle around it that needs to start getting and working properly, so I’m doing a bit of cycling, swimming and rehab.”
Feildel’s also now having fun filming the next season of Seven favourite MKR – and looking back on his life, is content with where it has taken him – even if that’s worlds away from where he started.
“Life is a rollercoaster,” he says.
“I know that (through) the last 15 years, I suppose, my life has been absolutely crazy and I’ve been absolutely busy, running like a headless chicken, running different businesses, different shows here and
there, so I haven’t been here as often as
I wanted to.
“But funnily enough, the last couple of years, I worked out my lifework balance now and really spend as much time as I can at home, and with the kids.
“And I think that is really, really important.”
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Originally published as Celebrity chef Manu Feildel reunites with his father after seven years
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