Revenge is sweet for celebrity pastry chef Rachel Khoo
If there’s one thing celebrity chef and author Rachel Khoo hates, it’s being told she’s got to where she is by way of a “lucky break”. The pastry whiz is having the last laugh on rude and sexist TV bosses from her past.
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If there’s one thing celebrity chef and author Rachel Khoo hates, it’s being told she’s got to where she is by way of a “lucky break”. The British-born pastry whiz, who returns to Australian television screens later this month in the second season of Zumbo’s Just Desserts, says landing her first cookbook and television deals were the result of hard work and not just luck.
“I hate it when people say ‘oh, you got a lucky break’,” she tells Insider.
“It has nothing to do with luck.”
Living in a tiny Paris apartment and babysitting to pay her way through culinary school, Khoo, 39, set about trying to shape her career. There were no free rides, no connections to get her in the door — just old-fashioned cold-calling.
“I emailed those publishers saying ‘Hi, my name’s Rachel. I know you’re super busy, but do you have 10 minutes to meet me so I can pitch you some ideas?’,” she says.
“From those 10 emails I got three meetings. I went, I took the train from Paris to London, I pitched my ideas, did a little presentation and that’s how I got the deal.”
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Thinking her publishing work would translate nicely into a TV series, she set about trying to find a production house that would help get her ideas off the ground.
Where most of the publishers simply ignored Khoo’s correspondence, those in the world of television got back to her — they were just rude, sexist and offensive.
“I thought the cookbook would make a good TV show so I did the same thing — I emailed production companies in London,” she says.
“One of them said ‘oh you’d need a man to present a TV show with’ — this is 2011, you would not be able to say that now. Another said ‘nice idea, but we should do a TV show called Queen of Tarts’ — you would not be able to say that to a woman (today).
“Another — I was turning 30 at the time — was like ‘oh, you’re 30 …’. It took me a while to find a production company that said ‘we get your idea’,” she adds.
Khoo eventually found that partner and together they pitched The Little Paris Kitchen: Cooking With Rachel Khoo to the BBC where it ran in 2012. Many said this new face on TV in Britain was an “overnight success”, but the now Stockholm-based chef isn’t a fan of that term either.
“People thought I was an overnight success but actually it was hard work, persistence and taking a risk and I would say that is still relevant today because I still have to pitch the projects, I still have to convince the TV channels and publishers to do things,” she says.
Those projects include a range of cookbooks that have been published around the world, television shows seen in nearly 200 countries, writing in some of the UK’s most read newspapers and, more recently, the development of a podcast on sustainability.
Asked when she knew she had “made it” in the world of food, Khoo doesn’t point to a major book deal or a new television show. She travels back to the early days in Paris and her first small breakthrough.
She had just been signed by Penguin to write her first cookbook — The Little Paris Kitchen — and had received a modest advance.
“With that I was able to buy a mini washing machine and that changed my life,” she laughs.
“It sat in my tiny bathroom and I couldn’t plumb it so the wastewater had to go through my bath tub. That for me was when I made it in life: I have a washing machine!”
When she returned to London after eight years in Paris soon after, there was another big change that signalled she was moving up in the world.
“When I moved back to London I had a flat where I had a bedroom,” she says.
“For eight years in Paris I lived in a studio where my sofa would fold out into a bed so having a bedroom … yes!”
Khoo, who shares her Stockholm home with her husband and two young boys, says her dogged approach to her career is something she tries to impart on the competitors on Zumbo’s Just Desserts, where she will again host alongside Sydney patissier Adriano Zumbo.
Those who listen and take her advice on board — and that of her co-host — are the ones she believes will do the best in the show.
“The ones who do well, and it was the same with the first season, are the ones who listen to your feedback,” she says.
“Adriano and I really try to give them feedback which, if they listen to it and take that on board, they can up their skills in the next dessert they make or use it to really develop as a dessert maker.”
She believes the popularity of such shows — ones that are focused more on the art of the cooking than personalities of the contestants — can be put down to the need to escape.
“There is so much going on in terms of politics, climate change (that) sometimes you just want to switch off for an hour where you just enjoy somebody baking a cake,” she laughs. “You’ve had a hard day at work and you just want to escape.”
* Zumbo’s Just Desserts starts next Sunday, 7pm on Channel 7
Originally published as Revenge is sweet for celebrity pastry chef Rachel Khoo