On The Art Of Starting Small
On 7 October, food writer and broadcaster Rachel Khoo arrives at Electric House in London as part of a tour for her first memoir, The Smallest Restaurant in Paris. The title refers not to one of the French capital’s coveted dining rooms, but to something altogether more provisional: a table for two inside Khoo’s tiny Paris apartment, where she once cooked meals for strangers from a kitchen measuring only a few square metres.
It is the kind of beginning that, seen from the other end of a successful career, can acquire the polished inevitability of an origin story. Khoo would go on to become the author and presenter of The Little Paris Kitchen, the BBC series that made her internationally recognisable in 2012, followed by further television programmes, cookbooks and work across Europe and Australia. The Smallest Restaurant in Paris returns to the years before any of that was assured.
Khoo grew up in Croydon, the daughter of a Malaysian-Chinese father and Austrian mother, and studied art and design at Central Saint Martins before working in fashion PR. In 2006, aged 25, she abandoned the comparative security of her London job and moved to Paris with around £600, limited French and an ambition to study pâtisserie. She enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu while supporting herself through an assortment of jobs, among them au pair, shop assistant, tour guide and recipe tester.
This version of Paris is rather less weightless than the one television would later present. Khoo has described arriving without a grand career plan, learning French partly through work and piecing together enough income to remain in the city. Food gradually became both livelihood and language.
After training at Le Cordon Bleu, Khoo worked at the culinary bookshop La Cocotte and began experimenting with small-scale projects. Eventually she started inviting diners into her apartment. Her home measured just 21 square metres; the “restaurant” consisted of one table and two chairs. Reservations nevertheless attracted attention, and the peculiar intimacy of the arrangement became central to the persona through which British audiences would later encounter her.
When The Little Paris Kitchen arrived on BBC Two in 2012, it looked strikingly different from the imposing domestic stages of much television cookery. Khoo cooked with two gas rings and a small oven, surrounded by hanging utensils and the unavoidable evidence that someone actually lived there. The Guardian described the kitchen at the time as unusually appropriate to an age of austerity: cramped, imperfect and far removed from the gleaming “gastrodome” of the celebrity chef.
There was, inevitably, an element of fantasy. Early profiles regularly reached for Amélie when describing Khoo: Paris, vintage dresses, red lipstick, cake – the comparison reveals something about the period as much as the person. Food television was not simply selling recipes but increasingly complete aesthetic worlds, and Khoo’s happened to be extraordinarily coherent. Yet the memoir offers an opportunity to look behind an image that became familiar enough to obscure how precariously it had been assembled.
The Smallest Restaurant in Paris is consequently part food memoir and part account of creative formation. Each chapter ends with a recipe connected to the period it describes, while Khoo has also illustrated the book herself. Food operates less as decoration than as a form of autobiography: particular dishes fixing memories of jobs, friendships, mistakes and experiments that might otherwise blur together.
There is another unusual chapter to the story. Despite having already published bestselling cookbooks, Khoo chose to publish the UK edition of the memoir independently through her own imprint, Maison Khoo. She has documented the process publicly, from financing the book and arranging distribution to cold-emailing potential supporters and delivering copies to bookshops herself. It gives the project an unexpectedly circular quality. The woman whose career began by turning a tiny apartment into a restaurant has, years later, turned herself into a small publishing house.
However when it comes to creative success, recognition does not necessarily remove uncertainty; sometimes it merely changes its scale. Khoo has written that being a bestselling author did not automatically produce the publishing route she wanted for the memoir, and she instead returned to a familiar method: making the available space work.
This is perhaps the more interesting promise of hearing Khoo speak about the book now. More than a decade after television transformed her Paris kitchen into an object of fascination, she revisits the same period with enough distance to distinguish experience from mythology. The tiny restaurant remains charming, but its real significance may lie elsewhere.
For a woman whose public identity was built around making something substantial in a very small kitchen, The Smallest Restaurant in Paris returns to an appropriately modest proposition. Sometimes the interesting part of success is not the moment everything expands, but the period when almost nothing fits: the small decisions, improvised spaces and unlikely experiments from which something delicious takes shape.
