Six Stars, Nights Off: Hélène Darroze Names Her London Tables
The chef behind the three-star Hélène Darroze at the Connaught lists the rooms she books when she is not cooking, from Brat and KOL to a little-known Mayfair omakase.
Hélène Darroze, who holds six Michelin stars across three restaurants and has run French dining at the Connaught since 2008, has given Citizen Femme the list of places she eats on her own time. For French cooking in London she names Henry Harris's Bouchon Racine and Maison François, the latter for its Parisian brasserie spirit. Occasion dinners go to Isaac McHale's The Clove Club, which she rates for Scottish produce and fine dining without ceremony, or to Core by Clare Smyth for small groups. A first-time visitor gets taken to Brat, on the grounds that Tomos Parry's fire cooking is the clearest statement of what London does well. For a long-overdue catch-up with friends it is KOL, where Santiago Lastra works Mexican tradition through British ingredients. She goes to Cafe Murano with her daughters for Angela Hartnett's cicchetti and pasta, and keeps Cube in Mayfair, a relatively unknown omakase room, as her quiet one.
The single London dish she insists on is at BIBI, where Chet Sharma cooks a Lahori chicken drawn from family memory. Abroad, she returns to San Sebastián, Paris and a 1990s meal in Monaco that redirected her career.