For the famous Top Chef quartet, cooking is child’s play. For several seasons, Hélène Darroze, Philippe Etchebest, Paul Pairet and Glenn Viel have challenged their brigade in events as challenging as they are creative and technical. Jurors and adversaries, they also call on children to judge the dishes of the candidates.
Outside of the show, the four chefs talk about their family life as rarely. What parenting role do they take on on a daily basis? Are they close to their children despite their profession and the filming of the cooking show hosted since the first season by Stéphane Rotenberg? Planet tells you everything.
Hélène Darroze, historic brigade leader with three consecutive victories, is the mother of two daughters, Charlotte and Quitterie, adopted in Vietnam in 2007 and 2009. The one who shares many photos of her family on Instagram confides in her role as a mother. “I went to pick up Charlotte and Quitterie who were babies in Vietnam, I was a single mother. At the same time, I was opening the restaurant in London”, she confided in a podcast for the Télé-Loisirs site. . The opportunity for her to confide in her recourse to adoption. “As a teenager, I knew I would adopt children. I thought I would be a biological mother too. It did not happen for questions that life is like that”.
More discreet than his colleague, chef Philippe Etchebest also resorted to adoption. Married to his wife Dominique since 1994, the couple adopted their son Oscar-Louis in 2005 in Mexico. Asked last February in the magazine Gala, the charismatic host of M6 confided in the reasons for their discretion. “We’ve been working together from the start but we don’t want to expose ourselves too much as a couple or with our son Oscar-Louis. That doesn’t mean we don’t love each other”.
For Paul Pairet, who arrived in Top Chef in 2020, it is also the same adage: “to live happily, live hidden”. If the starred French chef, based in Shanghai, rarely talks about his love situation, he is the proud father of a son, Léon, now 20 years old. In March 2021, the leader of the brigade with purple cuffs shared a happy event with his fans on Instagram: the graduation of his offspring, posing proudly for a photo beside him.
As for Glenn Viel, the latest M6 recruit shares his life with his wife Erika and their two children Lilween and a son named Erevan. Asked by Télé Star, the forty-year-old spoke about his life and his career. “I am very happy but I worked. And I have three chances in my life: my family, to be born in France and my wife Erika”, he assures adding about his “extraordinary wife “. “She leaves me a lot of flexibility, she takes care of my children wonderfully”. Here’s what their family life looks like in pictures in the slideshow.
