Emily Roux doesn't need anything from her father apart from childcare

Cruz Beckham made his Reading Festival debut this bank holiday weekend, North West appeared on the latest cover of Dazed magazine and Kaia Gerber and Homer Gere are starring in the new 80s-themed Disney+ series The Shards. 2026 is the summer of the nepo baby.

The life of a nepo baby, however, can be a win-win or a lose-lose. You could profit from a successful career without any talent of your own, riding on the coat-tails of a famous family. Or, you could be talented in your own right, but no matter how successful you become people will always accuse you of not having ‘earned’ it.

Our obsession with celebrities' children has only increased in recent years with the rise of social media. An increasingly difficult job market, too, has thrown their success under the spotlight. You’d be within your right to assume that Emily Roux may have lived to rue the day she entered the family trade. But fear of nepotism allegations has not deterred the granddaughter of Albert Roux and daughter of Michel Roux Jr. Her Michelin star restaurant, Caractère, now nearly nine years old, has been going from strength to strength.

The fine dining restaurant in Notting Hill, which the 35-year-old co-owns with her husband, chef Diego Ferrari, previously of Le Gavroche, is immensely popular. With hospitality struggling amidst the cost of living crisis, Caractère’s success cannot be put down to the Roux surname alone. Although it may have helped her to get a foothold in the industry, it has taken years of grit and determination for Emily to step out of her father and grandfather’s towering culinary shadow.

That shadow began with Albert Roux, the renowned French chef, who opened Le Gavorche in Mayfair with his brother Michel. It was the first restaurant in the UK to gain three Michelin stars, and was taken over by Albert’s son, Michel Jr, before its closure in 2024.

‘The passion for food, eating out, has always been there,’ Emily says. In her early teens she spent a few evenings at Le Gavroche. ‘It opened my eyes to the camaraderie and little family that you had in the kitchen. I’m an only child, and I thought, I quite like these older brothers and sisters. It seemed like a lot of fun.’

Combined with a phobia of ‘sitting down and being behind a computer in an office’, cooking soon became ‘the only thing [she] wanted to do’. Her father is now 66, and enjoying a life away from the day-to-day business of running a world-renowned restaurant. This means he is regularly free to babysit Emily and Diego’s young children.

It’s clear that he couldn’t be prouder of his only daughter. ‘I think it was fairly obvious that she was going to end up in the hospitality industry,’ he says, although he is quick to add, ‘We never pushed Emily into cooking, that’s for sure.’

‘She was always interested in food… at a very young age she already knew flavour profiles and what was good, what wasn’t good.’ Michel Jr remembers going to restaurants with Emily as a little girl aged six. She would give him feedback after each meal.

‘On the way back home we would talk about it and she would make a note and say: “This one deserves a star, this one doesn’t.”’ Little did she know, she’d one day have a star of her own.

Emily decided not to take on the family business, and instead strike out on her own. Michel Jr says: ‘I took some advice from my father, but it was always more inspirational, and I think my father was always putting his nose in my business, so I tried not to do that with Emily.’ He adds: ‘It was a struggle in itself because he never really let go, and the actual business was struggling immensely. It was not making money. In fact, it was losing money — loads of money. So it took a long time for me to address that and to make it back into a profitable business. But Emily and Diego started from scratch.’

Emily adds: ‘He’s always a phone call away,’ and recalls how, during covid, she was on the phone with her father every other day, discussing how their restaurants’ respective landlords were reacting and how they would organise things to ensure the future of their businesses. ‘There’s always been help in the background. Always,’ she says.

When Emily studied at the Institut Lyfe in France as a young chef, she enjoyed anonymity — Roux is a much more common surname in France. ‘It was ideal,’ she says. ‘I was Joe Bloggs, and treated like everyone else. Most of the places that I worked never knew my family history or where I came from, probably until the time I was about to leave. It was perfect. I just lived my young commis chef life as anyone would.’

The pair agree times have changed since Michel Jr started out in the industry. ‘I think my team has a good work/life balance at the moment… I think that wasn’t the case when I started out in my career,’ says Emily. Her restaurant is shut on Sundays and Mondays, as well as for the Christmas and New Year period — ‘It’s a time when I want to be with my family, and I think everyone wants to be with their families’.

They also close for the last two weeks of August to coincide with the Notting Hill carnival and grant a reprieve for those with children, and are only open for lunch on Fridays and Saturdays. ‘We have lunch when they arrive. We have dinner together,’ she adds, about her staff.

Michel Jr says: ‘I worked 100 plus hours a week when I was training, and Emily probably not far off the same, at times. We have to do better than that. But I certainly don’t look back at my training period with any anger or ill feelings.’

Now his daughter is a parent to young children, does he reflect on his life as a busy chef with a young family? He is certainly on duty as a grandfather a lot of the time these days. Emily’s eldest son, a precocious six-year-old, enthusiastically interrupts our interview a few times, clamouring for his grandad’s attention, or perhaps a Michelin-starred snack.

‘Emily was put into a nursery and daycare as a child, so it certainly didn’t stop us working,’ says Michel Jr. ‘I tried my best to spend as much time as possible with Emily, because I felt that my father didn't spend enough time with me when he opened Le Gavroche, but it wasn't easy. I was still working ridiculous hours.’

For Emily, things were slightly different. ‘We already had the restaurant when the kids were born and they adapted to it as we did… but we make a really good effort to spend a wonderful day with them on a Sunday when we’re all together at home, and on Monday afternoons.’

What about that adage about ‘too many cooks’? Especially considering Diego, Emily’s husband, is in the mix too. ‘It works very well,’ Michel Jr says. ‘They’re coming over to France very soon and Diego might do a barbecue, I might do the vegetables, Emily might do something else.’ Emily adds: ‘It’s very natural and very easy. If there’s three of us, well, there’s three more ideas and three more hands to do something.’

Rivalry would not be unexpected in such an accomplished family, especially in a business that can be measured in awards. For Emily and Michel Jr, however, working with food brings them together.

The only downside seems to be that Emily’s children have a distinguished palette, like she did as a young girl. They eat the same food as the adults in her household. ‘He’s never had a dull pasta,’ she says of her eldest. ‘So when we go to a restaurant at an airport, for example, inevitably he won’t enjoy it and will be very disappointed.’ Ditto grandma’s homemade pizza dough, Michel Jr relates sadly. But, if this is the only problem, it seems the family are doing very well indeed. In this instance, too many cooks don’t spoil the broth, or in this case, the roux, at all.

Emily and Michel Jr will be collaborating on a Christmas menu at Caractère. Visit their website for more information.