Rachel Khoo was born on 28 August 1980 in Croydon, South London. Her father is Malaysian Chinese, having immigrated to the UK from Ipoh, Perak, at age 16 in 1968. He met and married her mother, an Austrian native. Khoo has a younger brother named Michael, and attended primary school in Bromley. When she was 12, her father’s IT career took the family to Bavaria, Germany, where they lived near Munich for four years, before returning to the UK when she was 16.

After graduating from university, Khoo worked in public relations for shirt-maker Thomas Pink for two years. Looking for adventure and with no knowledge of French, she quit her job and took a three-month patisserie course at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris in 2006. She also worked part-time as an au pair and sold perfume at Printemps, before joining La Cocotte, a Parisian cookbook store and café, as a pastry chef running baking workshops.

In 2010, Khoo received her first publishing deal for two French-language cookery books. She then opened a tiny restaurant in her Paris flat in the Belleville neighbourhood, serving just two diners at a time to test recipes. The BBC later commissioned The Little Paris Kitchen, which began airing on 19 March 2012 and was watched by over 1.5 million viewers per episode in the UK.

In 2014, she became engaged to Swede Robert Wiktorin and married in 2015. She moved to Stockholm in 2016, and also owns a flat in Kensal Green in north-west London. She and Robert have three children.