There are chefs who discover food through professional training, and there are chefs for whom cooking was simply always there - woven into childhood, inseparable from family, absorbed before it was ever taught.
Saada belongs to the second kind. Growing up as one of ten children, the kitchen was the centre of the house. She learned to cook alongside her mother from the earliest age she was able to, taking in not just techniques but a whole philosophy: the careful use of spices and aromatic herbs, a reverence for extra-virgin olive oil, and a respect for quality ingredients that has never left her.
Twenty years in professional kitchens
Saada has spent her entire working life in food. For ten years she ran her own restaurant, specialising in Mediterranean cuisine - an experience that gave her both the rigour of professional kitchen life and a deep understanding of what it means to feed people well, night after night, at a consistent level. For the past decade, she has worked as a private chef. It is a role that suits her particular strengths: the ability to read a client, to adapt her register from relaxed and convivial to quietly refined, and to make a villa kitchen feel, for the duration of a stay, like it has always been hers.
“From my earliest age, I was immersed in the scents and flavours of Mediterranean cuisine. My mother passed on an ancestral knowledge to me: the art of using spices and aromatic herbs with precision, the love of extra-virgin olive oil, and a respect for quality organic produce. Today, I share this passion through recipes where the freshness of lemon, the intensity of thyme, rosemary, and oregano, and the gentleness of olive oil all come together. A tribute to Mediterranean health, conviviality, and pleasure.”
Cooking shaped by travel
Alongside her Mediterranean roots, Saada brings a genuine curiosity about food from beyond the region. She travels widely and deliberately, seeking out culinary traditions, ingredients, and techniques that find their way back into her cooking. The result is a style that is Mediterranean at its core but open - inflected by what she has tasted and learned elsewhere, without ever losing its sense of place. She sources her ingredients from local producers, working with what is seasonal and available rather than imposing a fixed menu. In Provence, that discipline is its own reward: the tomatoes, the courgettes, the herbs, the oils are exceptional when they are allowed to be themselves.
Her specialisms
Saada specialises in vegetarian and vegan cooking - an area where her command of spice, acidity, and texture means the absence of meat is never felt as a limitation. She also specialises in raw food cuisine, bringing the same precision and care to ingredients in their most natural, unheated state - a discipline that sits naturally alongside her commitment to seasonal produce and the integrity of what she sources. For clients who simply want something delicious and unfussy - a long lunch, a relaxed dinner for a large group - she is equally at home. The register changes; the quality does not.
If you would like to arrange a private chef service with Saada during your stay, our experiences team would be happy to provide further details and check availability.
À bientôt
