I’M A WOMAN of the South, or actually many souths,” said chef Georgiana Viou. “This is how I explain my cooking to clients at Rouge.” That’s her new restaurant at the Margaret Hotel Chouleur in Nimes, in southern France. Though she’s originally from Benin in Africa, she’s made her home in Marseilles (near Nimes) for more than 20 years. “Today I’m as much Marseillaise as I am Beninoise,” said Ms. Viou, though she wouldn’t describe her cuisine as Afro-Provençale. “I don’t do fusion cooking. My cooking is spontaneous, seasonal and very personal.”

Born into a long line of female chefs, caterers and entrepreneurs in Cotonou, Benin’s largest city, Ms. Viou went to France to study literature at the Sorbonne. Eventually she realized that “cooking is what I like to do more than anything else.” Her cookbook “Le Goût de Cotonou: Ma Cuisine de Bénin” was published in May (in French) by Éditions Alain Ducasse.

“The Beninoise kitchen is complex, subtle and varied,” Ms. Viou said. “Different dishes are cooked along the Atlantic shore, once called the Slave Coast, than in the interior. Descendants of Brazilian slaves who returned home, as well as Portuguese and Brazilian slave traders, have had a big impact on our cooking, too. And Benin was a French colony for almost a century.” Here, Ms. Viou shares tips from her sunny kitchen.

The chef prepares attiéké, a dish of fermented cassava with a texture similar to that of couscous.

Photo: Helene Jayet for The Wall Street Journal

The kitchen tool I can’t live without is: my wodatin, which is a wooden spatula typical of Benin. I buy a bunch of new ones in the market in Cotonou every time I go home. And my Microplane grater, because I use a lot of fresh ginger and this is the fastest way to grate it. My blender. And my knives, including one that was my grandmother’s.

My pantry is always stocked with: olive oil, palm oil, vinegar, tomato paste, gherkins, red pepper paste, mustard, brown sugar, black chocolate for dessert, flour, honey, dried hibiscus flowers, fleur de sel, black pepper, rice, pasta. And ingredients from Benin like gari or tapioca. Plus my mother’s secret special spice powder—and no, I’m not giving you the recipe!

My cooking mentor was: not a single person. I’ve learned important things from so many cooks. So for different reasons, I’ll mention my mother, Romaine Monteiro, and the Paris chefs Yves Camdeborde and Sylvain Sendra, and the Marseille chef Lionel Levy, who taught me technique and precision.

Ms. Viou’s well-stocked pantry includes flavor-boosting ingredients such as palm oil, wild herbs and dried fish.

Photo: Helene Jayet for The Wall Street Journal

The cookbook I turn to again and again is: again, more than just one. I have many, which I read for inspiration rather than using them to follow recipes. One that I really like is “Astrance: A Cook’s Book” by the Michelin three-star Paris chef Pascal Barbot. In the book, he notes that a recipe cannot be frozen in time, because the taste of the same ingredients can change from one year to the next depending on their ripeness, freshness and other factors. I’d never seen anyone acknowledge the importance of nature and instinct in the kitchen like this before, and it really spoke to me.

The ingredient I’m most excited about right now is: Camargue rice. For me the rice grown in the Rhône delta is the world’s best, because it has a nutty mineral-rich flavor and a nice firm texture when cooked. I also love my own dried fishes; pork pastrami; palm oil, which has a savory, earthy taste like carrots or pumpkins; scent leaf, or efirin in Benin, a type of African basil with a strong aromatic taste; and wild herbs like houttuynia cordata—fish mint or chameleon plant in English—which has a pungent taste and many beneficial medicinal qualities.

Some of the chef’s favorite tools, including her wodatin (center), a wooden spatula used in Benin, and her Microplane (right), her go-to for grating ginger.

Photo: Helene Jayet for The Wall Street Journal

The most underrated ingredients are: inexpensive wild fish like gray mullet and mackerel. They have so much more flavor than the ones that are pricier and more popular, including codfish and farmed salmon. At Rouge, I’m supplied by the fishermen from the port of Le-Grau-du-Roi, and so my Mediterranean catch-of-the-day is always impeccably fresh. I love putting lesser-known fish on the menu so that people can discover how good they are. And so many delicious ingredients from West Africa remain very little known outside that region, though this is starting to change. There’s a growing curiosity about African cooking in France right now, so you see many chefs who aren’t of African origins using ingredients like roselle, a type of hibiscus flower, and even gari, the creamy granular flour obtained by processing the roots of freshly harvested cassava.

The worst feature of my kitchen is: the fact that my barbecue isn’t in there. I love the taste of smoke and grilled foods.

A drink I really love is: any cocktail from Benjamin Colombani’s Bar Gaspard, near where I live in Marseille. Benjamin does brilliant drinks like a Gin Sour—foamy, very green, made with gin, apple juice, basil, cucumber and vaporized cardamom. My partner also makes a mean gin and tonic.

The most important piece of kitchen wisdom I ever received was: Cook with love and honesty, because even when a cook makes mistakes—and every cook makes mistakes—food always tastes good if it comes from the heart. — Edited from an interview by Alexander Lobrano

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