Does fame have a recipe?
Five years ago, Dominique Crenn was just another hardworking San Francisco chef running a small, ambitious restaurant. She had been cooking since the early 1990s, when she arrived in the Bay Area from her native France. But she was still off the radar for many American food lovers. She had never won a James Beard award or served as a judge on Top Chef or hit any of the other marks of culinary stardom.
But in 2013, Atelier Crenn, her sleek modernist restaurant in Pacific Heights, won two stars from the Michelin Guide, making Crenn the highest-ranked female chef in the United States and drawing the tribe of global gastro-tourists who follow the stars. Last year, she was named World’s Best Female Chef by the World’s 50 Best, a London-based group that publishes an influential (if somewhat arbitrary) annual list of the best restaurants in the world.
Since then, she has shot video campaigns for LG refrigerators and Georg Jensen tableware, been the cover model for the magazine Gastronomique En Vogue, and is profiled in an episode of Chef’s Table on Netflix. She has been honoured by the French government for her contributions to gastronomy and culture, delivered a TED Talk on “defining success”, lectured at Harvard University, and spearheaded a movement of chefs to help restore agriculture in Haiti. Her vault to international fame and clout has surprised many American food lovers, who are more familiar with chefs like Barbara Lynch and April Bloomfield. And it has raised questions — some new, some age-old — about how and why some chefs, and not others, achieve celebrity.
Crenn herself, a little stunned by her whirlwind ascent, is one of the people wrestling hardest with those questions, including what it means to be a leading woman in what remains a male-dominated field.
“I hope that award won’t exist in two years,” she said over coffee (American drip, black) at a hipster bike shop/espresso bar near the restaurant. She considered rejecting the Best Female Chef title, which many chefs, including her, consider patronising. “But then I thought, ‘Am I going to fight it or am I going to do something with it?’.”
Crenn is clearly up for the fight, from the soles of her retro-chic Adidas trainers to the tips of her spiky hair. She is thoughtful, outspoken, authoritative and soft-hearted, sometimes in the course of a single sentence. Unlike many chefs who keep their heads down and their focus on the kitchen, she is not afraid to raise her voice — about religion, immigration, entitlement, gratitude and other topics only tangentially related to food.
As a chef, Crenn is both the artist who challenges and creates, and the cook who comforts and nourishes. (Her other restaurant, Petit Crenn, is an homage to French home cooking and to Crenn’s childhood visits to Brittany.)
Dinner at the jewel-box-like Atelier Crenn, which opened in 2011, begins not with a menu but with a poem on a slip of paper: “At the edge of the winter lake/ Come with me and look into the golden light/ A burst of oceanic feeling, salty black pearls/ The whimsically ebullient blue umami ...”
The poem, written by Crenn, continues, and changes with the season, as does the menu. Each line corresponds to a course: more than 30 different bites, each one simultaneously delicious, elaborate and bewildering.
On the plate, “whimsically ebullient blue umami” translates to a shellfish course: grilled local abalone garnished with abalone liver, roasted garlic, egg “jam”, oyster-scented cream and a tangy gelatinised mignonette sauce.
Still, food that is deeply affecting is not always what Americans are comfortable eating. Some critics have called Crenn’s work mystifying and pretentious, both on the plate and on the page.
Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis Of Taste, her 2015 cookbook, included a multicomponent recipe for “Birth” — a nest woven from corn silk, dehydrated and deep-fried, filled with tiny eggs made of corn “milk”, duck fat and egg yolks, and garnished with dark-chocolate twigs.
Crenn now has to wrangle publicly with the increasingly controversial role of leading female chef, a label she has tried to fend
off throughout her career. The morning after being named Best Female Chef, she was on The Today Show defending (and explaining) the title, while online a debate raged over whether the award was a gratifying recognition from peers or a blatant expression of the sexism that continues to pervade the restaurant business.
Many chefs and journalists contended that the award’s very existence smacked of tokenism, especially when bestowed upon a chef, like Crenn, whose restaurant has never appeared on the World’s 50 Best list. On the website Mic, food journalist Khushbu Shah wrote that the award “says you may be the best female chef in the world, but there are still 50 male chefs that are better than you”.
Today, her style of cooking may work in her favour: Crenn is making the kind of food that currently commands attention from the food media and gastro-tourists. That means using technology to transform familiar foods into exotic forms; deploying luxury ingredients like foie gras, abalone and king crab; experimenting with foraged food like plankton and sea buckthorn; and presenting every dish in a way that is highly Instagram-able.
Clearly, Crenn’s breakthrough is not only about the food. “Yes, Dominique is more enamoured of technique and equipment than any of the women chefs I know,” Silverton said. “But it’s her charisma and confidence, not her cooking, that cracked that boys’ club open.”