Does Fame Have a Recipe? Dominique Crenn’s Fast Rise

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/dining/chef-dominique-crenn.html

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SAN FRANCISCO — Five years ago, Dominique Crenn was just another hardworking Bay Area chef running a small, ambitious restaurant. She had been cooking since the early 1990s, when she arrived in this city 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 Ms. 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 “the 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 honored by the French government for her contributions to gastronomy and culture, delivered a TED Talk on “defining success,” lectured at Harvard, 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.

Ms. 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 patronizing. “But then I thought, ‘Am I going to fight it or am I going to do something with it?’”

Ms. 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 softhearted, 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.

“Dominique is a force to be reckoned with” said Melissa Perello, the chef at Octavia and Frances here and a longtime friend.

As a chef, Ms. Crenn is both the artist who challenges and creates, and the cook who comforts and nourishes. (Her other restaurant, Petit Crenn, is a homage to French home cooking and to Ms. 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 lightA burst of oceanic feeling, salty black pearlsThe whimsically ebullient blue umami

The poem extends to a dozen lines, each one corresponding to a course: the meal, to 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 gelatinized mignonette sauce.

The eminent French chef Guy Savoy described himself as “immediately seduced” by Ms. Crenn’s cooking. “Her work is so close to and respectful of the product,” he said. “When combined with her beautiful sensibility, the result is deeply affecting.”

Still, food that is deeply affecting is not always what Americans are comfortable eating. Some critics have called Ms. 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.

She may be intensely cerebral on the plate, but Ms. Crenn is high-spirited in person. “You’d think she would be a bore, but she’s exactly the opposite,” said Nancy Silverton, a founder of LaBrea Bakery and of the Mozza restaurants in Los Angeles. “Dominique is a very serious chef with a very playful personality.”

Ms. Crenn, 51, was raised outside Paris, in Versailles. Her father, Allain Crenn, was a politician and a painter, whom she credits with developing the awareness of the visual arts and the natural world that is always present in her work.

She learned the principles of cooking from her mother, Louise Crenn, and was taken to fine restaurants from a young age. But she did not dream of becoming a chef, and never attended culinary school. She moved here after graduating from college in Paris, and has never truly left. “France is my country, but San Francisco is my home,” she said.

With only her basic culinary skills, she talked her way into a job at Stars, cooking under Jeremiah Tower, and changed kitchens frequently after that, with a yearlong stint in Indonesia. Along the way, she refined the style and skills that have lifted her to a prominence available to very few women in the profession.

She is the only woman named to the international advisory board of the prestigious new Basque Culinary Center, a research and innovation institute in Spain funded by AB InBev, Siemens and other multinational corporations. Other board members include the chefs Ferran Adrià, Dan Barber, Alex Atala and Massimo Bottura.

The restaurant critic for Elite Traveler magazine, Andy Hayler, recently predicted that Ms. Crenn would be the world’s single most influential chef of the next 10 years, outranking a corps of also-rans, all men, like David Chang and Grant Achatz.

“Partly because she is one of the few chefs who can pull off a modernist menu in a way that is interesting,” Mr. Hayler said. “And partly because she is a woman, and therefore presumably able to influence more women to do what she does.”

Ms. 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 “Today” 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 Ms. Crenn, whose restaurant has never appeared on the World’s 50 Best list. On Mic, the 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.”

Because of rankings like World’s 50 Best, in which chefs help decide the winners, success in the modern food world requires being admired by other chefs — most of them male and European — even more than by critics. Ms. Crenn is popular among other chefs, who cite her dedication to mentoring, philanthropy and environmental causes, as well as her talent.

But her food is unapologetically artsy, personal and sometimes risky, and she believes this is one reason she received less credit and more criticism at the beginning of her solo career.

“Many people still think a creative, original artist must be a man,” she said. This was long true in art, fashion, literature and many other fields, she pointed out. “My biggest role models are not chefs,” she said, “but women like Coco Chanel, Simone de Beauvoir, Nina Simone.”

Today, her style of cooking may work in her favor: Ms. 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 Instagrammable.

“She cooks the way the men are cooking,” Michael Bauer, the longtime restaurant critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, said in an interview. “Like what you’d see at Benu or Quince or Le Bernardin,” all restaurants with three Michelin stars, headed by men.

Many women can and do cook in this au courant style, loosely called “modernist.” But in the United States, so far, few of them are at the helm of their own restaurants.

“Dominique is an outstanding chef, very creative and evolutionary,” said Elena Arzak, the modernist chef of Arzak in the Basque Country, who began to champion Ms. Crenn’s career more than a decade ago. Ms. Arzak was named the “Best Female Chef” of 2012. “She is always up-to-date on our world of food, and concerned with the larger world of nature and the environment,” she said.

(In April, Ms, Crenn will pass the “Best Female Chef” baton to Ana Roš, a former ski champion and self-taught chef whose restaurant in rural Slovenia is dedicated to introducing the world to the native foods of the western Balkans.)

Ms. Perello, of Octavia, said most female chefs lack not the ability, but the desire, to embrace modernist cooking. With its manicured compositions and technical transformations, it’s a style that constantly announces the presence of the chef. “For whatever reason,” she said, “it’s still easier for men to stick their neck out and say: ‘Look at me, look at what I’m doing on this plate. Isn’t it incredible?’”

Clearly, Ms. Crenn’s breakthrough is not only about the food. “Yes, Dominique is more enamored of technique and equipment than any of the women chefs I know,” Ms. Silverton said. “But it’s her charisma and confidence, not her cooking, that cracked that boys’ club open.”

Mr. Bauer, who gave Atelier Crenn three and a half stars in a 2014 review, took that a few steps further. “She has been successful because she does have talent, and she has worked hard,” he said. “But let’s be honest, also because she has enormous charisma, she’s beautiful, and has that French accent.”

Ms. Crenn shrugs off this assessment. She is firmly feminist, but her interest in identity politics in the kitchen is limited.

“Being a chef is about feeding people, which is part of the story of all humanity,” she said. “Male, female, gay, straight, Jewish, Muslim, white, black: The longer I do this, the more I am sure that none of it should matter in the kitchen — or anywhere.”

“Maybe I’ll start my own list,” she added. “It would not look like anything the world has seen before.”

Recipe: Caramelized Winter Squash With Pumpkin Seed Persillade