Fourteen: Atelier Crenn, Rebel Chef

Fourteen

ATELIER CRENN

I was forty-five when I opened Atelier Crenn—in my prime, for sure, although women aren’t assumed to have a professional prime quite like men. Sometimes I get the sense that women over forty aren’t even supposed to be visible. Well, with respect, screw that. I was ready. I hadn’t waited this long to open my own restaurant to give way on the things I thought really mattered.

I knew what I wanted, and I was willing to fight for it in the face of opposition. The first fight was over tables. We opened with fourteen tables, which I thought was too many and my investors thought was too few. (When, a couple of years later, I finally got rid of the investors, I brought the number of tables down to eight.) A three-hundred-seat restaurant is like a cruise ship; it requires a lot of labor and entails a lot of waste. When you have a smaller restaurant, you’re more focused on quality and keeping the experience intimate. If I could have gotten away with it, I’d have put a counter in the kitchen with only ten seats, but at least with fourteen tables, I knew it would be just about possible to meet every diner and to ensure I had a real encounter with each of them. The human connection was just as important to me as the food itself.

The interior of Atelier Crenn’s dining room.

The dining room was designed along clean Japanese lines. The colors were muted but friendly—no stark white tablecloths or harsh lighting. I wanted rugs on the floor and earth tones on the walls, dotted with my father’s paintings and presided over by a feeling of zen and tranquillity. The tables were wood, sourced from a sustainable logging company in Portland. The service was discreet and unpretentious. I’ve been in fine-dining restaurants where the atmosphere is so strained you’re scared to breathe or pick up a glass, lest you drop it. Excessive attention from servers can make it hard to relax. That’s not what we were trying to do. We were trying to make it informal and fun.

Atelier Crenn opened on January 21, 2011. The night before, everyone I loved came to celebrate. My nerves had returned with a vengeance, and in the days before the official opening I had convinced myself hordes of people were hoping I’d fail. I’m not vulnerable to impostor syndrome, but every night that week I lay awake imagining their response: who does this person—this woman who never went to cooking school or set foot in a commercial kitchen before the age of twenty-five—think she is?

If the adrenaline of the following night hadn’t displaced the terror, the sheer amount of love coming my way would have. Everyone I knew from every part of my life seemed to be in the room that evening. Katherine was there, of course, and many of my chef friends from other restaurants, and Melinda, with a gang of people I had known since my earliest days in the city. I made a speech in which I thanked everyone for their wonderful show of friendship. I said it was a strange experience, unveiling something I’d been working on for so many years. I can’t remember what else I said; seeing a restaurant bearing my father’s name was simply overwhelming. I had been a chef for over two decades and suddenly I felt like an ingenue.

Our “menu” . . . the poem we present to our guests.

As a concept, the tasting menu relieves diners of the need to make choices, allowing them to give themselves up to the flow of the evening. It introduces them to food they might not have ordered themselves and injects an element of surprise into the meal. In the case of Atelier Crenn, this was aided by the indirectness of the printed menu, which only hinted at what diners would see on the plate. I had given the restaurant the subtitle Poetic Culinaria, meaning that the experience of dining there could be regarded as somewhat akin to reading poetry, as a series of expressions by which one might way feel one’s way toward meaning.

I have always enjoyed reading poetry. I love Baudelaire. I love the American poet Mary Oliver, who wrote so movingly about nature and the sensual overload of living life to the fullest. Clearly I’m not a poet like Oliver, but I like putting feeling into words and pinning the moment to the page. I wondered why one couldn’t be creative in this way when writing a menu, and as Juan and I started to develop the look and feel of the restaurant, I started to formulate an idea of a poem instead of a conventional list of dishes. A poem is an expression with words that takes you through waves of emotion, and that’s exactly what my food is about.

It’s not that each line of the menu directly corresponds to a dish. It is more impressionistic than that. I want to evoke a feeling, to put the diner in a frame of mind that might permit them to travel with me over the evening’s dozen or so courses, through a series of moods and sensations. The menu changes with the seasons and with it the poem, but the first line is always the same—“Summer has come and is full of sweet surprises”—a reference to the Kir Breton I serve at the start of every meal, just as my mother served Kir Breton to her guests at her dinner parties. I might offer oyster next—“under midnight glow, I can taste the sweetness of the sea”—or a floral salad, “the forest radiant with possibility,” twisting back around to the ocean and a sea urchin or squid, whereupon “feeling the black sand under my toes, I dreamed of / these creatures’ languid movements.”

This sort of thing makes people nervous, I know. If people said I was pretentious, which they did, I shrugged it off, listening respectfully without feeling any obligation to change. My sense was that my restaurant wasn’t there to hurt anyone and there was an easy fix for those who disliked it. One food critic wrote disdainfully of how much it cost to eat at Atelier Crenn, to which I would say, “So don’t come.” Another wrote, “Oh, what are Crenn and Contreras going to come up with next, a recreation of the Golden Gate Bridge?” (A reference, I guess, to the elaborate architecture of the food, although honestly, who knows.) Others said snidely that the food was “too beautiful,” something I have been hearing all of my professional life. Tant pis.

You can’t have fear. You can’t think things are too risky. You’ve got to do what you believe is right for you, otherwise you will never go anywhere. I would never have left France if I had let fear govern my life. And so while I know it’s risky to jump off a bridge, being who you want to be is not risky. It’s not even a choice. It is the only possible way to live and move forward.

To me Atelier Crenn wasn’t outrageous or elitist or pretentious or absurd, it was simple: the idea that, with the right combination of flavors and words, my diners might join me for a walk in the forest. We might stroll through a farm or take a trip to the beach, as their memories moved in the same direction as mine. There we might stand for a moment, side by side at the shore, our ears pressed against the same imaginary shell.

The easiest way to explain how I set about creating the dishes for the first menu at Atelier Crenn is to use the example of the Kir Breton. The classic Kir Breton is an aperitif, a combination of cassis and sparkling cider. I wanted to take that idea, loaded as it was with my memories of home, and turn it into something more unusual, an amuse-bouche in which each of the disparate elements was given its own platform, shining in isolation before coming together.

In the case of the Kir Breton, I wanted guests to start their meal with a pop in the mouth, a small explosion of surprise that set them up for the journey to follow. I toyed with various ideas before settling on a spherical cocoa-butter shell, off-white and perfectly round, with the cider trapped inside and a swirl of cassis on the top. It is light, surprising, a little theatrical, and we always make sure to have a few nonalcoholic versions on hand for those who don’t drink. Oh, and with the combination of the ecclesiastical purple and the buttery white globe, it is beautiful, too.

This approach has been called modernist. I don’t think of it that way particularly, although I understand why that word might be used. I do like to take things apart before putting them back together, as a way of ringing the maximum flavor out of each individual ingredient. Visually, it also ensures that the greatest variety of color, shape, and texture makes it into a dish, a celebration rather than an elimination of difference.

Imagine a traditional bowl of onion soup, thick, gloopy, and saturated with cheese. I have always found this classic French dish too heavy, although I do like the flavors. For Atelier Crenn, I wanted to do something that was based on onion soup but cleaner and brighter—less of a bog and more of a tide pool. And so I inverted the recipe, putting a thin layer of cheese at the bottom of the bowl, a clear onion broth on the top, onion marmalade around the side, and a skein of sherry vinegar on the surface. It is a dish that is full of bright flavor, a sharpened-up version of a comfy old classic and it is one of my proudest creations.

Let’s deal with this business about beauty. In my twenties, I applied for a sous-chef position at the Park Hyatt in San Francisco, and a few days later duly turned up for the interview. All the candidates were taken into the kitchen and asked to make a single dish by way of audition. I did my own thing—I can’t even remember what it was now, but I do remember what they said when they rejected me: your plate is too pretty.

The implication is that a chef who spends time on making a plate beautiful is somehow skimping on everything else. It is thought to be frivolous, self-indulgent, irrelevant to the task at hand, as if cooking has nothing to do with aesthetics. It is true that, technically, you don’t eat with your eyes. But a good meal can appeal to more than one of your senses. No one would argue that texture doesn’t play a crucial role in a meal; no matter how tasty, none of us would be satisfied to eat at a restaurant where everything had the consistency of paste. Nor would we be happy if everything smelled the same way. How a plate looks is, to me, just as important. We’re not serving astronaut pellets. All the senses should be fully engaged.

Put it this way: when you dress, you try to put things together in a way that communicates something of your character. It doesn’t have to be luxurious, but it does have to be thoughtful. To call a plate beautiful is just another way of saying that there is an emotion contained therein, that it speaks to you when you look at it. For me, a successful meal should have the visual artistry of a painting. It is not enough to simply slap food on a plate. There is no celebration in that. You killed the fish, so you want to bring back its beauty. It shows a certain respect for the sacrifice.

Color is important. I have a dish based around carrot and aloe, which has been designed to look like succulents in the Californian landscape, with a red quinoa “soil,” aloe vera gel, and a bright carrot sorbet. These are not outlandish ingredients but rather familiar flavors remade afresh, opening our eyes to the things we see—or rather don’t see—every day.

Take the carrot. There is so much story with a carrot. This story can be good or bad. “Baby carrots,” for example, those depressing bags you see piled high in the supermarket, are not baby carrots at all. They are regular carrots that have been washed, peeled, and whittled down to a slimy, neon-orange stub, their production entailing a tremendous amount of waste. To eat a carrot—a real carrot—is to feel the soil in your mouth. There’s a beauty in that which all good chefs understand. Alain Passard, whose restaurant L’Arpège, in Paris, I visited in 2013, makes a garlic and carrot velouté I still close my eyes to remember.

One of the early dishes I worked on at Atelier Crenn was simply called Le Jardin. It involved baby carrots—real babies, fresh and young with the soil still clinging—edible flowers, and pea shoots. It looked like a riotous tumble of color and form, a messy artifice that combined cooked, raw, and pickled produce, depending on the season. I used fava beans in the spring, tomato and avocado in the summer. I made a meringue base that acted almost as an edible plant pot. If I’m honest, it looked more like a garden than a salad, an entire tiny ecosystem on a plate, with basil soil at the root and a bouquet of microherbs at the top, while the lettuces and flowers peeked out of the hollow of each meringue.

In my cooking I have always been drawn to a combination of the very simple and the very complicated. I cook with Versawhip, a soy-based protein used to stabilize whipped foams. I use kuzu starch, a Japanese starch with a glutinous texture useful for making gnocchi or dumplings. I use nitrogen, the extreme cold of which is useful for sealing in flavor; dehydration has a similar effect. And I use calcium lactate (white crystalline salt used as thickener) and sodium hexametaphosphate (a preservative that helps the hydration process). These aren’t just effects. They can be slammed as gimmicks, but there is always a good flavor-based reason for what I am doing.

Sometimes a dish has a superficial simplicity that masks an awful lot of technique underneath. If we go back to that basic unit, the tomato, I might present a dish that strives to get at the essence of the tomato by coming at it from many different angles. I might use a poached tomato, with tomato consommé and tomato compote, and a little shiso sorbet and yuzu panna cotta on the side. (Shiso is a leaf in the mint family; yuzu is a citrus fruit used in Japanese and Korean cooking.) There is a lot going on in this dish, which involves the preparation of five separate elements. Yet on the plate, I try to present it as a play on a simple tomato. This is something visual artists understand better than chefs, perhaps; that a dish of this kind is simultaneously a tomato and an idea of a tomato. The interplay of the two is what I am striving for. It is possible to taste and think at the same time.

A lot of these techniques are incredibly time-consuming and we cook from scratch every day. I like to keep my kitchen quiet. I don’t even like the sound of loud grilling or sautéing, which is one of the reasons why I love the Japanese grill. Some people work with high fire, but the beauty of this particular grill—as with smoking—is that it uses logs to cook the food in slow motion, just kissing the ingredients rather than slamming them around in a pan. Having a quiet kitchen gets you into a different headspace. We sometimes have music on, usually when we do a deep clean after Saturday night service. But my preference is for silence, which respects and understands others as they focus on their work.

The flow of the kitchen schedule took a while to establish but eventually we settled on a way of doing things. Three cooks generally arrive at the restaurant at 9:00 a.m. and start prepping all the things that take longest—stock, soup, sauce, and bread. Most of the ingredients are delivered fresh daily and these deliveries are large and complicated. My dishes tend to have a lot of components, so that for three or four dishes, on average fifteen to twenty separate recipes might be required before everything is pulled together on the plate.

People are curious about the creation of new dishes; where you start and how you know when you’re finished. It is a hard thing to talk about in concrete terms. Creating a new dish is, I would guess, equivalent to how an artist creates a painting. You use intuition and guesswork. You feel your way along in the dark. If a new flavor combination speaks to me, it’s an almost auditory sensation, one that I find I can hear when it’s finished. Rather like rhythm, I don’t think you can learn it. I dream of moving people, as anyone who creates something does.

A good example of this is my signature dish, A Walk in the Forest. It was a dish inspired by the walks I used to take with my father through the forests of Brittany. Every element of the dish corresponded to a sensory memory. There was a scattering of lightly burnt pine meringue, with the freshness and crunch of forest leaves; there was edible soil made from basil and pumpernickel, with the slightest hint of life’s bitterness; there was a variety of wild mushrooms—sautéed, pureed, pickled, and dehydrated, reminiscent of the dark funk of the woods—and mushroom broth to represent the light; as well as hazelnut praline and foraged herbs. I can’t say in exactly what order the composition came about, and there were a few blind alleys. But you learn as a chef that when something doesn’t work, it is merely a stepping-stone toward some other end, often one you can’t yet see. When the dish was done, it sang on the plate. My father taught me on those walks about the taste and flavor of life. “Papa, what’s that smell?” I would ask, a fistful of fresh earth in my hand. “Mon petit Crenn,” he’d say, “that is the scent of a life, long walked but well lived.” I think of eating this dish as akin to following a trail, a way into one’s own memories of being outside, or an invitation to step into the magical forest of a fairy tale.

Of course, to create something “natural” like this requires an enormous amount of artifice. This particular recipe is a gargantuan undertaking of different moving parts, the basis of which is the rich mushroom broth, which must be prepared before anything else and will be used as a component in the mushroom puree and pickled mushroom. Pumpernickel soil is simply pumpernickel bread put in a dehydrator for three hours until crisp, before being pulsed and seasoned. Mushroom whims are finely sliced king trumpet mushrooms, dried and then baked, and accompanied by mushroom paper (a thin layer of mushroom puree spread across an acetate sheet and dried in a closed oven until crisp). Then there is the pine meringue and the hazelnut praline. Considering the amount of prep that goes into this dish, it may become clear why I had no desire to open a three-hundred-seat restaurant.

At 11:00 a.m., after morning prep, everything is cleaned and scrubbed down, ready for the next phase—the arrival, at noon, of six more cooks. From here, things start to heat up. A meal for the staff is prepared that I insist must be healthy and delicious—not just leftovers—and that different chefs assume responsibility for every day. There is more cleaning at 2:00 p.m., and we all eat together around 3:30, when the front of house staff arrive. Then from 5:00 to 5:30 everything comes together as we prepare to open the restaurant.

I float around the kitchen helping out where necessary. I inspect plates to make sure they leave the kitchen looking as good as they can. Every single plate is checked before it goes out; this is another benefit of not serving six hundred covers a night. Once the diners have settled in and put in their wine orders, my favorite part of the evening arrives. There were those in my circle who, before the restaurant opened, knew I wondered how I would handle being a host. I love to meet people, but I can be blunt and I don’t enjoy small talk. I like to connect with people deeply right from the start, and I know that even among those who love me, there were some who thought I’d fail miserably—that I would go in too hard when I spoke to my diners and they wouldn’t understand my intention. That I would be like a person talking Arabic to a person speaking Chinese.

This isn’t how things turned out. Right from the beginning, people understood intuitively what I was trying to do. When food comes from within, there’s a richness of thought and struggle and narrative that makes you vulnerable to others and invites them to be vulnerable with you. It sounds crazy, but one night a woman started crying while eating a turnip. It reminded her of something and she was just overwhelmed. Every human story is connected if you tell it right, and when I cook, there is a connection to some inner part of myself that when things work out is able to touch people.

I started to think more about France. If there is a central irony to my food it is related to the fact that if I hadn’t left France I never would have discovered who I was, but discovering who I was took me right back to France. Memory has always been a creative trigger for me, and night after night, as I revisited my roots in the kitchen, I felt a new passion for the place, a strength of feeling inspired, in part, by the deep longing of separation. I hadn’t lived in France for over twenty years and it had never seemed closer.

Still, times were tough.

Even with our small number of tables we weren’t always fully booked. Business wasn’t consistent, making it hard to model a business plan. There was no money for expensive publicists so we had to rely on word of mouth. We wanted fresh flowers every night but flowers are expensive, too, so we decided to do them ourselves. One evening in the first year, I looked at the books and saw we had only five reservations. It would have been too expensive to open for only ten people, so we had to try to get everyone to reschedule. On another slow night, we called diners and made up a maintenance issue (gas leak!) to cancel the seating.

Staffing was difficult. It is hard to hire the best people in the city when you have no reputation to go on. For the first two years, it was a constant rotation of hiring, firing, and rethinking the team, getting rid of one egotistical chef who came to us from abroad and prefaced everything he said with, “Well, when I was in Europe,” while fighting to hang on to real stars who got poached. During those first few years, my job was half chef, half human resources manager.

Meanwhile, the issue with my business partners raged on. As the implications of the contract I’d signed became clear, I hired lawyers to try to undo it. The investors tried to marginalize me by saying, “You’re an artist, not a businesswoman; we’ll take care of the business decisions for you.” When it became clear I wouldn’t keep quiet, hostility between us escalated. Frequent bullying messages came in via text and email. Meetings between us got more and more awkward.

I would emerge from these encounters in a state of rage. I rarely lose my temper, but I was being pushed to the absolute limit, and once again Katherine would talk me down. She reminded me to be calm and businesslike, and not to take things too personally. She knew me well enough to know I was in danger of focusing on the fight with the investors at the expense of things that mattered more.

It would take five long years of working fourteen-hour days at the restaurant for me to raise the money to buy these people out, the lesson of which is always to read the contract, don’t rely on the goodwill of others, and find better lawyers than I had in the first instance. And only go into partnership with people you trust. Creative talent isn’t enough. The hard, practical work of setting up a business can’t be ignored. I wish it had been different, but there you go. The only way we learn is by making mistakes.

It was all very stressful and I still felt a long way from making a breakthrough. When, a year after opening, the Netflix show Chef’s Table reached out and asked if they could base an episode around me and come and shoot in the restaurant, I said no; I simply wasn’t ready. Two years later, they repeated the offer and it precipitated a rare moment of disagreement between Juan and me.

Juan, who when Atelier Crenn opened had switched from savory to pastry chef, was killing it on the dessert front, and while we may not have been booked to capacity every night, the tide had started to turn. In 2013, two years after opening, Michelin awarded us two stars. Juan thought we still weren’t ready for the cameras—we were fighting with our investors and the restaurant wasn’t in good enough shape for that kind of exposure. I disagreed. Sometimes when things aren’t going right you have to make a bold gesture, and it seemed like madness to me to send the TV cameras away a second time.

I said to Juan let’s go for it, and, overriding his objections, welcomed the cameras in. It was scary for me, not just as a chef-owner promoting my business, but as someone being asked to open up about my life in a way I hadn’t done in public before.

The show aired and the impact was immediate and phenomenal. We were 90 percent booked for an entire year. It was our most financially successful year to date and put us on the map internationally, even more so than the Michelin stars. People who watch cooking shows on Netflix don’t necessarily dine out all the time or follow the specialist culinary press, so the show brought us a whole new customer base. It also brought us a lot of goodwill, mainly I think because I had been open and vulnerable about where I had come from. I spoke about my adoption and my family, and my mother even appeared in a scene with me. Years after the show aired, people still come into the restaurant and say, “We saw you on Chef’s Table.”

One thing Juan and I had promised each other when we opened Atelier Crenn was that we would always try to see our vulnerabilities as strengths. Being small was a virtue, it made us light on our feet. The same went for all the other decisions we’d made that exposed us to criticism and that wound up being our greatest selling points.

People came around to the poem menu. The avant-garde style of my plates eventually won a great deal of praise. There was one decision I made, however, that still annoys people and from which I refuse to back down. I hate signs. Who invented signs? Why do we need to tell everyone we’re here? If people want to find us, they’ll find us. At Atelier Crenn, there’s no sign on the building announcing the restaurant’s name and no sign on the door, either. People get frustrated, walking straight past us or coming in fuming to tell me they drove around the block for ten minutes before finding us. I have a tendency to shrug, I’m afraid. Not having a sign on the restaurant is a little eccentric, I know. But it does something no other measure I can think of will do: it forces people to pay attention from the very beginning.