Fifteen: The Ethical Kitchen, Rebel Chef

Fifteen

THE ETHICAL KITCHEN

An hour north of San Francisco in bucolic Sonoma there is a place called Bleu Belle Farm. It is a beautiful spot, dotted with giant old trees, greenhouses, and a chicken coup full of huge, happy hens. Seventy percent of Atelier Crenn’s fresh produce is grown there, using biodynamic and organic farming in soil that is regularly tested to ensure there are no chemicals. We as humans have destroyed nature in a way that’s so drastic, I feel that even in the smallest, most individual ways, we have a duty to try to restore it.

For me, as a chef, this means creating a menu with the spotlight on vegetables. There is a prejudice among diners that, particularly in a fine-dining restaurant, vegetable dishes don’t represent value for money. Part of the ethos of Atelier Crenn is to treat vegetables as reverentially as other restaurants treat meat. Along with fish, they are the heart and soul of what we do, partly because my taste skews in that direction and partly because, if you are a chef and care about the planet, it seems to me the only possible approach you can take.

As a child, I was never under any illusion as to where the steak or sausages on my plate came from.

From the youngest age, we would stay at my uncle Jean’s livestock farm in Brittany, sometimes waking in the morning to the sound of screaming pigs. It was truly terrifying, as was the sight, when I got out of bed to look out the window one time, of my uncle and his workers chasing an already bloodied pig around the yard. As I got older, I understood that, in fact, Uncle Jean’s pigs represented the best-case scenario—kindly treated, living in roomy and well-aerated barns, with plenty of good food and as humane a death as could be managed. Every last shred of the carcass was used on my uncle’s farm, to make everything from blood sausage and rillettes to head cheese and saucisson. If we have to eat meat, this is the only decent way to do it.

I am not quite a vegetarian, and I don’t run a vegetarian restaurant. I do, however, recognize that particularly in America, too many people eat a meat-centered diet, when for health and environmental reasons meat should be a secondary ingredient, one component among many rather than a huge slab at the center of the plate. You don’t have to eat a hamburger every day, you know?

It’s a simple message: that people should think before they eat and consider where the food on their plate has come from. The problems of industrial farming are well-known by now—animals crated for their entire short lives, raised in appalling conditions, and stuffed with antibiotics, which after slaughter get into the food chain. I won’t buy from these places. We serve pork belly at the restaurant and I source the pork only from farms where the animals are well treated. Likewise our lamb, which comes from a farm up in Marin where the animals are respectfully treated.

The cured meat that goes into our beef carpaccio is Japanese Wagyu, which comes from cattle treated as close to the way my uncle Jean treated his cows as I have managed to find. Wagyu cattle aren’t pumped full of hormones or made to spend their entire miserable lives in a pen, and as a consequence, their flavor is better.

I don’t serve chicken in my restaurant. This shocks people sometimes. How can any restaurant that doesn’t market itself as vegetarian strike one of the major proteins off the menu? The fact is I don’t like chicken because I can’t find a supplier that meets my standards. The term “free-range” no longer means anything—it is used as a woolly alibi to hide all sorts of cruelty—and it is almost impossible to find a humane and sustainable supplier of poultry you can trust. Instead of chicken, I serve rarer birds such as squab, the more acceptable term for a pigeon in culinary culture, and a delicious halfway house between poultry and red meat. These birds are less likely to be raised in factory-farm conditions and can form the basis of a lovely winter dish I serve with maple syrup, squid ink chips, and parsnip logs.

Pintade is a type of guinea fowl. It is native to Africa, and in the restaurant we serve it with lemon, the citrus giving it a light, slightly Asian flavor. I’ve always thought of this particular dish as a bridge between different worlds, a meeting of earth tones with the sky. The word “fusion” has become frowned upon as gimmicky and fashionable, but the fact is that most good things involve a fusion of sorts. We take what we know and combine it with unfamiliar things to create something unexpected and new. To me, pintade is a wonderful comfort food—particularly when battered and fried it provides an alternative to traditional fried chicken—and one that we often serve at staff meals. And as my uncle Jean taught me, I try to minimize waste by using every scrap of the bird, stripping it down to the bone, before using the bone itself to make consommé.

Running an ethical kitchen is about more than where you choose to source your meat. It involves making sure that everyone in the restaurant, from front of house to the kitchen, has some sense of connection with nature. It means ensuring that “organic” isn’t just a label but connects in everyone’s mind to the experience of being on a farm, smelling the soil, understanding that we are part of the chain, not above it. It is about recognizing that when you put something foreign in the earth, you infect the food that is grown there.

Bleu Belle Farm is an emotional place for me, as a chef and as a human being. It’s also an important part of the restaurant. Psychologically, I think it’s good for the team to be able to walk around the farm once every few weeks, to learn about the soil and the trees and to hear the sound of the wind. The pleasures of cooking are as tactile as they are emotional and intellectual, something I have known since my childhood, when raking through the black earth to recover potatoes on my grandmother’s farm gave me a physical thrill. I try to re-create this for my staff and to make sure that everyone has a chance to get out to the farm regularly and reconnect with ingredients at a mineral level.

A lot of what we grow there is deeply unfashionable. I love reclaiming unfashionable food. It acts as a surprise on the menu and is an antidote to waste, which is one of the biggest problems in Western food culture. We like to buy cheaply and discard in this country. We eat cheap empty calories that do us no good. Obesity doesn’t come from the amount of food that you eat, but rather from the quality of your diet. If you’re eating chemicals that are not supposed to be in your body, your body is going to react. If you eat a lot of proper food, you might get big, but you won’t get obese.

Food connects to mood, too. When you start to feed people better, they feel better. This has been proven in studies of school-age children. The child who is eating properly will perform better than the child who is not. Well-fed prisoners behave better than prisoners fed on slop and scraps. But there are so many powerful interests invested in discouraging Americans from eating more healthily. When Michelle Obama tried to promote organic farming, the backlash she faced was amazing. And why? Because industrial farming fought back.

Before you buy something, you have to ask yourself if you know what the company stands for, and whether you want to support it. And while I am not a puritan about calories—I love butter, I eat a chocolate croissant for breakfast almost every day, and I love sugar, even though it’s killing the world—I do want people to think before they eat, to consider the quality of what they put in their mouths and to expand the range of what are considered “desirable” ingredients.

Take rutabaga, for example. Along with other root vegetables, it is associated with food shortages, particularly in France where it was a reliable staple during the Second World War. I love to take this supremely unfashionable and humble vegetable and pair it with a delicacy like crab, with perhaps an artichoke puree on the side. I love turnip, which we grow copiously at the farm. I will make something like turnip soufflé or turnip crème caramel—yes, it’s delicious—in a heartbeat.

Navet is a spicy root vegetable I grew up with, a little like radish and a delicious, much-overlooked ingredient, as is salsify, another dowdy root vegetable that happened to be my father’s favorite. It forms the basis of a savory dish I make with white chocolate and cauliflower.

To enjoy all of these ingredients requires one to check one’s prejudices and let imagination reign. “Carrot jerky” might sound absurd but it’s wonderful. (You soak the carrot in pickling lime to create a skin, cure it to draw out the moisture, brine it to rehydrate, then cook and dehydrate it again.) One might think of the carrot as an ingredient not suited to this kind of effort—only meat is supposed to be worthy of a many-stage process—but that simply isn’t the case. As our meat-heavy diets make us sick and deplete the planet’s resources, we have to expand the range of what we understand to be possible, and, as chefs, expand the range of our experience.

Take pickling lime. It is actually water with calcium hydroxide, and I discovered it in Spain, via Chef Andoni Luis Aduriz, and after returning to San Francisco worked on the technique with my former sous-chef, Daniel Beal, until we got it just right. It works for other vegetables as well as carrots and is an agent that has been used for thousands of years to make corn into masa.

Or take a more common ingredient such as honey. When Juan was working on a honey dessert, he got deep into local beekeeping culture, learning about the engineering that goes into a honeycomb, right down to the difference between “free-form comb building” and guiding bees with plastic comb frames.

He learned how hives from different neighborhoods produce subtly different–tasting honey, in accordance with the plants they feed on. (In Potrero Hill, for example, the honey has a hint of the fennel that grows on the hillside there.) To really finesse his recipe he had to educate himself to the level of expert so that his final dish encompassed honey meringue and beeswax sorbet, and included one and a half ounces of bee pollen. The result was a balance of flavors and textures so finely wrought that it seemed to be an expression of nature without intermediary.

This is the illusion of our kind of cooking; the immense, labor-intensive efforts that go into mimicking the world’s natural processes. Consider a dessert Juan makes called The Sea. During the research period for this dish, he went to Monterey to learn about seaweed and algae and came back with a radical dessert, featuring a palate cleanser of pineapple water with algae, followed by a dish of compressed aloe flavored with sea lettuce and shiso. This was served in either mussel, clam, or oyster shells, so that the whole thing looked like a beautiful tide pool.

For a pear sorbet and sage cake with yogurt snow, Juan visited Peter Jacobsen’s stunning farm in Yountville, where he found just what he was looking for—Seckel pears—the smallest and sweetest pear in the world that is sometimes referred to as the “sugar pear.” This is the beauty of Juan’s dessert work: it relies on natural rather than artificial sugars and never goes heavy on the cream.

The fact is that we all have some work to do when it comes to reeducating our palates. That includes me. Foie gras is an emotional part of many French people’s diets. For my part, I associate it with precious childhood memories of visiting my aunt Madeleine’s house in Lot-et-Garonne, in the southwest of France. She owned a foie gras farm and her birds were free-range; I used to run around the yard with them. I didn’t know about gavage back then, the technique of force-feeding birds to fatten the liver for foie gras, but looking back, for all the apparent happiness on my aunt’s farm, I know her birds wouldn’t have escaped that hideous fate.

And yet I still have an emotional response to good French foie gras. My family would eat it at Christmas, as a side to the turkey along with roast chestnuts, smoked salmon, and oysters, and it featured in an early dish at Atelier Crenn. There are ethical foie gras farms these days, most famously that of Eduardo Sousa in Spain, who has experimented with creating foie gras without resorting to gavage. And I find the outcry around foie gras somewhat absurd, when factory farming creates many more unhappy animals without generating anything like the same protest. But I have evolved, too, and understand that in spite of my happy memories of my aunt Madeleine’s farm, I can’t condone the cruelty. There is no foie gras on the Atelier Crenn menu these days.

There is also no fish that hasn’t been sourced from sustainable outlets. The fishing industry has changed radically since my childhood. La criée no longer exists. Now all fish sales are mediated by distributors. Nostalgia can be deadly, but this seems like a sad passing and it means you have to do your research into where the distributor buys its fish.

Fish stocks are in crisis, too, of course. According to the UN, the annual catch of fish removed from the ocean every year is 40 percent larger than it was 50 years ago. Resources are dwindling. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of the large predatory fish such as cod, shark, and swordfish have been removed from the oceans, which are also under threat from pollution and climate change.

I don’t serve large fish like tuna; I prefer smaller fish and shellfish. I try to find sustainable options such as oysters, which are not only delicious but ecologically sound. Oyster farms actually play a restorative role in ocean ecology, creating reefs that serve as a home to lots of other marine plants and animals. Like honeybees and grapes grown for wine, oysters express the character of their surroundings through their individual flavors. I have always loved Belon oysters, thousands of tons of which are transplanted to absorb nutrients from the Belon River in the south of Brittany every year, but I love the California oysters, too—the Kumamoto and Kusshi varieties, both small and exquisite and native to the Pacific Northwest. You are tasting the planet itself when you eat these finely bred shellfish, drawing down into something infinite that goes back to the first sea and beyond.

There is another, more practical, ethical dimension to running a restaurant, and that is the way in which you treat your staff. San Francisco is the most expensive city in the United States, and at Atelier Crenn we have always paid entry-level jobs at above the minimum wage. We pay every intern. If you come here, you work, and I don’t want anyone to work for me for free.

We give people 401(k) plans for retirement, and everyone has an annual five days of vacation plus twelve days of personal time. And we allocate paid time off for staff to give their services to charity. That starts at the top—I am working with a charity called the Root Project that aims to replant coffee, cocoa plants, and one million trees in Haiti after the devastation following Hurricane Matthew in 2016. For me, these measures are about reinvesting the profits from the restaurant in the people who have made it successful. We try to do as much as we can.

There is a broader way in which I try to manage an ethical kitchen, and that is by stripping out the underlying presumptions that have kept so many promising women and people of color from realizing their potential as chefs. A critic once wrote of me that I’m successful because I am “attractive and charismatic and cook like a man,” a shockingly sexist statement that an editor shouldn’t have allowed through. Every day I push back against these judgments at Atelier Crenn the best way I know how: leading by example.

Kitchens can be terribly stressful environments, and I also try to exercise good pastoral care. I insist that everyone on the team sits down and eats a delicious and nourishing staff meal every day. We might have Korean soup with braised beef, or a lamb barbacoa with tacos, followed by freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and though people eat as fast as they can, everybody does sit down. We made it a requirement to stop work for at least a few minutes. These are family meals that bolster the sense of community that keeps us together during more stressful parts of the day.

Although I finish at the restaurant at 10:00 p.m., I often don’t leave until midnight. My kitchen staff is very young, so I try to be there for them as much as possible and to make the atmosphere focused but light. Kindness isn’t weakness; you can be strong and professional without being a jerk. We’ve had people come trail from harsher kitchens—the kind that suck the personality right out of you—and say, “Wow, everyone here is having such fun.”

There are good reasons for putting these measures in place. Burnout in the culinary world is a very common phenomenon and depression and alcohol abuse are rife. There are plenty of news stories about chefs cracking under the pressure, most famously Bernard Loiseau, the famous chef at La Côte d’Or in eastern France, who shot himself in 2003 amid rumors that he was about to lose one of his three Michelin stars. Sébastien Bras, the son of my hero Michel Bras and a highly regarded chef in his own right, later opted out of the Michelin system, criticizing it for creating far too much pressure.

When I got my first star at Luce, did I feel pressure? Maybe. I don’t know. I think I look at pressure differently than most people. For some successful chefs, the public recognition of being awarded a Michelin star is what they have lived their whole lives for, but for me it was never the endgame. It’s a great honor, but I didn’t get into cooking for that. I always knew I could live without it.

I remember a discussion I had with Anthony Bourdain in the Cayman Islands a few years ago, in which he talked about his depression and how overwhelmed he felt at times. I didn’t know Tony well, but I knew him enough to know he was someone who had carried this struggle for a long time. If you read Kitchen Confidential, it is apparent there was something within him he couldn’t get past.

I learned that weekend in the Cayman Islands that there was another side to him, too; that he was amazingly kind and giving, soft and well-spoken. We were colleagues at an event hosted by the Ritz-Carlton, at which well-known chefs—in addition to Tony and me that year, Daniel Boulud and Rick Bayless were in attendance—performed cooking demonstrations for high-paying guests.

Tony Bourdain was the heart of the weekend, an example of how good cooking should never be separated from a good heart. He was about people, and humanity, and the darkness that he had within himself was something he tried to keep away when he was giving to others. I was very saddened by his death in 2018. I’m not a depressive person, but I have empathy for him.

Kitchen culture has a long way to go. People need to be kinder. There need to be more women and more minorities in the kitchen. And young people who want to become chefs need to understand that the metric for success isn’t the Michelin star. To me, the ultimate goal is to be inspired by one’s interests and in turn to inspire others. Success is finding out who you really are and anchoring that discovery to a purpose. Cooking is a great love of my life, of course, but I still think of it as only a vehicle to show others that, by pursuing the thing we love in the face of life’s obstacles, we truly find an end in itself.