Sixteen
MAMAN
A year or so after the opening of Atelier Crenn, Katherine turned to me one evening and said something shocking. “I helped you realize your dream,” she said. “Now you have to help me realize mine.” The restaurant, after a shaky start, was beginning to find its feet, and although Juan and I were still a few years away from being able to buy out the investors and set up the Crenn Dining Group—which we would own outright—business was starting to settle down. Katherine had stood by me throughout this period.
But having children wasn’t something I had given much thought to. I loved my brother’s kids, but having my own was never particularly a goal. I had always been focused on other things. Apart from Katherine and my close friends, my family in San Francisco was a rescue dog called Pascal—a Staffordshire terrier—who would later be joined by a Chihuahua called Maximus (who looks like a little rabbit and is my true baby). If Katherine had a baby, she and I were both clear we wouldn’t share parental responsibility; the baby would be hers alone. But I wanted to help her as she had helped me, and intuitively I understood the strength of her need. We knew it might be a bumpy ride, both for her as a woman trying to get pregnant and for us in the context of our relationship.
The particulars of Katherine’s journey to motherhood are not mine to tell, although I can say that it was amazing and I hope the small role I played was helpful. When things got hard, I pushed her. When she became discouraged, I refused to accept it. My bluntness, I know, can occasionally alienate, but it seemed to me the stakes were too high not to fight. After a few failed attempts at IVF and a lot of very difficult decision-making, I said, “Do you want a kid?”
“Yes,” she said. “But we have to accept reality. Maybe this isn’t meant to be.” This is not, as you know, how I think.
“It’s not a question of whether you’re going to have kids,” I said, “but of how you’re going to have kids. We just have to find a way around this.”
And we did. She did. My approach can be undiplomatic, but it comes from a place of love. There was something else, too; an open-mindedness about where one’s children might come from that drills down into my deepest sense of self.
In 2014, two perfect babies were born. After four years together, Katherine and I were no longer a couple, but I was still in the delivery room when they arrived. They came out silver, shining like moonlight, and I cut the cord. It was beyond words; amazing, beautiful, and I was honored to be there. I am not their primary parent, nor officially their parent at all, but I am present in their lives and I love them. It is as simple as that.It was a busy year. In addition to the birth of Katherine’s babies, I geared up to open Petit Crenn, a smaller, more informal sister restaurant to Atelier Crenn, in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of the city.
If Atelier Crenn was a tribute to my father, then Petit Crenn was devised with maman and my grandmother in mind. I wanted it to mimic the vibe of a casual French bistro, the kind of place where one might drop in and idle over lunch. The menu is seafood heavy, although on any given day we might offer a buckwheat crepe with escargot or a roast beet salad with green onion, and the classic French brunch menu comes with some upgrades.
When you order the Petit Crenn omelette, for example, there is the option of white sturgeon caviar on the side. The eggs Benedict is accompanied by smoked trout and braised leeks. The dining room is bright and white and modern, with the kind of warmth that can only come from an open kitchen and the ambience and smell of a wood-fired grill. My desire was to create a place that acted as an invitation to come and sit casually over a glass of wine, and to talk, always to talk.
Maman and I in Paris.
If there is a real mission behind every business I run, it is this opportunity for human connection; the idea, going back to my adoption, that we are who we are based on the connections we make. As the Atelier took off, it was the success of this, of everything, that gave me the most pleasure. I think we are the only restaurant in history to have taken tables out after receiving a Michelin star, which we did in 2013. But all I ever wanted was to deepen the connection between the people in the kitchen and the people in the dining room, and once the menu had been perfected, scale was the only way to do it.
The exterior of Petit Crenn on Hayes Street, San Francisco.
In March 2018, three years after opening Petit Crenn, I took over the venue next door to the Atelier and opened Bar Crenn, which I modeled after the Paris salons of the 1920s and ’30s. I have always loved that era, between the two World Wars when, in France, people attended the public salons to eat and talk. I love everything about it—the style, the music, the whole of the art deco movement—but above all, the conversations, out of which so many artists, writers, and thinkers emerged. That is what I wanted to re-create.
The life of a chef can be nomadic. When you achieve prominence, you can travel all the time if you have a mind to, spending your life at cooking exhibitions in glamorous hotels or food conferences in luxury resorts. In my experience, enjoyable as these junkets can be, as you get older the attraction starts to wane. A little goes a long way. You have your expenses paid, but a lot of the time there is no fee. Without realizing it, you are giving your time away for free, and you need to be mindful of what you get out of these events. In 2014, I started to pivot more toward the kind of local events at which I could actually meet people with whom I share a community. It was at one of these that I met Nicole, who I would eventually marry.
When we first got together, Nicole lived in LA, an arrangement that may seem unideal to some, but I’ve always believed that a couple’s ability to be apart can be a mark of true closeness, and even after she moved to San Francisco, we maintained separate apartments. The importance of being alone is one I have come to value more the older I’ve grown, and one that I connect to the pace of the restaurant. When I get home at night and on my rare days off, I long for quiet, while every morning, before heading into work, I take a moment to go out onto the terrace and watch the rowers doing their early-morning drills.
My house is my haven—a small, quiet, simple place, heavily inspired by my mother’s straightforward good taste, with a fireplace and a lot of art on the walls. There is a painting of David Bowie, who I love, and a painting a friend did for me inspired by Jean Cocteau’s 1929 novel, Les Enfants Terribles, one of my favorite books and movies of all time. Around the house are lots of images of dominos, as well as domino pieces I have collected from around the world. Domino was the nickname my father called me.