The question of family is one that will never stop intriguing me, the myriad pathways we take to one another. As I get older, my relationship with my own history changes. For a long time, I had very little curiosity about the woman who gave birth to me and who I was sure I could find if I tried. I even had a lead: the social workers kept track of my birth mother for over ten years after my adoption and they recorded that, many years after my adoption, she married. I have her husband’s name, which would not be hard to trace. I would think about it occasionally, or a friend would encourage me to take a look. But I never did.
There were good reasons to hold back. There is a fear of what I might find. There is the fear of rejection, even after all these years. I have a lot of self-confidence, but there is a part of me that is still vulnerable and I can be quite insecure. The fear of finding my birth mother was partly a fear of retrospectively altering my own story by introducing new and unassailable elements, of having to adjust myself in order to accommodate her.
Also, I didn’t need to. I don’t mean this in a plaintive or flippant way. I mean it in the most positive way there is. My whole life I had thrilled with the possibilities opened up by the gaps in my history, and by the sense of movement and opportunity they gave me. It had been a big part of my drive. Why give that up? Why compromise something I had worked hard to perceive as a gift and replace it with something that might turn out to be limiting? I didn’t need this information to complete my own story. I would complete it myself.
My brother did let me talk him into doing a DNA test recently, as I had done myself a few years earlier. DNA is a way for us to find out more about our origins without the potential disruption of tracing actual people—all the fun and none of the cost. Even my mother, for whom the whole question of our origins can be painful and difficult, got excited about the data my brother and I turned up.
Jean-Christophe is dark, like me, and we always assumed he had something like Iranian in his background. In fact, as it transpires, he is all European—French, English, Iberian, but nothing further afield than that—and nothing, it turns out, like me. As gene-reading technology improves, my DNA report changes slightly every few months to include new trace elements from Southeast Asia and Siberia. But it is still the case that I am predominantly North African—33 percent at the last count—and the rest primarily German and French.
Of these percentages, French represents the smallest proportion, just 7 percent of my DNA. And yet the older I get, the more French I feel. Although I left France in my early twenties, never to live there again, my thoughts and dreams still come to me in French. My most vivid memories, the foundation that feeds me, all originate in France. Even my priorities feel French—this in spite of the fact that when I lived in France, all I did was dream of going to America. Somehow these facts coexist. Part of my Frenchness feels like an absolute draw toward the beauty of things; the beauty of an object, food, a drawing, a poem—an inclination I have always at some level thought of as French. And of course I am aware of the central irony of my life: that one of the reasons I love France as much as I do is because I was able to leave.
The Élysée is the official residence of the president of France, a grand eighteenth-century building in the center of Paris that once belonged to Napoleon. I had walked past it as a college student a million times. Now I was back in Paris and about to walk in and make lunch.
It was 2017 and I had been invited to cook for Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, and a selection of the best chefs in the country. I have cooked for important people before, but this was different. I thought of how happy and proud my dad’s old friend Albert Coquil would have been, and how proud it would have made my dad. The lunch had been organized by President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, to celebrate the best chefs in France and to award the trophy for the Bocuse d’Or, a biennial culinary championship held in Lyon and one of the most prestigious cooking competitions in the world.
The lunch itself was for three hundred people, drawn mainly from the French culinary world, and for the menu the organizers wanted to showcase five chefs, with a balance between women and men. I was chosen along with Guy Savoy, Anne-Sophie Pic, Yannick Alléno, and the pastry chef from Ladurée, Claire Heitzler. Each of us got to do a single dish.
This would be the very definition of a tough crowd, the realization of every stress dream from my youth in which the French culinary establishment had been gathered in one place to judge me. Alain Ducasse would be present, as would Joël Robuchon, Marc Veyrat, Philippe Etchebest, and Christian Constant, a roll call of the most famous French chefs in the world, plus, of course, the president of the Republic. When I flew to Paris that November, I was shaking at the prospect of what lay ahead. If I messed this up I would never recover.
When I arrived in the city, I went for a walk to calm down. I let my mind wander way back to my college boyfriend, Philippe, and to my mother’s dinner parties at the house in Meudon. I bought some clothes for Katherine’s girls—some gorgeous summer outfits. (She was annoyed; it was November and they wouldn’t be able to wear them for months. This is the kind of thing I am always doing.) Finally, I headed over to the venue to meet my fate.
We were to serve lunch in the Salles des Fêtes, the grand reception room and a space of huge chandeliers, red drapes, and gilt wallpaper. I had thought very carefully about my dish. The safe thing, I knew, would be to stick to classic French cuisine, something purely in the tradition of the gastronomy we were celebrating. Then again, when have I ever played things safe?
Anne-Sophie Pic, the legendary chef who runs Maison Pic in Valence, in southwest France, did an exceptional oyster dish with black cardamom. Guy Savoy—the celebrated, multi-Michelin-starred chef who owns five restaurants in Paris—did a beautiful artichoke soup with black truffle and a brioche puff stuffed with mushrooms. In the end, I did a dish that took from traditional French cooking and combined it with my other culinary interests: Japanese rice, pickled seaweed, and broth with langoustines, with fermented pineapple on the side. It was light, fresh, with a beautiful layering of flavor. It was very French, no question. But it had its roots in other things.
After the event, we were all highly praised and thanked by the president. But it wasn’t until Alain Ducasse—one of the most celebrated French chefs of the modern era whose restaurants have collectively won over twenty-one Michelin stars—came over and told me my food was exceptional that I realized just how nervous I’d been. I hadn’t trained with these people. I hadn’t earned my spurs in a French kitchen or slogged through the brutal internship of a French cooking school. I had skipped all that, and although I had spent my entire career telling myself it was no big deal and that I’d made the right choice, at some level, I realized, I had been seeking the approval of the world I left behind. Over thirty years after leaving France, I felt as if I finally had the nod of my peers.
A very French occasion.
Eighteen months later, I was honored with the Ordre National du Mérite, one of the greatest awards the French government can give. The ceremony was presided over by Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens, the consul general of France in San Francisco, who before he handed me the blue-and-silver medal said, “With this award, France recognizes in Dominique Crenn a chef, an artist, and an activist. Her cooking draws inspiration from French cuisine while reinventing classic French food. An experience in her restaurants is an all-embracing artwork, as in music or architecture. And through her gastronomy, she gets involved with the city and the world, in a willingness to address the challenges facing our time.”
Contemplating knighthood in front of my flag.
I couldn’t have asked for a better summary of my work, nor hoped for more meaningful recognition. I was feeling on top of the world. The Atelier had received its third Michelin star in November, and Bar Crenn, which had been open for less than twelve months, had received its first star. Paris Match did a spread. Rolling Stone came. By January, it was clear that 2019 was shaping up to be our best year yet in the restaurant and my diary was booked solid through December.
On top of all this, there were two beautiful four-year-olds in my life, a wife I adored, and a kitchen full of people who were as close to me as family. In the rare moments I had to take stock, it occurred to me that the life I had created for myself was entirely on my own terms. I thought back to those days of my childhood when, looking down through my window at the orphanage in Meudon, I had wondered how much further I might travel. It was something that, in the coming months, I would have greater cause to think about than ever before.