"Rebel Chef," by Dominique Crenn

Since I love restaurants, especially restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area, I was happy to see that chef Dominique Crenn had written a memoir, “Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters” (Penguin, 2020). Crenn writes of her adoption into a French family in the French countryside, her wonderful family, and her early love of cooking. The “rebel” part of her title comes from her desire to go further out into the world, to fight the rather rigid and male-dominated world of high-level restaurant chefs, and to create her own way of cooking. Eventually, after cooking in several restaurants of various types, including one in Indonesia, she became the three-Michelin-star chef-owner of three restaurants (Atelier Crenn, Petit Crenn, and Bar Crenn) in San Francisco. It was a hard road, but she was determined, always buoyed by her parents’ unconditional love and belief in her. Other topics include her wondering about her birth mother, and her gradual realization that she was a lesbian. Over the years, I have dined at all three of Crenn’s restaurants, and have so appreciated her creativity, as well as the thoughtfulness displayed in her food, the atmosphere of her restaurants, and her sense of hospitality. Besides choosing the best ingredients, drawing on the different cultures she has experienced, she is also inspired by poetry, even presenting diners with a poem at the beginning of their dining experiences. And as she says in this memoir, she purposely kept her restaurants quite small, and when possible comes out into the dining room to welcome and speak with the diners. She did this when a friend and I dined at her first restaurant in San Francisco, Atelier Crenn, some years ago, and we did indeed feel welcomed.