With a strong dedication to her craft, but a gentle view on how chefs ought to collaborate with those working alongside them in the world’s top kitchens, Dominique Crenn is a poster child of a new generation of chefs taking the edge off haute cuisine. Crenn, a gay woman and LGBTQ+ rights activist, cares deeply about doubling down on inclusion, making her a brilliant fit for Les Bateaux Belmond. In conversation with OutThere, she shares her experience of making it big in the industry – and why being ‘the best’ for oneself is still what matters the most.
When Dominique Crenn was enlisted as Culinary Creator for the Bateaux Belmond cruise brand in France, it was a homecoming of sorts for the superstar French chef – and a relatively unfamiliar scenario for someone who has spent much of her life being an ‘outsider’. She is, after all, a woman who was adopted as a baby by her parents in Brittany, who embarked on a culinary career without any formal training, who moved to the US to pursue that career in a foreign language, and as a gay woman.
But Crenn has never let being an outsider define or confine her. Having first honed her craft under chef Jeremiah Tower at San Francisco’s Star restaurant, she worked at the InterContinental Hotel in Jakarta –becoming Indonesia’s first-ever female head chef – and Luce in San Francisco, collecting two Michelin stars along the way. In 2011, she opened Atelier Crenn, also in the Golden Gate City, and wowed diners and critics with what she calls her ‘poetic culinaria’ – food that ‘tells a story’ and is innovative in its presentation, textures and concepts. Dishes like her signature ‘A Walk in the Forest’ are works of art, the plates landscaped with tiny bonsai trees, mushrooms, edible flowers, and a light, lichen-esque cake. What could have been style-over-substance follies are bona fide palate pleasers and earned Crenn another Michelin star, making her the first female chef in the US to hold three such awards.
And she has achieved all this with a serene leadership style that defies the angry head-chef cliché. There are no vein-popping rants at the underlings. Crenn, who’s also a women’s and LGTBQ+ rights activist, treats her staff humanely and trustfully delegates while she saunters from table to table, greeting and chatting with diners. The opening of her next-door wine bar, Bar Crenn, in 2018 earned her a fourth Michelin star that same year. And the accolades have poured in – the World’s 50 Best Restaurants Icon Award in 2021 and inclusion in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World among them. But Crenn says she needs no such validation (don’t ever call her the best ‘female’ chef, either – she’s simply the best chef) and that her twin daughters and marriage to Hollywood actress Maria Bello are her greatest sources of joy and strength, especially in the wake of her successful battle with breast cancer. It seems there’s no stopping this self-described ‘badass’. And Belmond cruise diners are about to find that out – in the best possible way.
How has it been to collaborate with Belmond?
For a collaboration like this, I think it’s important for both collaborators to tell a story together and to have a meeting of minds that creates something different. So I bring my story, and I try to understand their story. For the cruises in the Champagne or the Bourgogne areas, I wrote a menu based on how I will feel when I’m on the boat, travelling through this beautiful landscape with friends, and hopping into farmers’ markets, getting to know the people and the farmers there, and the history of the villages. That’s the dish that I would like to cook. It tells a story of the place, but also maintains my identity as a chef. So that’s the spring/summer menu, and we’ll change the dishes through the year and the seasons.
Storytelling has always been a hallmark of your cooking. How did that begin?
In my family, the food always told a story – this is where you come from, and all of that. There was this dance around food, it wasn’t just about putting products on the plate. For example, if my mother was making wild rabbit stew, the rabbit came from my dad’s best friend, who had just hunted the wild rabbit a few hours before and brought it to the house. There was a story behind it, and that was something I was always interested in. My grandmother used to tell me, “People are going to define the cooking as French, you might use an ancestral understanding of cooking, yet you always have to tell your story on the plate.” So, yes, my upbringing in France definitely shines on the plate, and then there’s the story of my life on there too. Dominique Crenn with a little French twist.
Your upbringing also included going to lots of international restaurants in Paris with your mum, and your dad took you to a Michelin-starred place when you were just nine or ten. Did that make an impression?
When my dad took me to this restaurant, I don’t think it was about the food, per se. It was about the feeling, the sensation of walking into a place where there was some type of symphony or theatre, and you felt embraced by the movement of everything around you. And I was like, ‘Whoa, this is cool’.
So now you have your own Michelin-starred restaurant, dedicated to your dad. Do you think it has been harder to achieve such success as a woman?
I think there’s been a closed door to us being in the kitchen, and it’s unfortunate. When I opened the restaurant in Indonesia, the staff were just females, and the first words that came out of their mouths were, ‘Chef, we’ve been treated like secondary citizens’. And I think this is the collective thinking all over the world.
Remember, the brigade de cuisine kitchen staffing system was built by Auguste Escoffier. It was like the army – ‘Oui, chef! Oui chef!’. You have to follow the rules. Don’t say anything, work your ass off, don’t take breaks. Chefs were taught that the way to be respected is to disrespect others. And that’s wrong, this idea of masculinity and power. Yet as women, we have allowed this behaviour for a long time, because we were trying to move up, to find our own place.
I never had this attitude. My dad was a politician, and he surrounded himself with women only. He told me that women are the soul, the core of the world. They know how to navigate and empathise. He said to me, ‘Never let a man think they are better than you. Never let a man make you think you can’t get where you want to go. But remember, you’re not better than them, either. You’re just smarter’. [laughs]
Are things improving in the industry for women?
Despite the #MeToo movement, nothing has really changed in the kitchens. When The World’s 50 Best started the Best Female Chef category, they said, ‘We need to give visibility to those young women who are doing a great job, and to help them go to the top’. The problem is, when you give an award category of a gender, you keep the gender segregated. Period. I don’t care what you say, you’re not being inclusive. And in the ‘Best Chef’ award, there’s no woman included. And it’s 2025. So we have to be careful and keep going, and speak up and not accept this behaviour.
Are you finding ways to tackle this issue in the way you work?
You have to surround yourself with people who care, women and men, you create a different community. That’s going to bring change to the industry. You have to build a team around you – and no one is as good as my team. Everybody has a place. And it’s a community of people that trust and want to be with each other in the creative process, and I think this is very important. The problem in some kitchens is that the head chef thinks they’re ‘the boss’. A boss is someone who will treat others poorly, will yell at them. But the problem is that cooking is an emotion, an energy, so if you stress people out, there’s going to be a problem. I think those chefs need to relax, take their egos out of it and understand that when you build something, you build it with other people, and you should give them credit.
In the 2016 episode of Netflix’ Chef’ Table dedicated to you, you said that at the beginning of your San Francisco career, you said you had ‘nothing to lose’. With such success, you now have much to lose. Which position do you prefer?
I think when I said, ‘nothing to lose’, it was a positive affirmation because I was building myself. Today, it’s the standard I set for myself. I’m so grateful for the beautiful things that people write about me and the awards they give me, but those things don’t define me. It’s what I do with it that defines me. I know who I am, and I want to continue to get to know more about myself. If my restaurant closed tomorrow, I would be like, ‘Wow, I had such an incredible run, what is next for me?’
In 2019 and 2020, I had cancer. I was literally on the edge of death. But it was about choosing to bring positivity, to think, ‘this is a gift you’ve been given and it’s up to you to decide where you want to go with that’.
In our industry, people are often so anxious and stressed. I know a lot of chef friends who are like, ‘Oh my god, I got a bad review’, or ‘I’m not on that list.’ And I’m like, ‘Are you serious? Let it go. Look at what you’ve achieved’. You have to understand that if you know who you are, where you want to be with your life and how you want to grow from it, you get to breathe for a second and see that no one defines you. No one. No one holds the work and the struggle, and the sweat that I’ve been through. So I can look in the mirror and say, ‘Wow, Dominique. You’re so fucking badass’.
The world we live in today is so crazy, there’s so much pressure to be the best. But what is ‘being the best’? The best for others? Or the best for ourselves? That’s the difference.
www.ateliercrenn.com | www.belmond.com
Photography by Carly Hildebrant and courtesy of Belmond
