Dominique Crenn: Career Highlights, Awards, and Books

Dominique Crenn is an award-winning chef and advocate for sustainability and equity in the culinary world. Growing up in the Brittany region in northwest France, Dominique Crenn spent many hours working in her grandmother’s potato fields, foraging for mushrooms with her father and brother, and partaking in her family’s Sunday dinners. Her father’s best friend, a restaurant critic in Brittany, sometimes brought her along on his tasting trips. These experiences sparked her imagination and taught Chef Crenn to think of cooking as a form of storytelling. All of these memories, and the familial and communal love they evoked, would become touchstones in her cooking. They would also provide the foundation of Chef Crenn’s developing food philosophy: creating food that’s visually, texturally, and conceptually exciting with a deep, emotional center.

After leaving France for California, Chef Crenn honed her skills at fine dining establishments before eventually opening her own restaurant, Atelier Crenn. At the Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn, diners receive a poem instead of a menu, with each dish represented by a line of poetry. Chef Crenn describes her practice of tying food to language as “poetic culinaria.”

When she first arrived in San Francisco, California, in 1988, Chef Crenn had no formal culinary training. However, she talked her way into a job cooking at the city’s hottest restaurant (Jeremiah Tower’s Stars), then worked at various restaurants around the city before moving to Indonesia. She made history there as the first female executive chef in the country, leading an all-woman crew at the InterContinental Hotel in Jakarta. Here are some of her more recent career highlights:

• Luce (2008): Chef Crenn returned to San Francisco in 2008, where she helmed Luce, an acclaimed restaurant in the InterContinental Hotel. It was at Luce that she earned her first Michelin star in 2009.
• Iron Chef (2010): With her star on the rise, Chef Crenn gained even more mainstream recognition after winning an episode of Iron Chef America in 2010.
• Atelier Crenn (2011): Despite her success, Chef Crenn still wanted to create a restaurant of her own, a kitchen where she could express herself. With that in mind, she opened Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, in 2011, so named for her father’s painting studio in Brittany. The restaurant would eventually receive three Michelin stars.
• Petit Crenn (2015): In 2015, Chef Crenn opened Petit Crenn, a pescatarian bistro in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco.
• Chef’s Table (2016): In 2016, Chef Crenn starred in a fifty-minute episode of the Netflix docuseries Chef’s Table, which combines interviews with a look into a chef’s kitchen to explore their life and food.
• Bleu Belle Farm (2017): In her quest to supply her restaurants with the best, most sustainable produce, Chef Crenn founded Bleu Belle Farm in Sonoma, California, in 2017. Bleu Belle Farm provides most of the produce served at Atelier Crenn.
• Bar Crenn (2018): Chef Crenn opened Bar Crenn, a Michelin-starred vegetarian wine bar, next door to Petit Crenn in 2018.

Chef Dominique Crenn has received multiple Michelin stars throughout her culinary career, including a three-Michelin-star rating for Atelier Crenn, which many consider the highest honor available to a chef or restaurant. Learn more about Chef Crenn’s stars and other accolades:

• Michelin stars (2009): In 2009, the restaurant Luce received a Michelin star with Chef Crenn at the helm. Atelier Crenn received one Michelin star in 2011, two in 2012, and finally the highest honor of three stars in 2018. Bar Crenn has also received one Michelin star.
• The World’s Best Female Chef (2016): In 2016, the World’s 50 Best, a United Kingdom–based group that publishes an annual list of the best restaurants in the world, named Chef Crenn “The World’s Best Female Chef.” But, as Chef Crenn explains, “It felt like a double-edged sword. There was no mistaking the implication that best female chef was a lesser category than the one unqualified by gender.”
• James Beard Award (2018): In 2018, Chef Crenn won the “Best Chef: West” award from the James Beard Foundation, an American culinary arts organization that provides accolades honoring American culinary professionals.
• Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite (2019): Chef Crenn received the French Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite, one of the country’s highest honors, in 2019.
• Icon Award (2021): Five years after naming Chef Crenn the World’s Best Female Chef, the annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants award ceremony presented her with an Icon Award, which recognizes an outstanding chef and restaurateur.

Dominique Crenn is the author of two books: Atelier Crenn: Metamorphosis of Taste and Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters. Cowritten with fellow writer and San Francisco restaurateur Karen Leibowitz, Atelier Crenn is Chef Crenn’s first book. More than a cookbook, Atelier Crenn includes some of Chef Crenn’s cooking philosophy and inspiration alongside recipes for some of her most beautiful dishes.

Cowritten with British author Emma Brockes, Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters explores Chef Crenn’s childhood growing up in France and her unique journey toward becoming a world-famous chef. As Chef Crenn puts it in Rebel Chef, “If I hadn’t left France, I never would have discovered who I was, but discovering who I was took me right back to France.”

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