Sustainability is one of my biggest passions. I have two little girls, twins, and I lie awake at night worrying about what the world will look like for them.
Dominique Crenn
Meat's effect on climate change simply cannot be ignored.
Well, I don't think I'm a chef. I'm just someone that... I found a way of speaking. It was not a pen. It was not a brush. It was food.
Eating is an act of activism for me; it's politics.
I'm French, I know how to cook.
I've participated at summits where I was the only chef. I was surrounded with thinkers and writers and innovators.
Look, I'm human. Sometimes I'm struggling, sometimes I'm hurting, sometimes I have feelings, sometimes I'm heartbroken. I try to do good in the world even when I'm very sad.
When you give someone an award and you tell them that they are the best female chef in the world, you alienate them from their peers.
I think I was eight or nine when I had my first long-form tasting menu.
I've met a lot of people who were resistant to my ideas, because they were afraid to get into unfamiliar conversations. I didn't listen to them.
Cooking is just a vehicle to express yourself, like painting and acting... The reason why we're cooking is not because we want to put something on the plate. It's so much more complex than that.
When you are adopted and you realize that someone gave you a gift, you pay attention to things very clearly. You realize how lucky you are.
As a young girl, being a chef did not cross my mind - I wanted to conquer the world. I wanted to play with my brother and the boys. I wanted to be a famous photographer.
Everyone should watch 'Supersize Me' to realize how much our physical health is connected to the food we eat.
I came to the U.S. in the 1990s. I worked all around, including at Stars, and in 1996, I became the chef of Yoyo Bistro, which used to be Elka. During my one-year tenure there, I met a lot of French chefs at the time.
It's funny: not too many people used to think that Brittany was a culinary treasure, but there's such amazing stuff. Beef and pork, of course, but the seafood! The food there is kind of wonderful.
As a chef, I've always been very conscious and very thoughtful about the way that I buy food or have my farmers produce it.
I think through humor you can get a point across better than through just a dramatic narrative.
We need to come up with alternatives to all the plastic wrap and containers that we use in restaurants. It's small things, like having your team bring reusable cups to get their coffees, and consolidating shipments as much as possible.
When I came to America, I saw the inequality right away with the food industry. And I don't really talk about it in the book, but the racism here, it's so predominant and so impregnated in the history of America.
What I want to tell people is, you have to believe your gut. You have to find answers from what your gut is telling you. I always work with intuition.
In the restaurant business, if you break even, you're lucky. It's a really hard business, it's a survival business.
I'm talking to a lot of my industry to maybe try to create a guild and coalition where people, when they retire, would get a pension. We pay taxes through the years, we pay for unemployment, but we don't have a pension.
When I started to work in the kitchen, there's not a lot of women that were working and I didn't try to pay attention to that.
Anybody that comes in, a new person is supposed to spend six months downstairs in the basement doing prep work. I didn't. I got on the line right away.
I am just a little fish in the sea. But I do understand that everything that I do could have a little impact.
I have a big mouth. And I'm not afraid to use it.
I was sifting through the dier, and I remember thinking: This potato is important. It comes up from the soil and feeds us, it connects us. It is the core of society.
My food is about texture and technique.
For a menu to come together, you have to have sweetness, saltiness, crunchiness... it's all about balance.
My restaurant is an expression of myself - my fantasies. Where I've been, and where I want to be. I think of my cooking as very emotional.
I want to treat every ingredient in a way that conveys its most pure qualities, but with a little bit of a dreamy twist.
We need to get into the community and understand who they are and their needs instead of just giving them something without understanding what they want.
I've loved poetry since a very young age and my parents, especially my dad, he really introduced us to art when we were quite young.
I feel that when you connect something that you do, especially serving food, and connect that together with words - I think it's very important.
I think Los Angeles is an incredible city. It's also very diverse, which I love about it.
I think sometimes when you go to a space you might like it, but the landlord is expecting something different from you. Our concept is very specific to us, so we need to have the freedom of doing it.
San Francisco needs to become a city where you have late night offerings.
I think cooks that are just interested in molecular gastronomy are cooks that will never be chefs.
I think what we have at Atelier Crenn, which I think is good, is that the basics are very traditional.
I live in a condo outside of San Francisco, in a town called Larkspur, near a marine area.
I try to craft a menu that is very welcoming. I like to make vegetables and seafood, and I love to make pasta.
I love meals where you have maybe 10 side dishes spread on the table. People get their plate and they can then pick what they want to eat.
I try not to spend 10 hours in the kitchen when I cook at home for guests. That's why I try to be really organized and have everything thought out.
Meat is complicated. We have to be thoughtful about the ecosystem that we're living in and not to destroy it because of the instant gratification and the demand of others.
I'm not a pescatarian, I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm also a conscious person. And I know the impact of the way that we fix meat nowadays is not good. It's killing us, it's killing the planet.
A restaurant, a small business lives day-by-day. If they're lucky they can make maybe up to 5% profit. That's not a lot.
My family, they come from farmers. I used to spend my summers on the farm instead of in the south of France. I loved the hard work and the earth.
So, when I was about eight, I told my mother that I wanted to be a chef - and a police man, too. I didn't totally know that was it at the time, but I was very attracted to it from the beginning. I liked the idea of working with people in a kitchen, of dealing with ingredients, all of it.
I love hi-tech kitchens, but that doesn't necessarily mean full of appliances.
