Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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 never doubted myself when I opened my first restaurant. You've got to give 100% of yourself until you know you've done it. But it was still a struggle.
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.
I'm Dominique Crenn. I'm a chef, entrepreneur, artist, poet, human being. I have three restaurants in San Francisco: Atelier Crenn, Bar Crenn and Petit Crenn.
You need to be confident. You need to know who you are as a person and as a human. But make sure that you go through the world with humility and respect for others.
Every dish is very connected to my own experiences. Perhaps I go deeper in the description and feeling in the dish than a male chef would. But it's difficult to say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is so much inequality and injustice in America, and COVID-19 has exposed that even more. We have to really understand that this is a wake up call; this is a time of action.
I kind of do not like the word chef. Chef, giving you a sense of hierarchy and power. To be a good cook and to be a good leader, it has to come from within and to understand others.
What the food industry should be talking about? Climate change. It should be talking about the industrialization of food. It should be talking about how are we gonna feed the kids at school.
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.
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.
I'm not a saint - I'm not saying that - but I was lucky enough to work with people who believed in me, and I want to honor that until the day I die. I'm still learning and still evolving, though.
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.
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.
My grandmother was kind, but she knew what she wanted and she wasn't afraid to give a command. When, eventually, I ran my own kitchen, I realized I had a leadership model reaching back into my earliest memories.
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.
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.
Early in my career, I was told I shouldn't try to work in a kitchen, that I should consider serving or managing instead. It was a sad narrative that was given to me, and it came from a society that didn't know better.
If you are a chef, you have an incredible responsibility in this world. Don't just open a restaurant to serve food. Include the community, and make sure that you are not taking advantage of what the planet has given us.
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.
My parents believed in the importance of education, but beyond that they were pretty relaxed. My brother and I weren't expected to become lawyers or doctors. As long as we were settled and happy, we could do what we liked.
I loved school, although I got bored very easily. I liked literature. I loved philosophy. I didn't like math. I was good at English. I didn't like German. I was good at sports and continued to compete on all sorts of teams.
You're thinking about a dish, you're thinking about an ingredient, and in many ways, you end up becoming a naked chef in front of the customer, because what you put on the plate is you. It's who you are and where you've been.
Obviously, growing up in France, I had foie gras probably when I was two years old. Writing about it and understanding what's going on in the world about it, I think I became more conscious and more thoughtful about things, for sure.
I was very fortunate to grow up in France with amazing parents who allowed me to understand the importance of activism. My dad was a politician but he was also an activist, and my mom was a beautiful feminist who took care of others.
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.
At a very young age, I fell in love with the idea of being in a restaurant and being surrounded with people around me. I don't think at the time I thought about becoming a chef. I have a bachelor's degree in economics. I never went to a cooking school.
I want people to ask me how I feel about the world, or what is my day about, and ask me a question that's not just related to food, but that's related to me being a person: Someone that's vulnerable, someone that has ideas and someone that wants to learn more.
Like I say, Michelin is Michelin. It's nice people are recognized, but at the end of the day, the star doesn't define you, it's what you do with it, and it's what you do in life in general. I think it helps you with the business, but it doesn't help you as a person.
You have so much responsibility because when you're in the kitchen, it's not just food, it's where the food comes from, what you did with production, what you did it with human interaction, and how you did it with different cultures. Food becomes a mark of activism.
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.
Of all the restaurants I visited in my childhood and adolescence, it was Michel Bras that I remembered most vividly and it was the chef himself to whom, early on in my cooking, I would make the most references. I don't mean that I tried to cook like him. Rather, that I tried to think like him.
When I interview people that want to work with us, I often disregard their resume, because a piece of paper, it doesn't tell me really who they are. I'm looking for honesty, vulnerability. I'm looking for strength, I'm looking for weakness. I'm looking also for someone that wants to learn and is excited about learning.