Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters - Hardcover

Crenn, Dominique; Brockes, Emma

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0735224749 ISBN 13: 9780735224742

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

The inspiring and deeply personal memoir from highly acclaimed chef Dominique Crenn

By the time Dominique Crenn decided to become a chef, at the age of twenty-one, she knew it was a near impossible dream in France where almost all restaurant kitchens were run by men. So, she left her home and everything she knew to move to San Francisco, where she would train under the legendary Jeremiah Tower. Almost thirty years later, Crenn was awarded three Michelin Stars in 2018 for her influential restaurant Atelier Crenn, and became the first female chef in the United States to receive this honor – no small feat for someone who hadn’t gone to culinary school or been formally trained.
 
In Rebel Chef, Crenn tells of her untraditional coming-of-age as a chef, beginning with her childhood in Versailles where she was emboldened by her parents to be curious and independent. But there is another reason Crenn has always felt free to pursue her own unconventional course. Adopted as a toddler, she didn't resemble her parents or even look traditionally French. Growing up she often felt like an outsider, and was haunted by a past she knew nothing about. But after years of working to fill this blank space, Crenn has embraced the power her history gives her to be whoever she wants to be.
 
Here is a disarmingly honest and revealing look at one woman's evolution from a daring young chef to a respected activist. Reflecting on the years she spent working in the male-centric world of professional kitchens, Crenn tracks her career from struggling cook to running one of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants, while at the same time speaking out on restaurant culture, sexism, immigration, and climate change. At once a tale of personal discovery and a tribute to unrelenting determination, Rebel Chef is the story of one woman making a place for herself in the kitchen, and in the world.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dominique Crenn is the chef/owner of Atelier Crenn, Petit Crenn, and Bar Crenn. Highly celebrated as the first female chef in the United States to receive three Michelin stars, Crenn focuses on cuisine as a craft and the community as an inspiration. Adopted and raised in Versailles, France, she began her formal culinary training when she moved to San Francisco in 1990 and worked under luminaries Jeremiah Tower and Mark Franz. As an active member of the culinary community, Crenn is passionate about promoting innovation, sustainability, and equality.

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One

Home

One day late in the summer of my twenty-fourth year, I stepped off a plane and took a deep breath. I had never been to San Francisco before, but as I breathed in, I knew instantly, almost violently, and without a shadow of a doubt something that a quarter of a century later I'm still completely convinced of: I was home.

I had left my parents that morning on a station platform in Quimper, northern France, waving to me as my train left for Paris. My brother, Jean-Christophe, was beside them. A day earlier, we had all stood in a church and watched him get married, surrounded by family and friends. That was where I belonged, in a lush farming region of northwest France where I had lived all my life and where my family has roots going back generations. And yet, as my train left the station that day, I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait to get out.

The decision to move to America looked, from the outside, impulsive. My English was imperfect. I had no long-standing friends or relations in the United States. My parents, although well traveled, were chiefly interested in Europe and I had inherited their priorities. And even though I had grown up hooked on American TV shows-primarily Starsky & Hutch, those maverick TV cops of the 1970s whom I'd once planned to grow up and turn into-my knowledge of the United States was hazy. I could talk for hours about German reunification, the Polish Solidarity movement, or the long-range fallout of the Second World War on French politics, but I was largely ignorant about the United States. This was partly why I wanted to move there. For some, lack of information is frightening. For me, it has always been energizing.

This draw I feel toward the unknown, and the fundamental curiosity that drives it, is connected to how I came into the world. I have two birth certificates, with a different name and a different birthplace on each. My parents are Allain and Louise Crenn and my brother is Jean-Christophe Crenn, but I'm aware that I have at least two other siblings in the world, neither of whom I have met and about whom I know nothing. And then there is the riddle of my birth parents.

When I left France that hot summer day, I knew these three things about myself: I knew I had been placed in an orphanage at the age of six months. I knew that the name on my birth certificate had been Dominique Michele. And I knew that when my parents first set eyes on me, I had been smiling.

I knew lots of other things, too, of course. I knew I was competitive. I knew I was ambitious. I knew my recently completed degree in economics, undertaken in the absence of any better ideas and largely to please my education-loving parents, wasn't going to be the basis of my career. I knew I loved poetry-especially Baudelaire-for the way it could transfer emotion from one person to another, and I knew I wasn't going to be a poet. The things I had loved as a child revolved around being outside and running around, and at the age of twenty-four nothing much had changed. I couldn't imagine doing a job that kept me hunched over a desk or in an office all day.

I also knew I liked cooking. My love of food was almost too intimate to connect with a career. It was deeply bound up with my love for my family and my relationship with the country I was leaving. To me, France didn't mean Paris or fashion or the Left Bank or the Belle Epoque, although I loved all those things. At mineral level, however, France meant something else: the blazing green countryside and the wild northwest coast. It meant lobster just caught from the sea and vegetables yanked from the earth, dirt still clinging to their roots. There was something about plunging my fingers into the warm summer soil or biting into cold salted butter on fresh bread that affected me the way nothing else did. It would take me a long time to articulate and even longer to accept, but deep down, on that day of departure, I knew I loved France.

Of course, I hated the place, too. The reality of living in France, where tradition is revered to the point of intransigence, is that doing things differently is rarely an option, and even as a child I had known I was different. It wasn't simply that my interests were different from those of my friends. I was different in more profound ways, too. To be adopted is to have a shadow life, to live alongside the outline of What Might Have Been. What if I had stayed with my birth mother? What if another couple had adopted me? What if no one had adopted me and I had grown up in the orphanage? These were thoughts that as a child had the power to flip my stomach. When I boarded the plane that day, it is safe to say the number of things I didn't know about myself-crucial, structural things of a kind that, for most people, go to the heart of who they think they are-outnumbered the things that I did.

It didn't matter. The blank slate of my adoption opened up possibilities for reinvention. And while the details might have been slight, for twenty-four years the story of where I had come from had told me everything I needed to know. I knew the world was wide open and anything could happen.

In the mid-1960s, my parents lived in Garches, a picturesque town near Versailles seven miles west of Paris, because of my dadÕs job. When I was growing up, my dad moved between various government posts in and around Paris. For a while he worked as the director general of a think tank called the CFPC - Centre de formation des personnels communaux-, and later as the secrŽtaire gŽnŽral in Meudon. At the time of my adoption, he was the regional representative for Brittany in the French national government and went to work every day at the National Assembly.

This was kind of a big deal. As a child, I was never ashamed or self-conscious of being adopted, mostly thanks to my parents' attitude; they were so open and positive about our adoption, it never occurred to me to be otherwise. I suspect that some of my confidence, however, also came from the fact of who my father was. We weren't wildly rich, but in the communities of my childhood Allain Crenn was a well-respected and connected politician, among whose friends and mentors included Charles de Gaulle. The pair had met in London during the Second World War, when my father was a volunteer for the French Resistance and de Gaulle was head of the Free French government in exile in Britain. In the 1960s, when de Gaulle was president of France, he and my father remained on friendly terms.

 

I like to imagine my father as a swashbuckling teenage Resistance hero. But in a quieter way, my parents' decision to adopt my brother and me, two children of obscure origin, was an act of bravery, too. It's worth remembering that 1960s France was not a liberal place. The demonstrations that took place in 1968, and that both of my parents participated in, broke out in part as a response to the stifling conservatism of a society in which the Catholic Church still wielded enormous influence. Even now, France is less progressive than it might superficially seem: legally, gay couples can adopt in France, but in reality it is extremely difficult. Algerians and North Africans face widespread discrimination. In 1966, a couple adopting children who did not look altogether "French" was a broad-minded act.

 

I never spoke to my parents about their inability to conceive a biological child, but later I found letters that hinted at how difficult it had been. "No baby yet," wrote my mother, painfully, in letters home to her family years before my brother and I were adopted, a sentiment echoed by my father in his own letters. "We hope to expand our family soon," he wrote.

 

I sometimes think that my father's open-mindedness came in part from having grown up with three sisters. There was a sensitivity to him, an openness to the world and to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0735224749
• ISBN 13: 9780735224742
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar