Dominique Crenn Arrives in Paris With New Restaurant Golden Poppy

21.08.2023 - 17:39 / cntraveler.com / Dominique Crenn / Martin Brudnizki / With New

“It doesn't feel like Paris, does it?” Dominique Crenn is grinning ear to ear as she whisks me through Golden Poppy, her new restaurant in La Fantaisie, a just-opened hotel in the 9th. The comment refers to the handiwork of Swedish-born interior architect Martin Brudnizki, who oversaw the design. The smile says everything about how Crenn feels right now, not only as America's most decorated woman chef but also as an artist, activist, and cancer survivor—joyful.

She tells me how much joy she finds in the sunny yellow, her favorite color, used throughout the space, before gushing over the upholstered banquettes stitched with decorative poppies. The use of California's state flower is a nod to the place she has called home for three decades. Her semi-open kitchen got a similar treatment, gussied up with yellow Mibrasa grills and cooktops, the likes of which I've never seen in Paris. But the garden, a quiet idyll, is the most prized feature for a property situated on a bustling market street. It's dotted with a mix of antique furnishings and ruby red Fermob bistro tables, with plenty of space for Lulu, the Chihuahua she shares with her fiancée, Maria Bello, to frolic.

Dominique Crenn on the roof of La Fantaisie

The restaurant's unlikeness to Paris—and the distance Crenn has traveled to get here—is what makes this venture, her debut in France, so full of possibility. Thirty years after leaving to see what she could become, she has returned with a Bay Area brightness, an unapologetic slow-food ethos, and a menu that honors the rich immigrant cuisines that constitute California's culinary vernacular while using the best French ingredients. All of it is served up in a space designed to visually nurture the story of the food. “Intention is important here,” she says. “I want people to feel something from the second they enter.”

She brings this vision to a food-mad city with a reductive view of West Coast cooking as all detox juices and avocado toast. And she's serving it to a dining public that, in many cases, is learning for the first time who she is and what she stands for. “I'm not here to prove anything to the French,” she says. “I'm inviting people to see that things could be different. Yes, we sell food, but this is a human industry. Humanity needs to be the core of everything, of every company. It's not a new concept, but we've lost it.”

Communicating to diners that food, like art, should build community and educate as much as it nourishes has been central to her projects since 2011, when she opened Atelier Crenn, the pioneering San Francisco restaurant celebrated on Chef's Table, which took home three Michelin stars in 2018. It's why she's been vocal about regenerative agriculture (her Sonoma-based Bleu