TOP TABLES ❘ À LA CARTE
“ WE BEGAN WITH AN ORDER OF THE BRILLIANT TARTARE OF AGED RED TUNA, SERVED WRAPPED IN SHISO AND WITH SEVERAL SAUCES”
Chicago, New York and Philadelphia never got a look-in in Paris (unlike London), however, until the recent opening of Golden Poppy, a contemporary Californian restaurant named after the state’s official flower, at the new hotel, La Fantaisie, in the 9th arrondissement. The plot thickens, though, because this restaurant is the homecoming creation of French-born chef Dominique Crenn, who moved to San Francisco in 1988 and trained with Jeremiah Tower, one of the founding chefs of Californian cuisine. Today Crenn is the only female chef in the US to hold three Michelin stars for L’Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco, where she also has two other casual tables. “I’ve wanted to open a restaurant in Paris for a long time, because if my cooking style is Californian, my heart will always be French,” she explains. Crenn, who was adopted from a Breton orphanage by an affluent couple from Versailles, first became interested in gastronomy as a young girl. Her father, a politician, often brought her along when he dined at Michelin-starred restaurants with a friend who was the food critic for the Breton newspaper, Le Télégramme; and her mother groomed her palate by cooking dishes from many different kitchens as well as taking her to Chinese, Indian, Japanese and Vietnamese restaurants in Paris. Crenn also learned a lot about produce during summers spent on her family’s farm in Brittany. “I loved the theatre of restaurants,” she writes in her memoir, Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters (Penguin Press, 2020).
California cooking was based on the freshest local produce – preferably organic, it avoided dairy goods and it was richly inspired by the kitchens of the immigrant neighbourhoods that make San Francisco one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. After cooking around town and training with Jeremiah Tower, Crenn made these concepts the wick of her own subtly elegant cooking style, a sort of free-style California cuisine espaliered to the traditions of French gastronomic logic and technical rigour. Crenn describes her cooking as “poetic culinaria”, or the poetry of cooking.
Heading to Golden Poppy for dinner with a friend, I was hugely curious, because I’d never been to any of Crenn’s vaunted tables, but had
read many encomiums to the luminous beauty and confident sensuality of her cooking. The restaurant, in the just- opened 73-room hotel La Fantaisie in the 9th arrondissement, has a sort of opium dream, through-the-looking-glass décor that’s a trippy mash-up of Victorian conservatories and the visual tropes of Northern California, including a wilting number of fake plants, notably a large artificial olive tree. It’s signed by the trendy London-based interior designer Martin Brudnizki, and with a pleasant view over the hotel’s interior garden, its best features are framed botanical prints, banquettes with floral upholstery and modern rattan chairs with floral upholstery medallions.
The French friend with whom I was dining was immediately flummoxed by Crenn’s short menu, which is arranged in categories that are more familiar to San Franciscans than Parisians – Raw and Cured, California Soul, Taste of the Sea and Sweet Treats. The idea is to graze, as the unfortunate expression goes, on a series of small-plates dishes (another unfortunate expression) according to whim, hunger and ❯❯
From top: Golden Poppy’s unique décor; mushroom and choux dumplings at Golden Poppy; Dominique Crenn has returned to Paris from California
Oct/Nov 2023 FRANCE TODAY ❘ 61
IMAGES @ HÔTEL MAISON MÈRE, IMAGES © JÉROME GALLAND, LAURENT DUPONT, MAKI MANOUKIAN
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