Abalone is beautiful, but not obviously so: a clingy, ruffled foot, rubbery as an eraser, fattening on kelp for years in its lumpy shell.
The cook must work to transform it, and the abalone at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco is thoroughly transformed on the grill: tender, delicate, complicated with the bristling tang of sauerkraut and a smoky mussel sauce spooned at the table from a copper pan that seems pilfered from a dollhouse.
Like all of the dishes here, it’s unreasonably pretty. But it doesn’t speak of surface and froth so much as the tide’s whirling, unknowable depth.
In 2011, the chef Dominique Crenn opened this restaurant in the Cow Hollow neighborhood and became the first woman in the United States to win two, then three Michelin stars — she is now one of the most acclaimed chefs in the country. What started as unusual, character-driven California-French fine dining, as obsessed with technique and Japanese ingredients as the emotional intimacy of the personal narrative, has become more focused in its point of view.
Fine dining can seem allergic to change beyond aesthetics, but Ms. Crenn has reimagined Atelier Crenn many times over. The kitchen served very little meat to begin with, but as the chef’s ideas around sustainability changed, the restaurant did, too. By 2019, the kitchen had phased it out entirely to focus on vegetables (many grown on Ms. Crenn’s farm in Sonoma) and seafood.
The kitchen works with local spot prawns and halibut, sablefish and sea urchin. There was a time on the beaches of Northern California when you could clamber down and pry red abalone off the rocks, but now wild abalone is scarce and chefs tend to buy it from a single farm in Monterey.
For years, Atelier Crenn has been tinkering with French onion soup. It debuted on the opening menu as a delicately chewy Comté dumpling in onion purée under a gelatinous veil of sherry vinegar. Most recently, the soup was reincarnated as a tiny tart filled with a psychedelic whorl of pearl onion petals and a side of hot, concentrated onion broth, reinforced with kombu.
At 14, Atelier Crenn isn’t new on the scene, and while it reaches into its own archive, it’s not restricted by it. The dining room and the kitchen are in motion. The menu is alive, turning over each season, and as dishes like that abalone reappear, they’re often revised.
The exception is the Kir Breton, a fragile shell of cocoa butter filled with ripping cold apple juice, sweetened with a sticky little dab of crème de cassis. It’s the unfussy mixed drink from Brittany, blushing with black currant liqueur, compressed here to a single bite, and it opens every meal.
Servers are swift and composed, and you feel they’re paying close attention, but without tightly controlling every move at their tables. They chat spontaneously here and there, they connect. They’re also as proficient with their lines as stage actors, delivering some bites like the Kir Breton with precise instructions: “Chef suggests you put the whole thing in your mouth and close your lips before biting down.”
You’ve been eating your whole life and, what, tonight you need instructions?
But sometimes, you really are rewarded for relinquishing control and submitting to absurdity. In this case, instantly: The pale orb breaks against your tongue in a sparkling rush. The cocoa butter melts away. Not every bite can be unforgettable, but this one is.
The cooks use a modified food starch to gel that crème de cassis, but the kitchen does less with gelling agents and various emulsifiers than it used to, and dishes never draw attention to their presence. What you notice instead at Atelier Crenn is the profusion of beauty, the softening affect that it has on you.
The pastry chef and co-owner Juan Contreras is a master of presentation, and his pastry kitchen is responsible for many of the menu’s tiny wonders that straddle sweet and savory. This summer, a delicate pea pod made of shatteringly thin pastry, held juicy double-shucked sweet peas shimmering with mint oil, embellished with herbs and flowers.
A spumy strawberry and Champagne dessert was served in a halved glass bottle. Beautiful, but a little lean — from this pastry kitchen, I longed for one more dessert! (I felt similarly about the salad that followed the savory courses, “like in France.” A thoroughly cute idea, but one that didn’t deliver much satisfaction.)
You don’t have to read the chef’s memoir to enjoy dinner, but the menu, even as it floats away in places to tell you about Mr. Contreras, remains anchored by Ms. Crenn’s story. Servers deliver dreamy anecdotes about the chef, who grew up in the suburbs of Paris and spent summer vacations on her family farm in rural Brittany.
She had never cooked in a professional kitchen before showing up in the ’90s at Stars in Los Angeles and asking the chef Jeremiah Tower for a job. Ms. Crenn moved through kitchens in California and Indonesia for years before making her name at her own place.
With just nine tables now in an unmarked building on Fillmore Street, the dining room has the look of a luxurious club, filled mostly with couples out for special occasions. Since it opened, Ms. Crenn has built on the old argument that chefs can be artists, that food can be art and that, currently, a tasting menu for one, without drinks, can be worth $400.
That menu won’t appear until you’re leaving the restaurant. Instead, as you sit down, you receive a poem. So devastatingly earnest, so committed to its AABB rhyme scheme, it made me cringe, but only for a second — then the dishes started to arrive, and the food spoke for itself.
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Tejal Rao is a chief restaurant critic for The Times.
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