Latest news with #AtelierCrenn
The Age
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
What's the talk among the world's top chefs?
What do the world's top chefs and restaurateurs talk about when they get together? At the recent #50BestTalks event, held as part of the World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards in Italy, it was everything from the profound to the ridiculous. Listen in: From Bruno Verjus of Table by Bruno Verjus in Paris, awarded eighth place in the top 50: 'I don't cook food, I cook landscapes.' Well may you snort, but Verjus brings a new spontaneity and emotion to cooking that's precise and disciplined. He also wants us to stop thinking so hard about dining: 'Food and wine don't have to be explained; they must be felt.' Also intriguing is chef Jeremy Chan of Ikoyi in London (placed 15th) with his personal mantra 'to cook from the inside out'. His food is such a personal expression of who he is, he says, that he could never dine in his own restaurant: 'Ikoyi is where I output my life experience into food. It would be like eating part of myself.' The charming Dominique Crenn, whose restaurant, Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco placed 96th in the extended top 100 list, dislikes Instagram and resents the need for photogenic food. She pleaded with young chefs to avoid the use of AI and develop their own voice instead.
Sydney Morning Herald
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
What's the talk among the world's top chefs?
What do the world's top chefs and restaurateurs talk about when they get together? At the recent #50BestTalks event, held as part of the World's 50 Best Restaurant Awards in Italy, it was everything from the profound to the ridiculous. Listen in: From Bruno Verjus of Table by Bruno Verjus in Paris, awarded eighth place in the top 50: 'I don't cook food, I cook landscapes.' Well may you snort, but Verjus brings a new spontaneity and emotion to cooking that's precise and disciplined. He also wants us to stop thinking so hard about dining: 'Food and wine don't have to be explained; they must be felt.' Also intriguing is chef Jeremy Chan of Ikoyi in London (placed 15th) with his personal mantra 'to cook from the inside out'. His food is such a personal expression of who he is, he says, that he could never dine in his own restaurant: 'Ikoyi is where I output my life experience into food. It would be like eating part of myself.' The charming Dominique Crenn, whose restaurant, Atelier Crenn, in San Francisco placed 96th in the extended top 100 list, dislikes Instagram and resents the need for photogenic food. She pleaded with young chefs to avoid the use of AI and develop their own voice instead.
Time Out
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Time Out
These are the most expensive restaurants in every U.S. state
From gleaming Vegas palaces to rustic New England barns, every state has that one special restaurant where the prices are high—but so is the payoff. combed through user reviews, awards and serious price tags to pick out the most expensive spot in each state that's actually worth the money, and here are some highlights from coast to coast. California If you're looking to empty your wallet in style, Atelier Crenn in San Francisco is your stop. Chef Dominique Crenn's three-Michelin-starred restaurant offers a $400+ tasting menu that's as artistic as it is ambitious. These dishes are edible poetry plated like modern art. Maine At White Barn Inn in Kennebunkport, the vibe is refined New England charm. Housed in a 150-year-old barn with garden views and live piano, this place nails the upscale rustic look. The $265 lobster tasting menu is the real showstopper: it's locally sourced, seasonal and just the right amount of indulgent. Nevada Las Vegas is packed with pricey plates, but none top Joël Robuchon Restaurant at the MGM Grand. This three-Michelin-star stunner serves up a $525 tasting menu that can balloon to nearly $1,500 if you go for the Grand Cru wine pairing. Expect chandeliers, marble and luxury dialed to 11. New York Even in a city known for sky-high prices, Masa in Manhattan takes the crown. The minimalist Japanese restaurant offers a 26-course omakase for $750—$950 if you want a spot at the sushi counter. These dishes are so refined and intricately prepared that guests are asked to refrain from perfumes and colognes so the meal can be fully appreciated. Texas Monarch in Downtown Dallas may be new on the scene (opened in 2021), but it's already proven itself to be a heavyweight. Perched on the 49th floor of The National building with floor-to-ceiling views, it's modern Italian done big. The $175 chef's tasting menu includes luxe bites like wagyu filet and foie gras terrine. Wyoming If you're going big in the Cowboy State, saddle up at Gun Barrel in Jackson. This Western-themed game-focused steakhouse serves up elk, bison and venison in a $72 Mixed Game Grill that's as bold as the decor. With roaring fireplaces and taxidermy in every corner, this is the splurge a cowboy deserves. These are the most expensive restaurants in every U.S. state Alabama: Perry's Steakhouse & Grille, Birmingham Alaska: Crow's Nest, Anchorage Arizona: Bourbon Steak, Scottsdale Arkansas: Arthur's Prime Steakhouse, Little Rock California: Atelier Crenn, San Francisco and The French Laundry, Yountville Colorado: Beckon, Denver Connecticut: David Burke Prime, Mashantucket Delaware: The Quoin Restaurant, Wilmington Florida: L'Atelier de Joël Robuchon, Miami and Victoria & Albert's, Orlando Georgia: Bacchanalia, Atlanta Hawaii: Roy's Hawaii Kai, Honolulu, Oahu Idaho: Chandlers, Boise Illinois: Alinea, Chicago Indiana: St Elmo Steak House, Indianapolis Iowa: Splash Seafood, Des Moines Kansas: The Restaurant at 1900, Mission Woods Kentucky: Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse, Louisville Louisiana: Restaurant R'evolution, New Orleans Maine: White Barn Inn Restaurant, Kennebunkport Maryland: The Bygone, Baltimore Massachusetts: O Ya, Boston Michigan: Prime + Proper, Detroit Minnesota: Demi, Minneapolis Mississippi: BR Prime, Biloxi Missouri: Pierpont's, Kansas City Montana: TEN, Billings Nebraska: 801 Chophouse, Omaha Nevada: Joël Robuchon Restaurant, Las Vegas New Hampshire: Hanover Street Chophouse, Manchester New Jersey: Restaurant Latour, Hamburg New Mexico: Sazón, Santa Fe New York: Le Bernardin, New York City and Masa, New York City North Carolina: Del Frisco's Double Eagle Steakhouse, Charlotte North Dakota: Maxwells Restaurant & Bar, Fargo Ohio: Marble Room, Cleveland Oklahoma: Fait Maison, Edmond Oregon: El Gaucho, Portland Pennsylvania: Barclay Prime, Philadelphia Rhode Island: Mill's Tavern, Providence South Carolina: Halls Chophouse, Charleston South Dakota: Delmonico Grill, Rapid City Tennessee: Jeff Ruby's Steakhouse, Nashville Texas: Tatsu, Dallas and Monarch, Dallas Utah: The Capital Grille, Salt Lake City Vermont: The Lincoln Inn Restaurant, Woodstock Virginia: The Restaurant at Patowmack Farm, Lovettsville and The Inn at Little Washington, Washington Washington: The Metropolitan Grill, Seattle West Virginia: Stefano's, Morgantown Wisconsin: Carnevor, Milwaukee
Observer
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Observer
This Year's Hot New Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT.
For four months in 2026, the Chicago restaurant Next will serve a nine-course menu with each course contributed by a different chef. One of them is a 33-year-old woman from Wisconsin who cooked under the pathbreaking modernist Ferran Adrià, the purist sushi master Jiro Ono and the great codifier and systematizer of French haute cuisine, Auguste Escoffier. Her glittering resume is all the more impressive when you recall that Escoffier has been dead since 1935. Where did Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of Next, find this prodigy? In conversations with ChatGPT, Achatz supplied the chatbot with this chef's name, Jill, along with her work history and family background, all of which he invented. Then he asked it to suggest dishes that would reflect her personal and professional influences. If all goes according to plan, he will keep prompting the program to refine one of Jill's recipes, along with those of eight other imaginary chefs, for a menu almost entirely composed by artificial intelligence. 'I want it to do as much as possible, short of actually preparing it,' Achatz said. As generative AI has grown more powerful and fluent over the past decade, many restaurants have adopted it for tracking inventory, scheduling shifts and other operational tasks. Chefs have not been anywhere near as quick to ask the bots' help in dreaming up fresh ideas, even as visual artists, musicians, writers and other creative types have been busily collaborating with the technology. That is slowly changing, though. Few have plunged headfirst into the pool in quite the way Achatz is doing with his menu for Next, but some of his peers are also dipping exploratory toes into the water, asking generative AI to suggest spices, come up with images showing how a redesigned space or new dish might look, or give them crash courses on the finer points of fermentation. 'I'm still learning how to maximize it,' said Aaron Tekulve, who finds the technology helpful for keeping track of the brief seasonal windows of the foraged plants and wild seafood from the Pacific Northwest that he cooks with at Surrell, his restaurant in Seattle. 'There's one chef I know who uses it quite a bit, but for the most part I think my colleagues don't really use it as much as they should.' The pinball-arcade pace of a popular restaurant can make it hard for chefs to break with old habits. Others have objections that are philosophical or aesthetic. 'Cooking remains, at its core, a human experience,' chef Dominique Crenn wrote in an email. 'It's not something I believe can or should be replicated by a machine.' Crenn said she has no intention of inviting a computer to help her with the menus at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco. It is true that generative AI consumes vast amounts of electricity and water. Then there are the mistakes. According to OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, 500 million people a week use the program. But it is still wildly prone to delivering factual errors in a cheerily confident tone. (The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, the creators of ChatGPT and other AI programs, alleging they violated copyright law by training their chatbots with millions of Times articles. The two companies have denied that.) None of the chefs I interviewed takes the chatbot's information at face value, and none will blindly follow any recipe it suggests. Then again, they don't trust most of the recipes they find in cookbooks or online, either. Cooks, like other humans, are forgetful, distracted and hemmed in by their own experiences. AI has its shortcomings, but these aren't among them. Chefs who consult the big electronic brain when they're devising a new dish or dining room find it helpful for the same reason bands like working with producer Brian Eno: Some of its suggestions are so unexpected that it can jolt them out of a creative rut. 'You can get really hyper-specific ideas that are out of the box,' said Jenner Tomaska, a chef in Chicago. For the Alston, a steakhouse he opened Friday, Tomaska wanted a variation on the Monégasque fried pastry known as barbajuan. ChatGPT's earliest suggestions were a little basic, but as he fed it more demanding prompts — for instance, a filling that would reflect Alain Ducasse's style, steakhouse traditions and local produce — the fillings got more interesting. How about Midwestern crayfish, white miso and fresh dill, with pickled celery root on the side? 'It's a little bizarre, because I like to talk through these things with people, and I'm doing it with something that doesn't exist, per se,' Tomaska said. But arming himself with ideas from his solitary talks with ChatGPT, he said, 'does help bring better conversation to the creative process when I do have someone in front of me.' Visual renderings from AI helped chef Dave Beran talk to the architect and designer of his latest restaurant, Seline, in Santa Monica, California. He wanted a vibe that drew something from the shadowy, dramatic interiors of Aska in Brooklyn and Frantzén in Stockholm, but held more warmth. He kept prompting Midjourney to get closer to the feeling he wanted, asking it, for example, what if we had a fireplace that I wanted to curl up beside? 'That was the mood we were trying to capture,' Beran said. 'Not dark and moody, but magical and mysterious.' Midjourney's images looked like fantasy artwork, he thought. But the program acted as what he called 'a translator' between him and his designer, giving them a common language. At the moment, AI can't build a restaurant or cook a piece of Dover sole. Humans have to interpret and carry out its suggestions, which makes the dining rooms and dishes inspired by AI in restaurants less unsettling than AI-generated art, which can go straight from the printer to a gallery wall. True, some chef may put a half-baked idea from ChatGPT on the menu, but plenty of chefs are already do this with their own half-baked ideas. For now, AI in restaurants is still inspiration rather than the final product. Since Achatz's first serious experiments with ChatGPT, about a year ago, it has become his favorite kitchen tool, something he used to say about Google. Its answers to his questions about paleontology and Argentine cuisine helped him create a dish inspired by Patagonian fossils at his flagship restaurant, Alinea. Before opening his latest restaurant, Fire, in November, he consulted ChatGPT to learn about cooking fuels from around the world, including avocado pits and banana peels. It has given him countless ideas for the sets, costumes and storylines of a theatrical dining event somewhat in the mode of 'Sleep No More' that he will present this summer in Beverly Hills, California. Asked to evaluate how well Jill had integrated her training from Escoffier and Adrià in the dishes she proposed for Next, Achatz responded in an email. 'Jill knows or researched important chefs and their styles, which very few chefs under 40 process today,' he wrote. 'She is young, and while experienced, does not yet have the understanding of how to blend them seamlessly.' Years ago, he had similar blue-sky conversations at the end of the night with the talented cooks who worked with him at Alinea and Next, including Beran. He finds that batting ideas back and forth is 'not of interest' for some of his current sous-chefs. 'That dialogue is something that simply does not exist anymore and is the lifeblood of progress,' he said. ChatGPT, though, will stay up with him all night. —NYT
San Francisco Chronicle
05-06-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Which Bay Area restaurants landed on the World's 50 Best list?
Two of the Bay Area's most decorated restaurants, SingleThread and Atelier Crenn, have landed on a global stage once again. Influential restaurant ranking group World's 50 Best Restaurants included the fine dining institutions on its extended list of restaurants, from 51 through 100, which includes 37 cities around the globe. Atelier Crenn in San Francisco placed at No. 96, while Healdsburg's SingleThread was named No. 80. 'We are grateful when our name appears, a sign that our labor is seen,our flame recognized,' Atelier Crenn executive chef and owner Dominique Crenn wrote on Instagram. The restaurant has appeared on the main 50 best list, at no. 48, as recently as 2021, but fell off the list completely last year; SingleThread, meanwhile, fell from its place last year at No. 37. Past Bay Area honorees on World's Best 50 Restaurants' main list include Saison, Benu and the French Laundry, which has been inducted into the organization's 'Best of the Best' hall of fame after being placed in the No. 1 spot. The World's 50 Best Restaurants, published by the British media company William Reed, put out its first rankings of top fine dining destinations in 2002. The group has been criticized in the past for a lack of diversity in its organization, not requiring members to pay for their meals, as well as uneven gender and geographic representation in past lists. The main list, which will rank restaurants from 50 to No. 1, will be revealed in Turin, Italy on June 19.
