Rebel Chef by Dominique Crenn & Emma Brockes

Author:Dominique Crenn & Emma Brockes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Working, cooking, learning.

He is also an extraordinarily good chef, although I didn’t know it back then. When he walked in the door, I saw a young guy with cutoff pants and sun-bleached hair who looked like a typical Californian surfer. Juan was born in San Diego and is of Mexican descent. His grandfather was a carpenter, his father was a doctor, and his mother, who he had been very close to and who had died when he was young, had been a teacher. We talked for hours at that first meeting, about his life, his dreams, and the loss of his mother. What’s interesting is that we didn’t talk exclusively, or even overly, about food, yet I immediately had a deep sense of compatibility with him.

(A friend of mine recently asked Juan to recall his first impressions on meeting me. “Crazy!” he said. “All over the place! A lot of ideas and goals!” I guess my energy had yet to find its true focus, although I was many years into planning my own restaurant. “Her strength is in risk-taking. She pulls the trigger and the rest of us go along for the ride.”)

In late 2006, I woke up one day and realized I had been at the Country Club for almost eight years. Though I was happy there, the longer I stayed the more remote some of my ambitions seemed to become. It was a good life and a satisfying job, and I was close to the owner. I still am. In many ways, I had gone much further in my career than I could have ever imagined, working in prestigious restaurants and for the biggest names in the business. But in one very specific goal I had fallen short. I had turned forty a year earlier and was starting to panic that if I wanted to open a restaurant, I’d better get on with it.

This goal was about more than being my own boss. From my chef-owner friends, I knew that owning a restaurant was a huge headache. It was financially risky and emotionally fraught and the probability was it would fail. But the reward, if it worked out, was something I could barely imagine. Even at the Country Club, where I had so much freedom, there was a limit to how much influence I could exert. Its look and ethos had been established long before I’d arrived and reflected the owner, not me. I wanted to create something of my own.

Later that year, toward the end of 2006, a pair of restaurateurs approached me and said they were opening a restaurant in Santa Monica. Would I come in with them, as a coinvestor and the executive chef? On the face of it, it seemed a good fit. They talked about farm to table, and organic and local food movements, and they talked about a love of innovation and modernity.

The restaurant was to be called Abode, in a building on Ocean Avenue, across the street from the entrance to the Santa Monica Pier.

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