Atelier Crenn: Pornokitchen at Home
School's out for summer and fine dining is IN! We go big, seven courses plus mignardise from one of the worlds most highly regarded restaurants.
Under normal circumstances a chef/restauranteur would consider offering take out at this level to be impossible. Circumstances are anything but normal and now is the time that the tough get going. Dominque Crenn and her team show how it is done.
The meal kit comes in a big shopping bag full of numbered boxes and containers. The big fancy white box on top has the seventh course, dessert.
A big bag of goodies.
Our kit did not come with printed directions. Instead you're sent to a web site with a series of videos showing you how to assemble and plate each dish. The videos are presented by the staff member who made each course. This really lends a personal connection to the kitchen that you don't even get when dining at the restaurant and it partially makes up for the lack of social interaction you have with the take-out format.
The contents of the bag arrayed out, with one bundle wrapped in string.
The first course is a welcome cocktail of non-alcoholic Kir Breton. Since we were already sipping a bottle of champagne, we decided to save the kir for the morning which we would combine with the half bottle of champagne that was provided with the wine pairing to make Kir Royale.
The next course contained caviar and the epicures at Crenn and the California Caviar Company weren't about to leave the handling of the delicate ingredient to chance. The jar came with a polished bone spoon for dispensing so nobody would be tempted to use a metal spoon. Details...
A jar of caviar with a smooth polished bone spoon in a fine mesh bag, tied with a satin ribbon.
One of the first things you notice about Atelier Crenn even when the dining room is open is there is not a normal menu. Instead, Chef composes a poem and creates a menu inspired by it, or vice versa. It sounds cheesy as hell but you forget about it after the first bite. This dish is a "caviar and koji rice tart" and contains white sturgeon caviar from the California Caviar Company with a "fume" gel and koji cream. The tart shell was very delicate and buttery.
By the shimmer of black pearls, tumbling in the ashen cloud.
The next course is known as "Grains and Seeds." This has trout roe on the bottom covered with a layer of toasted pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and puffed buckwheat. This is topped with beet gel, brown butter and truffle oils, buckwheat vineagar, nasturtium oil, and toasted pumpkin seed oil. Finally some nasturtum leaves flowers are placed on top, to make it pretty and represent the "fallen leaves" of the poem.
To bury in fallen leaves my treasures of the earth and sea.
As someone that has been making bread every other day for months, whoah I got schooled by a professional. I mean, fuck.
Chef's grandmother brioche with blue cheese cultured butter.
Next is crab tartare and broth. I had to take a picture of the packages for this dish because it came with a cute little piping bag full of vaudavan curry spiked apple butter. The container with the crab has been perforated all around near the top. You rip it off and plop it down onto your plate to use as a ring to get a perfectly round shape.
Packages for crab tartare and broth with a cute little piping bag.
The dungeness crab tartare with wakame vineagrette, apple butter, seaweed, and crab broth.
Warriors ashore bathe in a glow as luminous as its gilded crown.
The last savory course is trout mousse with spring vegatables and Salt Spring mussel cream. The mousse is sandwiched between two thin layers of crispy and savory "bread" of some sort that can barely be comprehended by mere mortals. This keeps the mousse intact on the trip home and while reheating. Worked like a charm.
As delicate creatures of green and blue surface to bloom.
Dessert is the most complex, with the most ingredients. You get this lovely pate-choux shell with a green "crumble" coating that looks similar to what you find on a Mexican concha cookie and a chocolate stem. Inside you have a layer of apple sauce, which the pastry chef refers to as "adult baby food." This is studded with perfect cubes of raw apple. Then an amazing salty pecan praline is layered on top. Some candied pecans are pushed in. Then an anise and vanilla spiked chocolate whipped cream is piped in to make a wall extending over the top of the shell (piping bag not included.) That is filled with caramel and more pecans are placed on top. Finally, the lid. This was a great dessert and came together really well.
Summer has come and is full of sweet surprises.
Finally some peanut butter crunchy salty chocalate balls were available as a supplement. A great finish to a great meal.
Supplemental peanut butter crunchy salty chocolate balls.
Hats off to the team at Atelier Crenn for putting together an amazing dinner under difficult circumstances.