Dominique Crenn’s Petit Crenn Is Reopening—but Only for 5 Months

Tori Latham
·2 min read
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One of the country’s best chefs is shutting down one of her restaurants.

Dominique Crenn, behind the Michelin three-starred Atelier Crenn, is closing her more casual Petit Crenn in September, Eater San Francisco reported on Thursday. The restaurant first opened in 2015 but has been closed since the pandemic. It will reopen for one last run in mid-May.

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The closure is due to the restaurant’s lease expiring, a representative for Crenn told Eater. However, they added that Petit Crenn “is still alive,” and that Crenn’s restaurant group will keep expanding stateside and internationally. (Along with Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn, the chef also has Bar Crenn in San Francisco and Golden Poppy in Paris.)

When Crenn opened Petit Crenn, she envisioned it as Atelier Crenn’s more laidback counterpart. “It’s an homage to the cooking of my mother and grandmother, really,” she told Eater at the time. “Atelier Crenn is my father, who was a politician, and Petit Crenn is my mother and grandmother—this is the way they served their food.”

Back in July 2020, the restaurant temporarily closed due to the pandemic, but it never fully reopened in its original form. Rather, Crenn has hosted pop-ups in the space since 2023, including a dinner series that April, Eater noted. For these meals, including partnerships with purveyors and winemakers, according to the Petit Crenn website, Crenn would prepare pescatarian tasting menus with the produce she grows at her Bleu Belle Farm. (The chef notably stopped serving meat at all of her restaurants in 2019: “It’s ridiculous for me to expect others to do as I say, not as I do,” she said at the time. “Meat is insanely complicated—both within the food system and the environment as a whole—and, honestly, it felt easier to just remove it from the menus all together. Local and sustainable fish and vegetables are just as, if not more, versatile—and delicious.”

Petit Crenn will return (albeit briefly) with a more conventional bent: The restaurant will serve a $210 dinner menu, inclusive of a wine or non-alcoholic pairing, from Wednesday through Saturday. Reservations for mid-May to June will become available on Friday, with later dates coming in the future. The reopening gives fans of Petit Crenn an apt way to say goodbye to the Hayes Street space—and maybe someday they’ll once again see Petit Crenn in another form.

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