Dominique Crenn

The best chefs don’t just make delicious food; they feed us ideas. Dominique Crenn has earned worldwide acclaim for her restaurants—including the Paris-based Golden Poppy, which opened just last year—by using her cooking to tell stories and evoke emotions. There is a poetry to her food—both in how she composes each dish, and how deeply she thinks about it. She is focused on the most urgent message of our time: how we can live on this planet together.

In 2019, Dominique, already the first female chef to earn three Michelin stars in the U.S., stopped serving meat to bring attention to industrial factory farming; her farm in Sonoma County, California, demonstrates that growing food regeneratively can be a delicious solution to climate change, rebuilding soil health by pulling carbon from the air back into the ground. When food comes directly from farmers who take care of the land, you bring the values of those producers directly to the table. Sourcing food in this way, she uses her artistry to highlight the profound role our food choices have on the environment. Above all, Dominique understands the power that food has to change our lives—and the planet.

Waters is an award-winning chef and cookbook author