The duo forms a star couple in the United States.
France’s favorite culinary show is soon back on our screens with two new jurors, Stéphanie Le Quellec and Dominique Crenn. The latter, a French chef based in the United States, had already appeared on the show in 2022 as a guest. That year, it opened Golden Poppyhis first restaurant in the 9th arrondissement of the French capital which reinvents traditional French cuisine, with particular attention paid to seafood and vegetables.
This Parisian native born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye was a self-taught chef before running three restaurants in San Francisco. She has carved out a place among the greats. In 2018, she became the first woman to be awarded three stars by the Michelin Guide in the United States for her restaurant Atelier Crenn and in 2016, she was elected best female Chef in the world by the ranking. The World’s Best 50 Restaurants. And its popularity across the Atlantic does not stop there.
Dominique Crenn married American actress Maria Bello, revealed in the cult series EMERGENCIES (between 1997 and 1998) as Dr. Anna Del Amico. We could also see her in the films A History of Violence (2005) or, Coyote girls (2000) and since 2017, she played Jacqueline Sloane, the psychologist in NCIS: Special Investigationsa series that she left in 2021. And their meeting happened when the French chef had just entered a very difficult episode in her life.
“When we fell in love, I had just learned that I had cancer. She said to me: ‘OK, let’s do cancer’. We danced, we laughed, we had dinners” she confided in an interview given to Release. There is no doubt that the American actress provided him with unfailing support during this long-term fight against the disease. After 16 sessions of chemotherapy, she was able to get rid of her breast cancer. The two stars got engaged in Paris in December 2019, then married in 2020.
The two women each had long relationships before meeting. Indeed, Dominique Crenn, aged 59, was initially the wife of a man “for the papers”: the chef Juan Contreras with whom she opened Atelier Crenn. “I don’t talk about it often, he was a great friend and today we don’t see each other anymore,” explains the French chef. Then she had a relationship with Katherine Keon, who bore her two twin daughters Charlotte and Olivia, who stayed to live with their mother. For her part, Maria Bello is also the mother of Jackson, her son from her relationship with her former partner Dan McDermott. She was also in a relationship with Clare Munn before leaving her for a young actor and musician, Elijah Allan-Blitz.