Petit Crenn Melbourne opens in October with 40 seats

Petit Crenn Melbourne opens in October at 495 Collins Street, the first restaurant Dominique Crenn has run outside the United States.

The 40-seat room takes the ground floor of the InterContinental Melbourne The Rialto, a corner site that until recently held a Haigh's Chocolates shop. The hotel's owner, the Australian group Salter Brothers, is her partner on the project.

What Petit Crenn Melbourne puts on the card

A forty-seat cafe is a small stage for a three-star surname.

The kitchen runs from morning to night. Coffee and pastries early; from midday a bistro list of mussels with preserved lemon, French raviole in onion consomme, steak tartare with egg yolk jam and pepper sauce, croque-madame and seasonal tartines. Salted madeleines with caviar close it.

Beside the kitchen, a standing counter called Le Contour takes five more guests. Crenn designed the room with the Salter Brothers team, leaning on the granite, water and grey light of Brittany, where she was raised.

Crenn holds three Michelin stars at Atelier Crenn in San Francisco, awarded in 2018 and the first three-star kitchen run by a woman chef in the United States. She also has Monsieur Dior in Los Angeles and Cafe Dior in Dallas, and holds the Icon Award from the list that moves to Lima on 4 November.

A Breton room built for Collins Street

The first Petit Crenn opened in San Francisco in 2015 as the plain-spoken counterpart to Atelier Crenn: no tasting menu, no theatre, a short card of vegetables and fish. The Melbourne version keeps the name and the argument rather than the recipes.

"Petit Crenn comes from my own life, from the cafes in France where you can sit for five minutes or five hours and always feel welcome," Crenn told Broadsheet, which reported the opening on 9 September. She has said Melbourne's appetite for European cooking decided the city.

Salter Brothers finished a refit of the Rialto hotel before handing over the ground-floor site, and the group has been adding restaurant names to its properties rather than running in-house kitchens. No date inside October has been given and bookings are not yet open.

Melbourne has absorbed imported names before, with mixed results. The question for a 40-seat cafe carrying a three-star surname is whether it still reads as an event in February.