French technique meets Japanese elegance around a traditional garden at the upscale Tetsuya's, where there is just one coveted degustation menu.

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"San Francisco is kind to the innovator and has always provided us with the opportunity to take risks, " says Crenn, whose cooking is a mix of traditional French technique and avant-garde hijinx.

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Drawing influence from 100-year-old recipes that have become the hallmark of Benoit, Alain Ducasse and Chef Philippe Bertineau have composed a menu that celebrates traditional French cuisine with modern technique, seasonal ingredients, and a deft hand.

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Lee is acutely aware of the Bay Area's two-pronged French culinary heritage the precise, technique-heavy strain epitomized by Keller in Napa Valley and the more hands-off, ingredient-based school of Waters in Berkeley.

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The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM.

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She enrolled in cooking classes at Le Cordon Bleu, where she realised that French cuisine was not about national origin, or some mythical connection to la France profonde: it was about technique.

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