Our cabinetmaker advised us to do flat trim in a similar situation because it's really hard to hide that with crown. (Fortunately that matched our house stylistically anyway so we were good with that.) His alternative was to do a multi-layer crown where it would be complex enough that you would lose sight of that variance, but since we didn't go that route I don't remember the details of how that would have worked (except it cost a lot more). It is definitely noticeable to anyone looking up into that corner, but with the flat trim he just scribed it to the ceiling so the piece gets bigger as the ceiling rises. The other option we had at the time was to skim coat the ceiling and try to build it closer to level there, but decided it wasn't worth the cost.

Flat board first and then attach the crown to that so the crown can be moved and cheated on the flat board.

I think what @millworkman is describing is the multi-layer option our cabinet guy gave us--basically two layers of trim where one follows the ceiling on top and one follows the cabinet below.

You need a bigger gap to do the two step riser and crown, and actually hide 1” over that short span. The existing gap is actually better than any moldings that accentuate how out of level that is.

What Millworkman said, but you'll need much smaller (or at least shorter) crown that what you're looking at or it'll be too obvious. It'll stick out more (because it'll be mounted on the flat piece) so it won't look like itty bitty undersized crown.

Personally, I find crown to be a little too fancy for a complement to flat-panel/Shaker-style cabinets. Plus, you don't have any other crown in your kitchen as a design cue.

I'd forgo the crown moulding on top of the wall cabinets and use a flat moulding with a simpler profile that can be scribed to the ceiling. Inverted baseboard with a simple bead would be one candidate.

Mike: I dont think anyones ceiling is completely level. I know mine is not completely level. When I had my kitchen renovated a few years ago, my expert and “ fuspot” carpenter did a fabulous job making our crown molding above our cabinetry look super. I am still amazed at his expert mitering. I only have the crown molding above my cabinets; the rest of my kitchen: no crown molding.