A Cook's Tour (38 page)

     ‘It looks like France,’ said Eric, gazing out the window. For Keller, the French Laundry is a cause. It is the culmination of a philosophy shared by the people who work with him. Every detail is inseparable from the whole, whether it’s new steps to the porch or a new dish on the menu. He brought up the famous Taillevent in Paris as an example of the kind of place he aspires to leave behind someday. ‘You don’t know the chef’s name at Taillevent, do you? No. It’s the restaurant you remember – the institution. The tradition.’ Though he’s a legendary perfectionist, lives next door to his kitchen, and takes a hands-on approach to every tiny detail, what he has created in Yountville is a place inseparable from its community and suppliers, where the absolute best ingredients are treated with the highest degree of respect.

     Think I’m exaggerating? Maybe I’ve gone over to the dark side – flacking for a chef I hope will someday throw me a freebie, maybe blurb my next book? No, you haven’t seen how he handles fish, gently laying it down on the board and caressing it, approaching it warily, respectfully, as if communicating with an old friend.

     Maybe you’ve heard some of the stories. That he used to make his cooks climb up into the range hoods each day to scrub out the grease personally. How he stores his fish belly-down, in the swimming position. That every fava bean in his kitchen is peeled raw (never soaked). How his
mise-en-place
, his station prep, is always at an absolute minimum – everything made fresh. Maybe you’ve heard about his unbelievably beautiful, elaborate
fifteen
-course tasting menus, seen pictures of food so perilously balanced, so perfectly posed, that you don’t know how it ever gets to the table. They feed about eighty-five people a night at the French Laundry. They employ, all told, about eighty-five people. An army of similarly dedicated purveyors comb lonely stretches of the Pacific Northwest at night, some armed only with flashlights, looking for the telltale phosphorescence of a particular wild mushroom. People grow things to his specifications. The simplest-looking garlic chip garnish at the French Laundry can require the skills of a microsurgeon. Maybe you’ve heard all that.

     There was a break between courses – a sort of seventh-inning stretch – and there we were: four grown men – three chefs and an author – standing outside Keller’s kitchen in the dark, our noses pressed up against the window screen, spying on the man, whispering.

     ‘SSssshh! . . . He’ll hear us!’ somebody said.

     ‘Look,’ said Michael. ‘See how happy he looks!’

     ‘My God! He’s got no
mise
at all!’ said someone else. Standing there in the shadows in the French Laundry’s garden, it felt like we were kids on Halloween night.

     ‘That’s a happy man,’ agreed Eric.

     ‘How many chefs get to do this?’ Keller had said earlier. ‘We’re just really lucky. And I don’t forget that.’

     A twenty-course tasting menu, under the most favorable circumstances, is a challenge to any chef. A twenty-course (including
amuse-gueules
) tasting menu for a party of fellow chefs is, for most of us, reasonable rationale for a nervous breakdown. But imagine – try to imagine – turning out four distinct and different twenty-course tasting menus for that one table of chefs, only two or three courses in common, over sixty different plates of food hitting one party of four – and doing it at the same time as serving a full dining room of regulars, many of whom are also having elaborate multicoursed tasting menus – and you get the idea when I say that Thomas Keller is different.

     The meal took six and a half hours, with very little, if any, waiting between courses. Four different little oyster dishes would arrive, and we would all first look at our own plate, then glance longingly at the others’. For a while, we’d taste a little, sawing off a tiny bite of oyster, for instance, then pass our plates counterclockwise so the others could try. After many bottles of wine, and many courses, some of us just stopped passing. How do you cut a single oyster into four portions? It’s hard. Some get more than others. In the highly charged atmosphere where everybody wants to try everything, this can lead to disputes – maybe violence. By the time the meat and fowl began hitting the table, I just hunched over my plate and said, ‘Don’t even think about it. You can try this one next time.’

     There was a lot of head shaking and sighing going on. Who among us in the whole wide world of chefs would attempt this? It was, far and away, the most impressive restaurant meal I’d ever had. Let me give you a closer look. Listed below is the menu for that evening, what I was served. Keep in mind that Scott, Eric and Michael were simultaneously enjoying equally elaborate and yet different dishes.

     The meal began with the French Laundry’s signature
amuse
– tiny little coronets of salmon tartare, served in a cone rack like at Baskin-Robbins (the inspiration for the dish). We all knew they were coming. We’d seen them in the cookbook – in my guests’ case, they’d had them before. In addition to being delicious, it’s psychological manipulation at its most skillful. You can’t help but be charmed. The cute little cones, wrapped in tiny paper napkins, press long disused buttons in the sense-memory section of the brain. You feel like a kid again, your appetite jump-starts, and a breathless sense of anticipation comes over you. You want – you need – to know: What’s next? Here’s what I had next: puree of Robinson Ranch shallot soup with glazed shallots, English cucumber sorbet with pickled cucumber and a dill-weed
tuile
, Yukon Gold potato
blini
with shiitake mushrooms and chive butter, cauliflower
panna cotta
with Malpeque oyster glaze and osetra caviar,
côte de saumon
, an Atlantic salmon chop with russet potato
gnocchi
and Périgord truffles. Salmon chop? you’re thinking. Salmon ain’t got no chops! Yes, they do. Up by the head, there’s an oft-neglected triangle of delicious flesh. It’s a tricky little piece, usually discarded when chefs cut salmon for uniform portions of filet, because it’s an awkward shape and riddled with annoying little bones. At the Laundry, a liability has been turned into an asset. There it was on my plate, a perfect little
côte de saumon
, looking just like a baby lamb chop, one bone extending from a tiny medallion of fish. Sounds cute? It is. A lot of Keller’s dishes reveal an abiding sense of whimsy.

     Whimsy and its unlovely cousin, irony, make appearances on a lot of menus these days, more often than not, unsuccessfully. You’ll see a menu item with a ‘cute’ transposition of terms – for instance, ‘tournedos of monkfish,’ which means nothing more than that the chef is bored with the word
medallions
or feels insecure about titling his creation ‘little pieces of monkfish.’ Rarely does the finished product bear any resemblance to the term in its original usage. Now, if you were to serve that little disk of monkfish, larded with bacon, topped with a slab of foie gras, and drizzled with truffled
demiglace
, you might be able to get away with calling it ‘tournedos of monkfish Rossini’ – a direct reference to the old beef classic. But why? It’s a dangerous game playing with your food like that. The line between cute and cloying (or worse – pretentious) is a very fine one.

     But Keller, typically, is playing at something else here. He’s not looking to elevate a less than worthy dish by associating it with a beloved classic. More often than not, he’s taking something refined and giving it an ordinary – even clichéd – name (the best examples being his famous ‘coffee and doughnuts’ dessert, his ‘Caesar salad,’ and his ‘grilled cheese sandwich.’ ‘The one compliment,’ explains Keller, ‘that I enjoy the most is someone saying, “This reminds me of” – and they’ll tell you of this wonderful experience they had somewhere else. And I hope that when they go someplace else, they’ll say, “This reminds me of the French Laundry.” ’ Memory – that’s a powerful tool in any chef’s kit. Used skillfully, it can be devastatingly effective. I don’t know of any other chef who can pull it off so successfully. When you’re eating a four-star meal in one of the world’s best restaurants, and tiny, almost subliminal suggestions keep drawing you back to the grilled cheese sandwiches mom used to make you on rainy days, your first trip to Baskin-Robbins, or the first brasserie meal you had in France, you can’t help – even the most cynical among us – but be charmed and lulled into a state of blissful submission. It’s good enough when a dish somehow reminds you of a cherished moment, a fondly remembered taste from years past. When those expectations and preconceptions are then routinely exceeded, you find yourself happily surprised. Keller had a surprise for me.

     He’d done his homework, I guess, gleaning from my book that I’m an absolutely degenerate smoker. There is no smoking at the French Laundry – maybe the only place on earth I don’t mind refraining. But, to be honest, by course number five I was feeling a slight need. To my embarrassment and delight, they had anticipated this in the kitchen. When the next courses arrived, mine was called ‘coffee and a cigarette’: Marlboro-infused coffee custard (with foie gras). My dinner companions hooted. I blushed down to my socks, thinking this a cruel but very funny joke at my expense. I certainly didn’t expect the thing to taste good. Goddamn the man, it was good. (He’d actually used the tobacco from a very decent cigar, he told me later.) Best of all, after I’d polished off my plate, I felt a very welcome, much-needed nicotine buzz.

     Next?

   
Une salade fraîche au truffe noire
with celery branch and celery root vinaigrette. Hand-cut tagliatelle with Périgord truffles and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (The truffles were shaved tableside from a magnificent fist-sized monster.) Herb-roasted Chatham Bay cod ‘shank’ with a ‘fricassee’ of new-crop potatoes and applewood-smoked bacon emulsion. (Again, a liability turned into an asset, as the small, usually unservable tail section of fish had been cut across the bone and served like a lamb shank.) ‘Lobster Navarin,’ sweet butter-poached Maine lobster with glazed pearl onions, spring vegetables, and sauce ‘Navarin’ (another crosscultural reference – ‘Navarin’ is usually associated with a heavy, old-school French country classic of braised lamb shoulder). Brioche-crusted ‘confit’ of North American moulard duck ‘foie gras’ with braised fennel, fennel salad, and Tellicherry pepper. ‘
Gastrique
’ milk-poached four-story Hills Farm ‘
poularde au lait
’ with ‘crème fraîche’ dumplings and ‘
bouquetíre
’ of spring vegetables. Roasted Bellwether Farms spring lamb with a ‘cassoulet’ of spring pole beans and thyme-infused extra virgin olive oil. (These were the most fetching, tender little lamb chops I’d ever encountered.) ‘Roquefort’ ricotta cheese ‘gnocchi’ with a Darjeeling tea-walnut oil emulsion, shaved walnuts, and grated Roquefort cheese. Hayden mango soup ‘
et son brunoise
’ (I love the ‘
et son brunoise
’ thing – very funny). Haas avocado salad with Persian lime sorbet (of all the plates that made their way round our table that night, this was the only one that landed with a thud. Scott’s comment was, ‘This is waaay over my head. But then, I’m not that smart.’) ‘Coffee and doughnuts’ – cinnamon-sugared doughnuts with cappuccino semi-
freddo
(looking exactly like a coffee shop doughnut sitting next to a Chock Full O’Nuts cup filled with cappuccino, but marvelous). ‘
Mille-feuille à la crème de vanille et son confit d’ananas
mignardise
.’

     It was an absolutely awe-inspiring meal, accompanied, I should point out, by a procession of sensational wines. Unfortunately, I’m the wrong guy to be talking about wine. All I can tell you is that Scott, who knows about these things, used the word
wow
a lot. I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized glass, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic.

     Keller himself is quiet, with a bone-dry, gently sardonic sense of humor and the wary, observant gaze of a totally centered chef who knows what he wants to do – and is doing it – every day.

     He seemed annoyed when asked about the roots of his drive for perfection. ‘Perfect is something you never actually attain,’ he said. ‘It’s something you search for. Once you reach it, it’s not perfect. You’ve lost it. It’s gone.’

     Gush too much about ‘creativity’ and you’ll get: ‘There’s very little creativity – in anything.’

     But instead of
I
,
me
, and
my
, he uses words like
respect
,
hope
,
institution
,
future
. Big words and big concepts in a trade where most of us look no further down the road than the next star, the next book deal, the next investor, the next busy Saturday night.

     I was going to go on. I was going to blather on about the seamless integration of restaurant and locale. I planned to ruminate on the marvelousness of a chef finding, after years of wandering and false starts, a home. I was in love with the idea that a chef of Keller’s unique abilities and ambition could actually be content in a small town in wine country, marrying place, purveyors, personnel, and personal vision into an idyllic rural retreat, far from the carnivorous environs of the big city. The whole concept had great appeal to me. An ideal accomplished, if not by me, then at least by someone I liked and admired.