Bourdain & Keller
Recently, I read A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines by Anthony Bourdain. It's a great collection of some of his early travels while filming A Cook's Tour for Food Network.
One excerpt stuck with me — a dinner with Thomas Keller at The French Laundry. This post isn’t about the whole book. It’s about Keller, and why that chapter made me an even bigger fan.
[About a 15 minute read]
From A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines:
I was worried about this part of the jaunt. Even getting a reservation at the Laundry can be a lengthy and difficult process, and the prospect of chef/owner Thomas Keller allowing me, Mr Obnoxious Don’t Eat Fish on Monday, to eat in his dining room at short notice – while a camera crew shot the kitchen and dining room during service – seemed doubtful. Keller, very likely America’s greatest homegrown chef, had, as I pointed out in an E-mail to him, absolutely nothing to gain by allowing my spiteful presence through his doors. A journeyman knucklehead like me was hardly going to dazzle or impress. Instead, I threw myself cravenly at his mercy, pleaded for any consideration I could get: Professional courtesy? Curiosity? Pity? I’d take it, I told him, anyway I could get it.
Being the shrewd, conspiratorial, paranoid second-guesser that I am, I made damn sure, while Keller considered my request, to pad my guest list for the proposed meal with the heaviest-hitting, friend-in-common, high-octane bunch I could find. Even if Keller thought me an utter swine and an opportunistic hustler, my dinner companions would be sure to get his attention.
I put my end of dinner at the French Laundry together like a bank job. Enticed through threats, promises, and guarantees of an all-expenses-paid trip to what was sure to be a memorable meal, they came one by one. They knew who Thomas Keller was, just as he surely knew them.
From Palm Beach, dragged away from Easter dinner with his family, came Michael Ruhlman, the coauthor (with Keller) of The French Laundry Cookbook. We’d met only recently, at an evening of senseless debauchery and overindulgence at the Siberia Bar in New York. He’d written two other books, The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef, which I’d really enjoyed; I’d found from his prose that Michael, like no other nonchef writers I know, understands the glories of veal stock, the grim realities of kitchen grease, the hard kernel of truth about what really makes people want to cook professionally – and why. He generously agreed to join me in my bold but weird venture.
Scott Bryan flew in from New York. He’s an old crony by now. I’d met him through his food. I’m a regular customer at his three-star restaurant, Veritas, and we’ve become friends over the years. If you ever read in the papers about some ugly incident at a midtown bar involving me, a blunt object, and a vegetarian, chances are Scott will have been in the room when they clapped on the manacles. I’d written gushingly (and sincerely) about him in my earlier book, and I assured him that even though there would be TV cameras floating around like airborne pests, there was no script, no plan, and that all he had to do was show up in San Francisco, pile into a car, and eat what would very likely be a fantastic meal. Eric Ripert, the chef of the four-star Manhattan restaurant Le Bernardin, flew in from Los Angeles. Here’s a guy who is everything I am not: He has four stars, a résumé of nothing but world-class kitchens, incredible natural talent, top-drawer skills, and movie-star good looks. He’s not even American; he hails from Andorra, a minicountry in the Pyrenees. That he entered my life after reading my book, I always secretly attributed to his all-too-well-remembered apprenticeship days, when he must have experienced something in common with the desperate, debauched hustlers, strivers, and journeymen discussed in its pages. (Though I have a very hard time ever picturing Eric knocking out eggs Benedict like I did for so many years.) He has, by the way, what is perhaps the best independent intelligence network running in New York – and maybe the whole country. The NSA has nothing on this guy. If it happens in a kitchen anywhere, Eric knows about it ten minutes later. He’s also the most bullshit-free ‘French’ chef I’ve ever met.
They arrived, one by one, at my motel – all of us, it turned out, dressed for dinner in nearly identical black suits, dark ties, and dark sunglasses. Whatever collective coolness I may have thought we had evaporated immediately when I got a look at the car the TV folks had rented to take us out to dinner. It was a half-mile-long gleaming white stretch limo, a hideous rubemobile that practically begged for us to change into powder-blue ruffled shirts and pastel orange tuxes. I was mortified. Already extremely nervous about our reception and this much-anticipated meal, here we were, planning to arrive in the rural Napa Valley community of Yountville in a car more suitable to some lottery-winning yokel on his way to the county fair to sell off his prize hogs.
When you talk to most really talented ‘star’ chefs, the words I and me and my tend to come up a lot. Nothing wrong with that – it takes a big ego to do what chefs do, to keep them going in the face of absurd odds, uncertain outcomes, long hours in hot spaces.
‘My cuisine . . .’ ‘My cooking . . .’ ‘My kitchen . . .’ ‘My cooks . . .’ ‘My approach to food . . .’
You’ve heard that before. I do it all the time. So it’s striking to talk with Thomas Keller, to listen to this quiet, surprisingly modest man describe his restaurant as an institution – not as a personal enterprise or as the spawn of his own personal genius. Here’s the guy whose cookbook is widely seen as the ultimate in food porn. Upon the mention of the chef’s name, other chefs – no matter how great – become strangely silent, uncomfortable-looking, even frightened. In a subculture where most of us are all too happy to slag anybody at any time, you never hear anyone – even the French – talk trash about Keller. (One Frenchman, I believe, even called him the ‘greatest French chef in the world.’)
What’s missing from all the wild praise of Keller, his cooks, his restaurant, and his cookbook is how different he is. You can’t honestly use terms like the best or better or even perfect when you’re talking about Thomas Keller, because he’s not really competing with anybody. He’s playing a game whose rules are known only to him. He’s doing things most chefs would never attempt – in ways unthinkable to most. Everything about him and the French Laundry experience is different from most fine dining experiences; and Keller himself is a thing apart, a man hunting much bigger game, with very different ambitions than most of his peers.
Talking with the man as he walked through a small farm that grows him vegetables, watching his chef de cuisine pull baby leeks and garlic right out of the ground for that night’s dinner – and later, as he showed us around the grounds of the French Laundry after dinner, when he sat with us in the dark garden, sipping an after-work glass of wine – it was evident how unusual his priorities are and to what lengths he is willing to go to attain them. The building itself looks like an unassuming country home, rustic-looking wood and stone, surrounded by green fields, farmlands, and vineyards in the small community of Yountville in the Napa Valley. There are two stories, an upstairs deck with a plain wooden balustrade, and a pretty garden. The decor, like the service, is unassuming, comfortably casual, with everything – the room, the wait staff, the view of the hills outside the windows and through the French doors – conspiring to put the diner at ease. The service, though relentlessly sharp and efficient, is not stiff or intimidating. The waiters are neither too friendly nor too distant.
‘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.
Then I opened up the New York Times and saw that Keller is planning a French Laundry in New York, that he’s moving in across the street from Jean-Georges, down a ways from Ducasse, and realized I’d learned nothing at all.
‘Unfinished business in New York,’ said my chef buddies as we sat around a table at a Lower East Side joint.
‘Rakel didn’t make it,’ said one friend, regarding Keller’s failed venture in Manhattan many years ago. ‘It was great – but the people weren’t ready for it.’
‘Jesus,’ I sputtered, ‘Keller coming to New York . . . That’s an act of aggression! That’s like Wyatt Earp coming to town. Everybody’s gonna be gunning for him. Who wants that kind of pressure? He’s already got it all. New Yorkers go to him! Why come here and have to put up with all the nonsense?’
Needless to say, when the new place opens its doors, every chef, critic, food writer, serious eater, and casual foodie in the city will have been hyperventilating for weeks. To say the restaurant will be ‘eagerly anticipated’ would be an egregious understatement. I cannot even imagine what will happen. I’m afraid. I’m afraid he’ll fail (if that should happen, it would be for reasons having nothing to do with food, of course). But more, I’m afraid he’ll succeed. I like the idea of having to travel to experience a French Laundry meal. The journey is part of the experience – or was for me – an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent, and the otherness of everything Keller. I liked looking out the window and seeing hills and countryside. I don’t know if I want to be able just to pick up the phone, make a reservation, and, sooner or later, simply hop in a cab and zip down to Columbus Circle. One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca. That experience, like the French Laundry, should be a pilgrimage. Not that that will slow me down in the slightest when the new place opens its doors. See you there.