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The Phoenix and the French Laundry | People | News & Features | Wine Spectator Page 1 of 9 Home > Magazine Archives > Apr. 30, 2010 Issue > People The Phoenix and the French Laundry Thomas Keller's rise from the ashes of failure to create America's greatest restaurant Harvey Steiman Issue: April 30, 2010 On a warm July evening in 1994, Thomas Keller threw open the doors to The French Laundry. It had taken him 19 months to raise the money to buy it, exponentially longer than he'd expected, during which time he constantly dreaded losing it. Some smart chef or real estate investor, he knew, could sweep in and snatch up the 19th- century building where he hoped to create a restaurant and find success at last. He loved the building in Yountville, in the heart of Napa Valley. At various times in its life it had served as a saloon, a bordello, a residence and a steam laundry. Keller had big plans for it, imagining a great country restaurant in America like the French home of his culinary hero, Fernand Point. But Keller had failed at his two prior assignments. Despite good reviews, his first restaurant, Rakel, in New York, had closed in 1990 after less than five years, deep in debt. (A lien for $176,000 in unpaid sales taxes had nearly prevented him from getting a much-needed loan for the new restaurant.) Then, in 1992, Keller was fired from a job as executive chef at Checkers Hotel in Los Angeles. He could not afford another failure, he believed, or no one would ever take a chance on him again. Flanked on the cooking line by only two talented younger chefs, Ron Siegel and Stephen Durfee, Keller was ready to prove his detractors wrong. But things did not begin well. "The first night was a disaster," Keller recalls. "People were out in the dining room wondering if they would ever get their food. I am amazed any of them came back." "We were all caught off guard," says Siegel, now executive chef of The Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco. "We didn't have any sauté pans, which we discovered only after we started cooking. It was like doing a catering event and realizing, damn, I forgot to bring half the stuff we need." "I didn't have a sense of what the menu was," admits Durfee, now chef-instructor for pastry at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, Calif. "Thomas would call an order, and then he would have to come over and show me how to make it. We were inventing dishes as we went." At evening's end, Siegel recalls, Keller collected scraps of polenta left from cutting out small disks of it to serve. He reheated them with some leftover veal and they all sat down to a late dinner. "We figured out what we did wrong, and the next night was fine," says Keller. We all know how the story ends. The French Laundry eventually reached the absolute pinnacle of American restaurants. Today it ranks with the world's best. Reservations are notoriously hard to secure. Diners plan months in advance and pay $250 to feast on a dozen courses or more of a refined cuisine based on classical French techniques and impeccably sourced American ingredients. They come from far and wide for signature dishes such as miniature cornets of salmon tartare and crème fraîche, the whimsically titled "Oysters and Pearls" (a sabayon of pearl tapioca topped with a poached oyster and caviar) and "Mac and Cheese" (orzo in mascarpone topped with lobster). They can plunder a Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning wine cellar and luxuriate in service that seems magically choreographed. At 54, Keller now presides over nine restaurants, including the similarly ambitious and equally admired Per Se in New York. But he's not all caviar and foie gras. On a half-mile stretch of Washington Street in Yountville today, a tour of Keller's multifaceted approach to dining would include stops for a morning croissant and latte at Bouchon http://www.winespectator.com/magazine/show/id/42310 11/8/2010 The Phoenix and the French Laundry | People | News & Features | Wine Spectator Page 2 of 9 Bakery and a lunch of raw oysters and roast chicken at the bistro-inspired Bouchon before an evening-long dinner at the French Laundry. Or for something different, perhaps a four-course home-style American supper of fried chicken, pot roast or barbecue at Ad Hoc. Other Bouchons now grace Las Vegas and Beverly Hills. Vegas also has a Keller bakery, and there is a bakery-café down the hall from Per Se. The chef has built a close-knit team along the way, and launched many chefs and sommeliers to top-flight careers (for a partial list, see "School of Thomas Keller," page TK). One person who has been with him since the early days of the French Laundry is Laura Cunningham. Born and raised in Napa Valley, she had worked at Stars in San Francisco before Keller hired her as assistant manager, promoting her shortly thereafter when the original manager left. She also caught Keller's eye romantically, and within a year they were a couple. Although she officially left the company in 2007, he's backing her plans for an Italian restaurant, Vita, under construction up the street in Yountville. "We kept it quiet for a while," Cunningham says with a smile. "I had issues with dating someone in the workplace, and certainly someone who was my boss. I didn't want it to tarnish my ability to excel at my job." Cunningham certainly did her job well. She took classes in accounting and human resources, and she picked the brain of every sommelier she could find, making the front of the house at French Laundry as impressive as the kitchen. Although he will not divulge revenue figures, Keller says the nine operations in Thomas Keller Restaurant Group employ nearly 1,000 people and served 1.6 million meals in 2009. By any standard, it is an impressive culinary empire. Standing 6' 2", Keller appears rangy and athletic, but he speaks quietly and thoughtfully. He can charm with a warm smile or fix his expression into one of intense concentration. That focus can manifest in unexpected ways. Ordering coffee at the Four Seasons Hotel lounge in San Francisco, he specifies, "a double espresso, with just a little steamed milk, like a macchiato but without the foam." That attention to detail, knowing exactly what he wants, goes a long way to explain his success. Keller did not set out to be a chef. He never attended culinary school or took a cooking class. He got work in kitchens when he could not as a carpenter. And when he did start cooking, he failed as often as he succeeded. But in retrospect, his early life story reveals a series of building blocks and turning points that inevitably aimed him toward what he became. His father, a Marine sergeant, divorced his mother when Thomas, the youngest of the brothers, was 5 years old. His mother raised five children while managing restaurants to earn a living. "She made me understand the importance of discipline, and an appreciation for aesthetics," says Keller. After the divorce, they moved from Southern California to southern Maryland, and later to Palm Beach, Fla., where Keller peeled vegetables and washed dishes in restaurants his mother ran. A series of jobs in local restaurants followed, but "at that time it wasn't about cooking," he says. "It was how I could earn some money. And maybe meet girls." Just out of high school, he got a job cooking at the Palm Beach Yacht Club. His brother Joseph, 18 months older and already cooking professionally, taught him to boil a lobster, roast prime rib and make hollandaise sauce. Thomas then spent two summers in Newport, R.I., where he first tasted French cuisine. Fired from the second- year's position, he got work at the Dunes Club cooking staff meals. Unlike cooking for unseen guests behind a kitchen wall, he now had an audience, and the chefs told him exactly how well he did. "There they are, they're talking to me, saying that's good today, that sucks. The feedback made me elevate the quality of the family meal for them. And the appreciation for that was meaningful. "That's where I learned what cooks actually do," Keller notes. "We nurture people, we nourish them. I thought, what's more honorable than that?" http://www.winespectator.com/magazine/show/id/42310 11/8/2010 The Phoenix and the French Laundry | People | News & Features | Wine Spectator Page 3 of 9 The chef at the Dunes was Frenchman Roland Henin, who became Keller's mentor. Henin extolled the famous French chefs, and sent his young protégé back home to Florida with copies of The Great Chefs of France and Fernand Point's Ma Gastronomie under his arm. "He taught me that what they accomplished was not about a career. It's about their desire. It's about that commitment to what they do." Back in Florida, enamored with the elevated French cuisine in the books, Keller hired on to open his first serious restaurant. The Cobbley Nob got positive reviews, but it failed. "Of course we went out of business," he says, "because we tried to be too fancy, too upscale for Palm Beach in 1978." The next job worked out better. He spent three summers in the Catskills cooking at a small inn called La Rive, where he was the only one in the kitchen.