The French Laundry

None of the dozen or so cooks seems to be in much of a hurry. Their movements are methodical and in constant velocity. It’s about control, precision, finesse. Finesse. The word and its definition, printed on a large white paper banner, hangs over the main kitchen door, and although no one is looking up to read the words you get the sense that they’re all thinking it, chanting it over and over in their minds, marking the rhythm of their labor. The room is spotless and surprisingly quiet – Emeril Lagasse is nowhere in sight or sound. His BAM! would be a bit out of place, like Koko the gorilla in Gump's stemware department. This kitchen belongs to Thomas Keller, who oversees the team at the heart of the most celebrated and mythified restaurant in America.

“Welcome to The French Laundry.” The greeting is so simple, so ordinary that it surprises you once it’s uttered by the hostess at the podium. To get here, you’re likely to spend hours on the phone for days, hoping to break through the busy signal. Then finally, one day, the phone actually rings, it RINGS! But even then you’re put on hold. Is this some sort of sick joke, you wonder. The reservationist finally picks up, and you ask if there are any tables open on ANY day at ANY time in the next two months, which is how far out they accept reservations. You tell them it’s your ninetieth birthday, you say you’re Oprah, you say you’ve slept with the second pastry chef, you say you have lupus. You lie (except about that crazy drunken night with the pastry chef. Yowsa). And after all that, the chance that they’ll say “we’re all booked up” is achingly high.

This is the Meal of Your Life. On my most recent visit, there were two tasting menus, one the chef's menu and the other a vegetarian offering, both twelve courses and offered at $210, including gratuity. All meals at The French Laundry begin with a small scoop of salmon tartare on a sesame tuille shaped like a miniature ice cream cone. The whimsy of the composition immediately softens the starch of the setting. Diners, who have been sitting silently and a bit nervously as if they’re awaiting the Pope in his private receiving room, relax and smile. They loosen their spine and lean back in their chair. You’re eating a salmon ice-cream cone, and you realize then that this meal does more than deserve your respect, it demands your enjoyment.

The most recent menu included a cauliflower panna cotta with oyster glaze and Sevugra caviar, poached halibut on spring vegetables, white asparagus salad with sour cherries, lobster with sunchokes and morel mushrooms, crisp duck, wagyu beef with Japanese vegetables, a pair of dessert courses, and a seemingly endless stream of mignardise – revelations cascading in courses. And this truly is revelatory food. My most vivid memory is of a salad composition from my first visit to the restaurant that elevated the common celery into an extraordinary flora marvel. The celery, cooked slightly so as to maintain a measure of its crunch, was matched with truffles, a pairing that exaggerates the pleasant bitterness and Spring freshness of the celery against the earthy fragrance of the truffle, two familiar and contrasting ingredients exposing the other’s finest qualities. My mind opened up to possibilities heretofore unconsidered.

There is a clarity and a sparkle to the dishes. The clarity is achieved by an intensification of flavors through reductions, inventive layering, and restraint. It’s typical to see a single central ingredient used in several different forms in the same dish. One salad employs tomato tartare (oven roasted to intensify the flavor) as well as tomato powder, chives as well as chive oil. A dish is also never crowded with too many flavors and textures, allowing a few to stand out crisply and boldly. The sparkle is obtained by setting proper contrasts of flavors (the truffle and celery being a great example), using only the cleanest stocks for sauces, and leveraging vinegar to endow dull flavors with life. The flavors dance on the palette, vivid and vital. And so it was with the panna cotta, and the halibut, and every other dish, all of which proved to me that these are the archetypes of their categories. Halibut here is what any other halibut dish strives to be but never successfully traverses that ineffable gap that separate the two.

The service is in top form. Though it lacks the je ne sais quoi of the service I encountered at Bastide (Los Angeles) or at Alinea (Chicago), the staff here is the most knowledgeable I’ve ever met. They’re trained to know where every ingredient is harvested or raised, where every plate and spoon is manufactured, and our server this last visit even tossed out of his magic hat the two theories that explain the notch in the sauce spoon. They have polish too, but they’re entirely friendly if you want to joke with them (and I always make a point of doing so to test their mettle, or patience my friends might say). They glide through the room, evidence of the training received from professional ballet dancers. This is, after all, theater.

At the end of the meal, slightly inebriated, both belly and spirit expanded, my mind wanders, gently gliding over the past four hours, lifting them permanently into my memory. Thoughts stretch further back to the weeks when I first thought of making the reservation, stretch further back into years when I first sat in this very dining room. And further back still to the wonderful and rustically extravagant meals my mother prepared during my childhood. My life is collapsed before me, and all my memories have to do with food. This place, an old stone building in the gently rolling hills of Napa, casts a spell on its diners. Food becomes life, and not just a metaphor.

Our waiter leads us to the kitchen for a brief tour, one final generous gesture. The cooks are busy at work at the summit of their shift, but still unhurried. And I realize that this is the source of The French Laundry’s witchcraft, where a dozen men and women have given their lives, happily sacrificing so much to work here from morning to late at night, concocting their potent spells. But as C.S. Lewis once reminded us, spells do more than cast enchantments. They can also break them. As I walk off the premises and take off my jacket on a hot Saturday afternoon, I wonder whether I’m waking up from one or re-entering another.