Best Independent Operator Menu

The French Laundry

Inspiration and collaboration guide menu development at Thomas Keller's fine-dining destination in Napa Valley

Thomas Keller, chef-owner of The French Laundry, Yountville, Calif.'s famed fine-dining establishment, works closely with his chefs to develop new menu items.

By Wade Daniels

Location: Yountville, Calif.

Purchased: 1994

Chef-owner: Thomas Keller

Seats: 62

Signature dishes: "Macaroni and Cheese," "Coffee and Doughnuts" and "Oysters and Pearls"

Menu price: $175 for a seven- to nine-course chef's tasting menu

Thomas Keller is credited with breaking plenty of culinary ground at his restaurant The French Laundry in California's Napa Valley. Still, he says tradition keeps him from at least one adventure.

Specifically, he speaks of doing away with menus.

"At the fine-dining level, it makes sense to me that a person could walk into the restaurant and say, 'I'm here. Let me have . . . the highest experience I can have today,' " says Keller.

Still, after 32 years as a chef, he says he is hesitant to eliminate the diner's ability to make choices. Plus, nixing menus could mean less enjoyment in the kitchen, where Keller and his staff prepare what he describes as contemporary American cuisine with French influences.

"Cooks are excited by the products coming in the back door," he says. "So if we limit the amount of products we're getting, it may limit some of the excitement and spontaneity."

That sense of adventure is part of what has earned Keller and The French Laundry, which he bought in 1994, a raft of top-notch awards and global notoriety.

"He has infused a liveliness in what is often regarded as serious food," says Michael Bauer, executive food and wine critic for the San Francisco Chronicle. The French Laundry has no dearth of menu items with gourmet ingredients, like truffles and foie gras. However, to Bauer's point, the menu also has "Macaroni and Cheese," "Coffee and Doughnuts" and "Oysters and Pearls," which is described as a sabayon of tapioca with "Beau Soleil" onions and Iranian osetra caviar.

At The French Laundry, diners pay $175 for either a nine-course chef's tasting menu, a seven-course menu or a nine-course vegetable-tasting menu. The kitchen also is known to send out additional courses on a whim.

Despite its reputation, the French Laundry is not a place where one just drops the right name in order to get a table. It can take months to finally plant oneself in the 62-seat restaurant, and there is voluminous cyberspace chatter about the best way to secure that reservation.

Keller and his restaurant have won practically every award the culinary world has to offer. Bauer says the awards are entirely warranted and based on Keller's sheer talent.

"When other restaurants win awards there can be backbiting," Bauer says. "But when Thomas Keller wins, it's known that it's deserved."

Keller explains that inspiration for a new menu item can come from anywhere at any time.

For instance, he recently ate canned fruit cocktail, just as he or any American might have done countless times as a youth. From that, ideas started flowing, and within a few nights a French Laundry version was served alongside foie gras.

"Fruit cocktail was the form of the inspiration, and then the interpretation was totally different," Keller explains. "We liked it but recognized ways of making it better the second time. So that's part of the evolution process, and that happens all the time."

That is not to say that French Laundry's menu is entirely Keller's creation ; far from it.

"I've never worked at a restaurant where there is as much collaboration as there is here," says chef de cuisine Corey Lee, who has worked as a chef at The French Laundry since 2000. He explains that at the end of each night ; maybe around midnight or 1 a.m. ; all eight chefs on duty sit down and spend up to an hour planning the next day's menu. They go over what is available from local and far-flung purveyors and discuss what to serve and how to serve it.

Lee explains that Keller wants menu input from his kitchen staff because he wants each person to "take ownership" of what they prepare.

"He doesn't train us to be cooks; he wants a kitchen with eight chefs who are each creating," Lee says.

Keller has been traveling much more since last year's launch of his New York restaurant, Per Se, which recently received The New York Times' top rating of four stars. He also has Bouchon, a bistro-style restaurant opened in 1998 in Yountville ; the same town where The French Laundry is located ; as well as Bouchon Bakery and Bouchon Las Vegas. In 2003 he partnered to launch porcelain dinnerware products and to help design silver products now used at his restaurants. His next major project is an inn across the street from The French Laundry.

Lee says little has changed at The French Laundry in light of Keller's broadening workload, as Keller is in touch several times a day.

That commitment to the restaurant helps illustrate what Keller says is his process of transforming from a player on the field to the team's coach.