But in retrospect it was beautiful. Philip Tessier, who was a young chef, our sous-chef at French Laundry, formed a team and made the challenge. You knew when you did a bad job and you knew when you did a good job. Every day after school hed come home and watch Graham Kerr or Julia Child. And it was a small kitchen. I learned how to share with them. And one week I thought, Im going to ask him to bring them live, because as a chef I should really know what it feels like and of course how to slaughter an animal, and what better animal to slaughter than something that is relatively small? You know, go out and slaughter a cow or a pig would maybe have been a little more emotionally disturbing, but slaughtering a rabbit may be something that I could handle. I chose to go into the kitchen. I was working as a young cook in a private club in Narragansett, Rhode Island called the Dunes Club. How do we respond to that? So the schools that we did have were relatively new. And this olive oil was a small olive oil company I began to kind of keep me solvent in some ways, but also keep me motivated and keep me busy and have kind of I wouldnt even call it plan B. Which one do I want? Thomas Kellerdrew closer to the realization ofa longtime dream when hisTeam USA won the silver medal atthe 2015 Bocuse dOr competition in Lyon, France. [1], In April 2009, Keller became engaged to longtime girlfriend and former general manager at the French Laundry, Laura Cunningham. And I came back a bit arrogant, a bit uppity, a bit disrespectful of not my kitchen, but the owner, and so we didnt see eye to eye. I understood that there was a lot of competition, because not only did I want the vegetables, so did the deer and the beavers and any other wildlife that would come into the fray. There was that true connection to our suppliers, to those people who produced our food. Roast chicken and a salad of fresh lettuces with a simple vinaigrette. That year it won three International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) awards for Cookbook of the Year, Julia Child "First Cookbook" Award, and Design Award. Many residents and visitors to the area were lovers of fine wine and well-versed in contemporary trends in fine dining. Thomas Keller: This was a time in my life when I started to embrace the idea of doing things myself outside of the kitchen, having a garden. And he had told me about this small restaurant in Yountville for sale called The French Laundry and I should look into that. So I gave them some and I took some. So as a young boy, this tiger was in this massive well, I dont want to say penned-in cage. There werent really a lot of people who had aspirations of becoming a chef. Thomas Keller: I learned that I needed to be a lot more responsible to the amount of money I spent on my products and how to use them. Organization as a dishwasher really meant that you had to set up a template for the servers to, you know, where to put their dishes. Had they not, I wouldnt be here today. The same year, Keller published a book of family-style recipes, Ad Hoc at Home, which spent six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. There was a friend here in Napa Valley who was a banker turned vintner who helped me with finance, and who helped me with putting together the financial component of the business plan. His old friend, Chef Paul Bocuse, presented Keller with the Legions medallion in a 2011 ceremony in New York City. And then you have other sous-chefs, which would be responsible for specific groups of chef de parties. Thomas Keller: Its interesting because when I was at Taillevent, I had been cooking for quite some time. As a teenager, he fell in love with the art of French cooking and learned his craft working in restaurants up and down the East Coast before moving to France to complete his training. The pigeon was beautiful. Theres two ways of looking at it, and I look at it both ways. We did everything. Over the next few years the restaurant earned numerous awards, including from the James Beard Foundation, gourmet magazines, the Mobil Guide (five stars), and the Michelin Guide (three stars). The next day in the Lyon newspaper, the headlines: Pauls Dream Realized: America Reaches the Podium., Thomas Keller: We got silver. So it was one menu every day. When you won your first three Michelin stars, you celebrated at Taillevent in Paris. Now remember, a chef in France doesnt necessarily relate to the kitchen. He has established a collection of restaurants that sets a new paradigm within the hospitality profession, including The French Laundry, in Napa Valley, and Per Se, in New York, among others. By living frugally on his savings, Keller was able to undertake a series of unpaid apprentice positions in the citys finest restaurants including Guy de Savoy and Taillevent, Michel Pascuet, Gerard Besson, Le Toit de Passy, Chiberta and Le Pr Catalan. In my lifetime, in my career, Ive watched it grow from its infancy to where it is today, for good and for bad. It certainly is very gratifying to see the interest now. Thomas Keller: Those were two of the greatest moments of my life. You learn from the mistake of doing the bad job that you learn that you needed to either stack your dishes differently, rinse them differently, sort the silverware differently, or whatever it was that critical feedback taught you, thats what you needed to do, so you modified your behavior to be successful. Thomas Keller: There was one other a little less-known chef, who also inspired me and I think a lot of my colleagues, and that was Jean-Louis Palladin. It was my generation that kind of missed that. A California native, and a renowned perfectionist, Chef Thomas Keller is apprentice-trained, and one of America's most well-known and successful chefs the only American-born one with two restaurants that have received three stars from the Michelin Guide. He grew up in the Depression, was a Marine for 23 years of his life. I understood it. It takes a village to build a great restaurant. And for some reason he said, Okay, Thomas. Were they going to be Americans? You realize them on your own and that is really important as well. Apart from his innovative restaurants, ThomasKellers books and above all his dedication and imagination have brought his informed and inventive cookery intohomes from coast to coast and around the world. We converted the restaurant into Caf Rakel. Ren and his wife would come to South Florida in the wintertime because they would close their restaurant, and he was looking for a chef for the following summer and Pierre recommended me, so I moved to Catskill. We do the same thing over and over and over again. Theyll pick up the food guides. It all goes back to the rabbit. The California-based chef has won nearly every culinary award imaginable; his cookbooks line the shelf of other chefs and passionate home. He began his career at a young age working in a Palm Beach restaurant managed by his mother. So that organizational aspect allowed you to be more efficient, which was kind of the second discipline that I learned is efficiency was really, really key in doing things well. Very few people in our country even knew that there was an American culinary team representing our country in Lyon every two years at this competition of 23 other nations. What college did you attend for that short while? As a consultant for All-Clad Metalcrafters, Keller advised on the creation of the All-Clad Copper Core Bocuse DOr Cookware. And you know what, it was okay, either one. So that was a mistake I made that I never made again, and I learned from that. What are your core values? And it wasnt something I had thought about before, but within a half an hour, I defined what they were, just because thats how I felt, and thats how most people are. In 1986 he became co-owner and executive chef of the original Fleur de Lys in San Francisco. On January 26, 2004, Keller opened his restaurant Bouchon in Las Vegas. I think thats more of what I meant. "[18] He permanently closed his restaurant TAK Room, located in Hudson Yards, during the coronavirus pandemic. You are trying to prepare a dish without having the proper ingredients or necessarily even the knowledge of those ingredients, and that really became for me a real building block, because I understood that. It didnt matter if you were doing fine dining, family dining. I got in contact with the owners, Don and Sally Schmitt. Out of those 400, 52 agreed to write a check, for a lot of different reasons, for any amount of money. Every dish, we have to be thinking about in a way that, when someone comes in, its going to relate that experience to what Ruth said, because now your expectations as a guest have become greater. But it wasnt because I wanted to have a career in the profession, in the culinary profession. He wanted America to have a better representation at the Bocuse dOr. After two years, he moved to Rhode Island, working first as chef de partie at the Clarke Cooke House, and the following summer at the Dunes Club in Narragansett. And those six disciplines are what we do every day as cooks, and I embrace that. Jan Birnbaum was the first. You have dinner. The recipe called for a double boiler. It was something that made him really comfortable. So between the two of them, they ignited what I believe we have, the resurgence of the farmer, the fisherman, the gardener and the forager. At that point you begin overeating because you want to try each one of them. In the American version he plays a cameo appearance as a restaurant patron (the part is played by one of Keller's mentors Guy Savoy in the French version, and Ferran Adri in the Spanish one). Were they going to come from France? Keller served as a consultant on the feature film Spanglish, and in collaboration with restaurant designer Adam D. Tihany, created K + T, a collection of silver hardware and cocktail ware for Christofle Silversmiths. I went to move to Paris in 1983 so I had been cooking now for almost a decade. On the other hand, we look at it as a sports franchise as well. This dish is featured on both the menus at Per Se and The French Laundry, a dish that has stayed on the menus since it was created and one we fully expect to remain there. A chef in France is the head of a specific area. So they do this extraordinary blini there. When Keller returned to the United States, he was ready to take on the world, but the world still had a few bumps in store for him, including an economic . Returning to Florida, he opened his first restaurant, the Cobbley Nob, with two partners in West Palm Beach. Thomas Keller is a man who needs no introduction. Alice Waters had opened Chez Panisse, and since then the influence of that sort of sourcing, that farm-to-table cuisine, has spread far and wide. On its list of 50 Best Restaurants in the World, Restaurant magazine named The French Laundry Best Restaurant in the World for two years running. I learned that doing things that other people do better is not necessarily good just because youre doing it in your own backyard or in your own house. How did you come to take over The French Laundry? People walking around town, he would just chat people up and, Oh, you know, my son owns The French Laundry. And they would say, Oh, can you get me a reservation? Oh yeah. And in San Francisco we had Herb Caen. I was a semi-well-known chef with, I guess, a checkered reputation, and now I needed to go out and raise the money to buy this restaurant. One thing that is so fascinating about your biography is your lack of formal culinary education, the lack of a Cordon Bleu certificate. The Schmitts wanted $1.2 million for their business, and Keller had nothing resembling that kind of money, but they agreed to take $5,000 from Keller to hold in escrow while he returned to Los Angeles to raise the money he needed. But more than any of that, we realized a great burden of responsibility, because Ruth, who is an expert in her field, somebody who we all look to, somebody who we all respect, has now called us, literally, the best place or the most exciting place to eat in America. And yes, there are some restaurants around the world that would use a stage in an inappropriate way by making him stand in the corner and peel potatoes for three months, but a true stage in a restaurant that has integrity and understands their responsibility and the purpose of a stage gives you a great opportunity to learn. In other words, you carve the turkey, you serve the food, and then you took the leftovers home. I learned that the ingredients were important. I think one of my investors invested 500, and the one who invested the most I think was 80,000. And some friends of mine, who were very influential in my move, were moving to California and they said, Come to California and try it out. At the same time a gentleman named Bill Wilkinson, who I had a brief conversation with about four years earlier, he was opening a hotel in L.A. called Checkers. But nonetheless I built my own little smoker out of an old refrigerator and cured and smoked my own salmon. We went to the local markets all the time. We just received three stars. And of course if you were successful, then it was positive feedback and you knew that you did a good job. Visitors to Napa brought word back to San Francisco, where favorable mention in the press drew interest from even farther away. It comes out in a beautiful pan. No reality TV shows. He wanted to have chicken, barbeque chicken. After two years in Paris, Keller returned to New York, confident of his abilities in the kitchen and eager to prove he could run a kitchen in a first-rate establishment. Chef Thomas Keller takes a seat just outside the wall of windows enclosing his new kitchen, the centrepiece of The French Laundry's $10 million renovation, while inside about a dozen cooks smoothly begin preparations for evening service, when the performance will begin all over again, as it has for 23 years. As I grew older, I realized the benefit of a good education, and I continue to try to educate myself today. Lets face it, if youre with friends and family, or your partner, and youre having a wonderful time, your experience is going to be elevated because of the time that youre having with the people that youre with. Under Henin's study, Keller learned the fundamentals of classical French cooking. Thomas Keller: On a trip to Napa Valley one spring day, Jonathan Waxman, who is a friend of mine who had opened a restaurant in New York and now is opening a restaurant here in Napa Valley. Per Se, which was designed from scratch and custom-built as part of the overall construction process, was an immediate hit on the New York restaurant scene, with reservations booked months in advance and publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times giving rave reviews. He was tall, masculine, broad, a good-looking Frenchman who was the executive chef of this private club. Where I ended up having the commitment from was a one-star Michelin restaurant in Arbois which is in the Jura, which is in eastern France just below Alsace a place I had never heard about before, a restaurant I had never heard about. The chef's central focus these days are the final touches on what he envisions as the physical representation of the Keller legacy: a nearly $11 million renovation of the kitchen and property at . The parmesan was the grated kind that you found in the green shaker. I learned at that time that persistence is really one of those keys to success. After World War II the men came back and the women stayed at work and that spawned the convenience food generation, which was us. But it was such a wonderful moment that lasted for days afterwards, because you had all the leftovers. In 2006, the Thomas Keller Restaurant Group continued to expand, adding the family-style restaurant Ad Hoc in Yountville, as well as outposts of Bouchon Bakery in Las Vegas, and Bouchon Bakery & Caf in New York. Because cooking wasnt really something that was popular at the time that I became interested. A community college in Palm Beach. If you kept after it year after year after year, that dish evolved into something else. And during my time working for him and of course I was just a lowly cook so Im not sure why I was having this kind of conversations with him but the conversations were really about cooks and our career and our profession. So of course, it wasnt going to come until 4:00 in the afternoon, so we had all day to walk around and just kind of try to patiently wait. Entertainment was going to the Beaubourg and taking a French lesson in the audio class downstairs, or going to the museums or walking around Paris. It was a normal thing and it still is today. And if theyre not better than you, then you havent done a very good job. Thomas worked alone with the couple's grandmother as prep cook. [25][26][27], This article is about the chef. It was a wonderful restaurant. And certainly receiving the Legion of Honor from President Sarkozy was beyond anything I could ever dream of. Keller still believed that to become the chef he wanted to be, he needed to study French cuisine at the source by working in Frances great restaurants. But Gourmet magazine picked it up and they thought it was very important. You have lunch. So you know, I did different things in different kitchens, because each chef needed a stagiaire in a different way. In 1994, he set his heart on a converted laundry building in Yountville, in the heart of Californias Napa Valley wine country. So it just became a natural evolution for us to do away with the five-course menu because 80 percent of our guests were choosing the nine courses, and 20 percent were choosing the 40 others. Youre only doing it because you love the person and because youre responsible for the person and because thats what you do. Lets go back to the beginning. But each day, waking up each day finding some success kept me motivated to the next day. We also support the Semper Fi Foundation, which is actually in Camp Pendleton. Turned me down primarily not because there wasnt value in the property, but because I had a tax lien in New York City, and this tax lien was based on our failure at Rakel. I had now failed in two restaurants and a chef de cuisineposition or executive chef position at Checkers Hotel. My first job in the kitchen was as a commis. Thomas Keller: Well, we all learn that. You know, jai-alai is a sport. They didnt want steak Diane and pommes boulangre. We live by them day to day, not necessarily having written them down. I think the single most important thing you can do the single most important decision you make when youre making a reservation to a restaurant is not what restaurant youre going to, but who youre going with. [2] His restaurants currently hold eight Michelin stars in total: three at Per Se, three at The French Laundry, one at Bouchon, and one at The Surf Club Restaurant.[3]. I mean if youre having dinner you should be thinking about what youre eating. I dont know if theres a hospitality gene as much as theres a nurturing gene. [4] Four years after his parents divorced, the family moved east and settled in Palm Beach, Florida. Of course, when you butt heads with the owner, ultimately the owners going to throw you out and thats what he did. This was the area that was going to become the next advertising center of New York City. And so in conversations with the dining room, the course of a persons experience there was they would come in and they would ask they finally got into The French Laundry, it was a great it was a wonderful moment for them. Theres a lot of great chefs out there who can do a lot of great things, but to be consistent 300 days a year lunch and dinner over and over and over and over again is really for me what defines greatness. He studied briefly at Palm Beach Junior College but knew his real education would come by working at the best restaurants he could find. So at that right moment, in that right period of time, I was able to put my application in and be approved for an SBA loan. Thomas Keller: Yeah. In past interviews youve speculated that perhaps some people are born with a gene for hospitality. She would spend it seems like days preparing Thanksgiving dinner. What are we going to do? The former French Laundry Chef de Cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth won the Bocuse d'Or USA semi-finals in 2008, and represented the U.S. in the world finals in January 2009 under Keller's supervision where he placed 6th, equaling the best performance of the U.S. in the contest to date. I had left Checkers. The Cobbley Nob has to do with woodworking, because one of our partners was an amateur he was a hobbyist. For other people named Thomas Keller, see, Restaurant Magazine list of the Top 50 Restaurants of the World, International Association of Culinary Professionals, Restaurant Magazine's Top 50 Restaurants of the World, "Thomas Keller and The French Laundry Awards", "Le chef amricain Thomas Keller reoit la Lgion dhonneur", "MICHELIN Guide Reveals Inaugural Florida Selection", "The Thomas Keller Interview, II: On Benno, Bouchon and Brooklyn", "Prix fixe to the people: Thomas Keller goes populist with his new restaurant, Ad Hoc", "TK SET - Thomas Keller Limited Edition Set", Competing at the Bocuse dOr: Team USAs Unbeatable Recipes, Chef Timothy Hollingsworth Wants to Bring American Pressure to the Bocuse dOr, High Hopes for American Team in Bocuse dOr Cooking Competition, "Chef Thomas Keller:'Preparing myself to let go', "75 notable NYC restaurants and bars that permanently closed since 2020", "French Laundry chef talks about celebrity life", "Who cooked that up?