How French Laundry's chefs reach for the stars

Sophie Brickman, C hronicle Staff Writer Published 4:00 am, Sunday, September 12, 2010

Thomas Keller, executive chef and owner of the French Laundry, twice named "the best restaurant in the world," walked into the restaurant's waiting room, shook my hand, introduced himself, then looked me up and down and cleared his throat. "You're wearing jeans." I instantly started sweating. "Yes, Chef." "You're not supposed to be wearing jeans. They're not allowed in this restaurant." My heart pounded audibly in my ears, like some distant funereal drum procession. "Yes, I know, Chef." "You know, but you wore jeans anyway." I couldn't tell if this was a question or a statement. Standing there in jeans and a striped T-shirt as patrons in suits and gowns dined on the meal of a lifetime, I panicked. I wanted to explain that I hadn't been prepared to meet him, the only American-born chef awarded multiple three-star Michelin ratings simultaneously. I'd been scheduled to spend the next day in the kitchen with him, helping the cooks prep while observing a day in the life of the restaurant, research for a story I was writing about what goes on the behind the scenes of four-star restaurants in the Bay Area. But, on my drive to Yountville I received a call saying that Chef Keller had to fly back East, some scheduling mix-up. When I found out he'd be at the restaurant that very night, I dropped what I was doing - eating a burger in St. Helena - and ran over at 9 p.m. In preparation for my "real" day, I'd ironed my black pants, scrubbed the bottom of my kitchen clogs, in storage since I last worked the line, and even sharpened my peeler. Had I hoped, subconsciously, that Keller would come to my prep station, introduce himself and say, "Such a sharp peeler! And clean kitchen clogs! Come into my inner circle. Here's a flute of Champagne and some caviar"? Whatever my imagined scenario, it wasn't happening. After a long beat during which I stood, mute, he said, "Follow me." We walked down a narrow hallway. Was he leading me to the secret French Laundry closet where they locked up underdressed patrons? The drumming in my ears gave way to the sounds of kitchen life sizzling meat, clattering plates, the call and response between expeditor and line cook. As we sat down in "the box," a small, closet-like room with a high director's chair looking out into the kitchen, I got my first glimpse of this world-renowned kitchen. I wouldn't be allowed inside until the next day, yet even behind glass, I sensed differences between this kitchen and other four-stars where I'd staged, or trained, previously. First, I noticed the five gleaming gold stars hanging over the hood of a stove, signifying the restaurant's Mobil rating. I scanned down and realized that everything in the kitchen was gleaming. I saw a sweating line cook forgo a brief lull and chance to drink some water to scrub down the wall by his station until it, too, gleamed. A window to the manicured patio lined one wall. Windows! I thought. In a kitchen! The cooks, mostly men, were clean-shaven, hair neatly trimmed, chef's whites spotless. I thought briefly of my chef's whites halfway through service at Gramercy Tavern in New York City, decorated with, at minimum, three types of puree. Here, it looked as if service had just begun. Keller no longer runs the kitchen as he did pre-Per Se, pre-empire, when he'd participate in everything from menu creation to plating. He lives next door and is at the restaurant almost every day he's in Yountville, but the formidable day-to-day task of running the French Laundry lies with 30-year-old culinary chef de cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth, who oversees cooks nightly as they create and execute two different nine-course, $250 meals. Keller is still very much the face of the restaurant, and in the single hour I sat with him in the box, three patrons came into the kitchen to thank him for their meals. After he signed one of their menus, he turned to me and said, genuinely perplexed, "They look at me like I cooked their meal. I feel awkward." He peppered our conversation with French Laundry-specific maxims and mottos. "Work ethic is established today," he said - as part of the Keller team, you must hit the ground running. He mentioned "the rule of no repetition," that no ingredient can be featured more than once on each night's menu. Twice he referred to "the dance," or how skilled chefs move and hold themselves in the kitchen. Under the clock in the kitchen, a sign read "Sense of Urgency." On another wall was the definition of "finesse."

He handed me a slim binder before we parted, which cooks receive before their first day. "Dear Sophie," the cover letter read. "You are now part of our team and hold a position that many individuals desire." Inside, I read the Keller team's expectations of new cooks - strong work ethic, cleanliness, initiative, humility, "a love of repetition." As I stood up and stuck out my hand to give Keller a shake goodbye, I thought of what he'd said to me earlier. It's a maxim he tries to instill in his employees. "Treat it like it's yours, and one day it will be." "Chef, I'm so sorry about the jeans," I said. "It won't happen again." Keller's face broke into a wide smile. "I was just kidding. You knew that, right?" Right. 11 a.m. Now dressed in black pants and a chef's coat, I met Hollingsworth. A blue-eyed, blond Californian, his manner is unassuming and smiley, something unusual for someone under so much pressure. Moments after meeting me, he asked if I'd like to help check in truffles and caviar. What a gentleman. He weighed out and smelled Australian winter truffles the size of softballs, each worth approximately $1,100. "You see how this smells a little off?" he asked me, holding one up to my nose. I didn't. "I'm going to send it back." Then he took a mother-of-pearl spoon and in succession, scooped a generous spoonful from each caviar tin, smeared each on the fat of his thumb, then licked it off, as if he were about to take a shot of tequila. He asked me which caviar I liked best. They all tasted amazing. I willed my palate to perform, then, winging it, pointed to the second tin. "Hmm," he said, "That was my least favorite. But to each his own." My heart sank. Hey, I'm the girl who likes the worst of the best caviar in the world, nice to meet you. I remembered what Keller had told me the previous night: "I don't discuss price with my suppliers." If you want quality, you pay. And if you're Thomas Keller, you can. Unlike most restaurateurs, Keller doesn't struggle to keep his restaurant afloat: dinner service at the French Laundry stays at a "predictable 74 each night," said Keller - in the height of summer, in the dead of winter, always filled to capacity. As Hollingsworth labeled each tin "TH" - each cook marks his own ingredients, to foster a sense of ownership and responsibility - I looked around. A television inside the kitchen with a live feed to Per Se in New York showed a sprawling kitchen with cooks working, three hours ahead in their prep. What the French Laundry kitchen lacks in size - Hollingsworth affectionately describes it as "intimate" - it makes up for in other ways. The main part is divided into six stations for canapes, fish, meat, first course, cheese and dessert, and arranged so that if one person is slammed, other cooks can help. During service, Hollingsworth and a sous chef stand at the pass - where busers pick up the food and take it to the dining room - plating food and inspecting. Beyond the main kitchen are two other rooms where the commis - paid apprentices - and stages work on their prep list. They arrive at 5 a.m. and stay until they're done, 10 to 14 hours later. A band of windows wraps around the kitchen, and natural sunlight filters in, glinting off the hanging copper pots. Outside, lush vineyards rolled into the hills, but I was the only one looking. Eight line cooks, here called chef de partie, in traditional French nomenclature, or "CDP," worked, heads down, mincing chives just so, trimming mushrooms to the same size. They would stay in similar poses until 5:30 p.m., when service began, breaking only briefly to eat family meal at 4:15 p.m. while standing at their stations. Everyone is called "chef," no matter what position. It's a leveler, unusual in a kitchen I'd expected to be rigidly hierarchical. The only time Hollingsworth stood out as a superior was when he'd yell, "Elliot to the line!" and a cook would leave his station, run up to the pass and stand at attention to answer a question. 11:30 a.m. A bearded, soft-spoken man wearing a baseball cap and a dirty shirt tapped me on the shoulder. He stuck out against the clean white backdrop of the kitchen. This was Tucker Taylor, the culinary gardener, one of the reasons this restaurant is special. He runs the garden across the street, just shy of 3 acres, which provides 30 percent of the kitchen's produce (see today's Home & Garden cover story). Fruits and vegetables are harvested day of by Taylor and his team, so chefs can request produce just so - 2-inch baby zucchinis, 4-inch carrots. Unwanted produce gets kicked down the line to sister restaurants Bouchon and Ad Hoc. Cooks won't waste, Keller told me, if they understand the work that goes into growing and harvesting the produce.

2 p.m. The menu changes each night - minus some Keller signature dishes - which means Laura Ramos, the culinary assistant, must type it up each day. The courses are broken down into one canape, a first course, two fish dishes, two meat dishes, a cheese course, a sorbet and a dessert. Each party receives two amuses at the start of the meal, which are not printed on the menu, and each meal is rounded out with "mignardises," bite-sized petit-fours. Perhaps the biggest difference between Keller's restaurant and most other four-stars is that each line cook comes up with his dishes. I'd see the beginning of this process at the end of the night at the menu meeting. At most restaurants, the quality of a line cook is measured by how quickly he churns out the same dishes every day, for months, until the menu changes. The thinking, the recipe creation, the flavor profiling - that comes at the souschef level or higher. But, then again, in a further twist that differentiates them from most other line cooks, French Laundry cooks don't taste their completed dishes. Keller explained that if the cooks taste each component, and know that the flavor profiles work, the finished product will also work. On top of an ever-changing menu, if an ingredient doesn't look up to snuff when it comes in, Hollingsworth will swap it out for something better. The line cooks must not only be skilled enough to juggle new dishes every day but also be able to change their dishes on the fly. Because of this constant evolution, Ramos types up the two menus - the chef's tasting menu and the vegetarian menu - as late as possible. At 2 p.m., she sat at the computer by the kitchen with notes she picked up from Hollingsworth, and translated them with her best guess. Hollingsworth had written "tomato salad, eggplant, cucumber, mizuna with sesame," and she typed up, "Salad of French Laundry garden tomatoes, 'Fairy Tale' eggplant, compressed cucumber, mizuna and white sesame." Tim wrote "vendeen bouchon;" she changed it to "venden bichonn." "Borst" became "borscht." After a few tweaks from the cooks ("I wrote parsley, not purslane!"), the menu was set for the evening. Set, that is, for the regular riffraff. There are also mini VIPs ("minis") and maximum VIPs. Reservationists Google all customers who make a reservation, which is why you might get a candle in your dessert even if you don't tell anyone it's your birthday, or a glass of Champagne to celebrate that merger. Extras are all in an effort to keep a diner's experience as exciting as possible. "Minimum" VIPs might be people who have visited many times - they receive a few extra courses in addition to the regular menu. Maximum VIPs, Hollingsworth said, "might be a chef coming in, or someone who is well regarded in their industry, someone we have a relationship with." If the kitchen has the time, these special guests get a completely off-the-menu menu, created that day especially for them. Julia Roberts had been in recently and stood in the kitchen waving at the television set to the cooks at Per Se, none of whom looked up. I asked Hollingsworth if she got an off-the-menu menu. "She was VIP, but not off the menu," he said, adding cryptically, "That was because of the party size." 3 p.m. The purpose of my day at the French Laundry was to observe, yes, but also to work. I'd attended culinary school, staged at Jean Georges in New York City and worked the line at Gramercy Tavern. I may not have been up to French Laundry caliber, but I could peel a carrot. Yet somehow, every time I asked to help, someone deftly moved me to another part of the kitchen. "Have you met so-and-so yet?" "How about lunch in the garden?" I got close, at one point. Sous chef Nai Kang Kuan, who oversees the commis kitchen, asked me if I could quarter a chicken. He gave me a boning knife and I was about to make a cut right between the leg and thigh when a thin, elegant man tapped me on the shoulder. "Tour of the wine cellar?" It was so well choreographed that it was nearly service by the time I realized I hadn't used my knives, and when I pleaded with Hollingsworth, he gave me some baby fennel. I cut it obliquely into "hooks," and once I filled two "delis" (French Laundry vernacular for "pint container"), I retired my knives. Every time I saw a fennel hook grace the abalone plate throughout the night, my heart fluttered. 4:15 p.m. Four times a day, fresh rolls, brioche and baguettes are brought to the restaurant, twice for family meal and twice during service. Hollingsworth took one of each kind, broke each apart to feel for texture, nodded, then threw them into the garbage. I had to restrain myself from diving in after them - they looked as if they had just come out of the oven. I thought, What if they aren't good enough? Can he tell them to bake new bread? Does he have the power to warp time? 5:30 p.m.

Service begins when the computer spits out the first order from the dining room. "All right," said one cook to another, "It's game time, Cheffie." Service progressed in spurts and lulls, but even during the lulls, everyone moved - helping another cook, scrubbing down his station, jumping up to help Hollingsworth plate at the pass. An order for two foie gras plates came in, and canape cook Nick Ferreira sent the various components to Hollingsworth - foie, pickled blueberries, cipollini onions, watercress, puffed quinoa. Hollingsworth dotted thick, aged balsamic vinegar on the plate and arranged the blueberries on top of the foie before changing his mind and moving them. Ferreira mimicked Hollingsworth's every move, seconds behind him, so that both dishes were ready to go at the same time. Neither had seen the finished product before. Hollingsworth decided that for the next plate of foie, he wanted to brush the balsamic underneath instead of dot it. One tweak, that was it. When trailing at Daniel Patterson's Coi, I watched a novice cook "go down in flames," as they say in the industry undercooking meat, messing up orders, putting dirty spoons in the clean spoon container. Coi had a built-in safety net of senior chefs, so all the dishes that went to the dining room were four-star anyway, and such a scenario is inevitable in a high-pressure, low-paying, high-turnover industry where people are forced to learn and execute on the fly. At most restaurants, diners in the civilized, air-conditioned dining room have no idea how hectic things are behind the swinging doors. Yet at the French Laundry, even the smallest dose of chaos in the kitchen seemed almost unimaginable. Line cooks are sous-chef worthy at any other restaurant. Sous chefs are executive-chef worthy. No one drags. I saw Hollingsworth get mad only once, when Ferreira started cooking a piece of foie gras too early. "Pull it out of the fpan," Hollingsworth snarled. Then he returned to his orderly self. Of course, he knew that a reporter was in the room, and I've heard from people that sometimes he screams at chefs if they underseason. Frankly, I'd be surprised if he didn't explode every once in a while - the intensity in that kitchen is sky high. Hollingsworth sees not only every dish that goes out but also every plate that comes back in. Waiters, returning with empty dishes from the dining room, called out so that Hollingsworth knew to fire the next course ("Table four, clear") and each time, before noting it down, he'd glance up. One plate returned half eaten. "Everything all right?" he asked the server, who seemed to expect this and replied, "She enjoyed it, but she's just pacing herself." Those who work at the French Laundry or Per Se value the prestige, the training, the quality of the ingredients. I spoke to a former Per Se line cook who said, "If you're the kind of person who can 100 percent buy into it - it's like the military - if you can feel good yelling commands back, then you're going to love it. If you can't, you can't pretend." But man, they put on a good show. Over the course of the evening, I would taste dishes and burst out laughing - the flavors were so perfectly melded, the produce such high quality, the presentation so clever, the accompaniments so playful (the foie gras is presented with six kinds of salt from all over the world, including one pink and one black) that I didn't know how else to react. It seemed like cruel and unusual punishment to taste dishes within eyeshot of the cooks who had never tasted their own creations, but the cooks were so focused they didn't even glance my way. I tried to thank Hollingsworth, but could only muster a small groan of pleasure. He seemed used to that response. 9 p.m. I found a Nepalese cook desperate for a job at the French Laundry sweating alone in the commis kitchen. He'd called every day for months before getting a response. Two hours earlier, after one day in the kitchen, Hollingsworth had given him a sudden-death opportunity: Armed with a duck breast and anything in the kitchen, he was to create a three-course tasting menu featuring a salad, an egg dish and the duck. If it was up to French Laundry standards, maybe he'd get a job. Hollingsworth came to check on him. "How you doin'?" he asked, all smiles. The stage reluctantly left his quinoa to talk: "So overwhelmed ... trying to do my best ... honored to be here ... just want to learn." Tim nodded, grinning, then squinted. "Gotta visa?" I learned later that his duck hadn't made the cut. 11 p.m. The savory kitchen stopped cooking, though the pastry department continued to churn out plates past midnight. The cooks scrubbed down their stations as Hollingsworth drank his post-service coffee, and a little before midnight, Ferreira, who, as canape chef was done first, heated up the macaroni and cheese from family meal. Yet, no one touched it. I got the sense that chewing would be too exhausting.

The metal of the countertop was still hot from service. Everyone got a glass for wine from the half-empty bottles left over from the dining room, and after 13 hours came the final push of the night: the menu meeting. For me, this onehour meeting defined the ethos of the kitchen - the high expectations, the responsibility, the thoughtfulness, the talent, the sometimes rigid pursuit of perfection. Does it really matter if cucumber repeats on the menu? I wondered. Hollingsworth called on each cook to see what he or she had planned for the next day. First up was the cheese course. "What about celery times three?" Chef Adina Guest asked. "Hooks, micro, leaves?" Hollingsworth nodded, yes. "And pearls?" she asked. He shook his head, no. Next to him, sous chef Anthony Secviar couldn't stop yawning. Nostril flares gave a few other cooks away. Someone else read out his components. "Celery's already taken," someone said. The cooks then worked through the dish creation together, with help from Hollingsworth and Secviar. Keller participates when he's around. For another dish, Hollingsworth suggested that Matt Peters, visiting from Per Se, accompany his meat with bone marrow pudding. "Do you know how to do that?" he asked. Peters didn't. "Oh, that's a fun one." Then Secviar stepped in, throwing out an impromptu recipe. Peters took notes in his moleskin journal, which are given to each cook to record recipes either from their peers or from the filed database on the computer. As Hollingsworth said earlier, "If you're asked to do a job, we better give you what you need to do it." At the end of the night, exhausted cooks "shook out" - every cook entering or leaving the kitchen for the day shakes everyone else's hand - changed, and left. Some would go home to spend another few hours planning for the next night's meeting before collapsing into bed. On the TV feed, a lone Per Se porter scrubbed the stove. In 45 minutes, Per Se commis would begin their day. And, in just three hours, French Laundry commis would switch on the lights in the kitchen where I now stood, and begin theirs. Editor's note What goes on behind the scenes at a four-star restaurant? Chronicle staff writer Sophie Brickman, a culinary graduate who has worked in top kitchens in New York, wanted to experience the pressures and pleasures of cooking at this high, unforgiving level. After a night working in the kitchens of three of The Chronicle's four-star spots, she learned that each one is different and reflects the personalities of the chef/owner. This week, she looks at the French Laundry, which is arguably the best restaurant in the United States. Next week, she goes behind the stoves at Daniel Patterson's Coi and Roland Passot's La Folie. - Michael Bauer, executive food and wine editor
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