A Visit to The French Laundry

San Francisco Bay Area residents have a certain pride in our restaurants, in the level of culinary experience we and tourists can enjoy. Being able to eat well is part of the experience of living in and visiting San Francisco and the greater bay area. As cities go, we aren’t alone in taking pride in our restaurants. But I just checked Amazon and the Michelin Guide web site and didn’t find a red guide for Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other big American city. Earning a Michelin Guide seems to be quite an achievement in itself.

When the 2007 Michelin guide for the San Francisco Bay Area and Wine Country came out recently, I think more than a few people were surprised and disappointed to find that only one of our many respected restaurants earned the lofty Three-Star rating. If not for the Wine Country, we’d not have even that one. With four Two-Star restaurants and twenty-three One-Star restaurants, the Bay Area fared well overall compared to New York (with four and thirty-one, respectively), but the Big Apple boasts three Three-Star restaurants. Only The French Laundry earned this rating here at home. My dad just pointed out that on Restaurant Magazine's S. Pellegrino World's 50 Best Restaurants list, The French Laundry is currently #4 and considered the best restaurant in America.

The French Laundry looms in the Bay Area like Oz, like Valhalla, like Heaven, perhaps: a mythical place of otherworldly experiences as hard to get into as it is expensive—no, perhaps harder to get into. You have to call exactly two months in advance of the day you want to go; you need to persevere to get through on the reservation line; and then you need to get lucky. Just having the money to afford the experience is not enough. The stars must align in your favor.

The Occasion and The Journey
As our tenth wedding anniversary approached, my wife tried yet again to get a reservation at The French Laundry, having failed on several previous attempts over the years and hoping that we’d get lucky for this special occasion. Once again, we did not. She added our name to the waiting list and we made reservations at the Two-Star Fifth Floor , planning to enjoy a very nice dinner there. But at the last moment she got a call from the French Laundry about a cancellation for lunch and snapped it up. We were finally going!

Yountville is about an hour north of Oakland, and we drove through the drizzle to the wine country, passing through Napa and many roadside vineyards on our way to an 11:30 reservation. Once on Washington St in Yountville, we drove right past the restaurant, so unassuming is its façade. The restaurant itself is small and wonderfully quiet, even when full. This says as much if not more about the people eating there as it does the restaurant itself, but the point is that if you find that overly noisy restaurants make enjoying your meal nearly impossible, The French Laundry is like heaven for atmosphere. Its interior is simple and comfortable, elegant but not pretentious. I liked that it doesn’t feel compelled to impress with decoration, but rather lets the food and service do the talking.


(above) The facade on Washington Street

The Menu
So what did we have? Here, in order, is what we ate. The items in all caps are taken directly from the menu. Everything else was not on the menu and not ordered; those items just came without being requested.

1. Gougères—two small pastries, still warm, very cheesy inside.
   
2. Yellow beet ‘ice cream cone’ wrapped in paper napkin. The chopped yellow beets were in a ball on top of the ice cream cone with something like béchamel inside.
   
3. “PORRIDGE” OF “AKITA KOMACHI” RICE: Quail Egg Yolk, “Perilla” and Mountain Caviar
   
4. “JARDINIÈRE DE LEGUMES D’HIVER”: Garden Herbs and Black Truffle “Bouillon”
   
5. WARM SALAD OF FIELD RHUBARB: Leaves and “Ribs” of Jacobsen’s Farm Swiss Chard with Mustard ‘Beignets” and Mustard Emulsion
   
6. CURRY-SCENTED “GRATIN” OF CELERY ROOT: Baby Celery, Toasted Almonds and Plumped Raisins
   
7. HERB-ROASTED HEN-OF-THE-WOODS MUSHROOMS: Glazed Tokyo Turnips and Grilled Scallion
   
8. “CONFITE” OF PEARL POTATOES: Yukon Gold Potato “Mille-Feuille,” Green Garlic, Marinated Sweet Peppers, Field Arugula and Castelvetrano Olives
   
9. ROGUE RIVER CREAMERY “OREGON BLUE”: Thompson Seedless Grapes, Toasted English Walnuts, “Frisée” Lettuce and Pedro Ximénez Reduction
   
10. HAWAIIAN BROWN SUGAR ICE CREAM: “Florentin” and Dark Chocolate Sheen
    
11. CARA CARA ORANGES “EN GELÉE DE PAMPLEMOUSSE”: Champagne “Granite” and Tynant Water “Foam”
    
12. Crème Brulée and Lemon Pot de Crème
    
13. Orange tuiles
    
14. “MIGNARDISES” (which consisted of several trays of various candies):
    
    
    
    1. Milk, White and Dark chocolate truffles
       
    2. Hand-made salt caramels
       
    3. Pistachio nougats
       
    4. Hand-rolled chocolate covered Macadamia nuts
       
    5. Produced in honor of our anniversary, a special tray of truffles in these flavors: caramel, hazelnut, mocha, all spice, peanut butter, banana, and I think a couple more I can’t recall
    
    
15. espresso
    
16. four bottles of Tynant sparkling water
    
17. five kinds of bread
    
18. Shortbread, wrapped as a parting gift
    
19. a bottle and a half of wine

The Wine
The French Laundry’s wine list is 96 pages long. It offers a wide variety of international wines, from Beaujolais to the finest Champagne, at a wide variety of prices, from the occasional bottle under $100 to many more bottles in the mid-four figures and above. Having purchased most of our daily and special wines directly from the French producers themselves, I’m pained when faced with paying double or triple the price for a wine I recognize in a restaurant. When I am eating at a place I particularly like and thus want to remain in business so I can continue to enjoy it, I more easily accept the wine markup, having heard that wine is where many restaurants make their profit. It’s a little harder to cling to this notion, though, when the prix fixe menu is already costing you $240. If you’re not independently wealthy and thus not thinking often about how many pairs of toddler shoes, doctor’s visits, and trips to the Wiggles concert $240 would buy, just going to a place this expensive in the first place brings you out of your financial comfort zone. But if you decide to go, the worst thing you can do is fret about how much it’s costing you. An experience like this demands your full attention, and if you can’t stop worrying about the money you just shouldn’t go to begin with.

That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway. I really like wine, and when eating a meal like this I flat out needed something nice in my wine glass. I picked a 2004 Meursault Les Chevalieres, a white Burgundy from Remi Jobard. It’s about a $70 wine, marked up to $180. Fortunately, it was excellent, which was a relief, since the last thing I wanted was to set a personal record for most spent on a bottle of wine only to have the wine itself be disappointing. The meal lasted almost three hours, though, and a single bottle does not last that long. So before the cheese course we decided to get a half bottle of red burgundy, and the sommelier recommended a 2001 Volnay, Clos des Ducs from Domain Marquis d’Angerville. That half-bottle was nearly as much as the Merusault 750ml, but it was also outstanding. The waiter brought to the table the largest wine glasses I’d ever used, saying that the wine was worth his fancy Burgundy stemware. The glasses were so large, it was sort of like having your own personal decanter, and I felt a little silly drinking from one. I’m not sure it added anything to the wine’s own gifts, but it made me feel that I was suddenly about 75% of my normal physical size. Maybe that’s what a really ‘large’ wine is supposed to do.

The Experience
So what was it like, eating this exquisite food and drinking two gorgeous wines? It was fantastic. That lunch had so little in common with most other meals I’ve eaten that it’s difficult to express just what it was like. Usually the things on the newest dish were completely foreign to our experience either because we’d never encountered them before, or because we’d never had them prepared in that fashion and with such skill and care. Only Le Bourdonnais in Paris came to mind on occasion as we moved from serving to serving at The French Laundry. For example, we’ve all had rice. But Akita Komachi rice, prepared as it was on Saturday, was like no other rice I’d ever had, and prompted the first of many times I said, “Wow, I’ve never had rice (or whatever) like this before.” In my experience really good restaurants do something in their kitchens that is simply on a different level from what we usually encounter in food preparation. I remember the first time I saw a pro golfer hit a ball at the Olympic Club during the US Open years ago. I’d never heard that sound, I’d never seen anyone swing that smoothly, I’d never seen anything like that in the years I’d been playing golf. It was golf, but it was golf done in such a way that it was vastly different from any golf I’d seen before. A really good restaurant does the same with food. They’re cooking back there, but they’re doing it on such a different level of competence and creativity that normal experience doesn’t prepare you for it. I’ve only enjoyed it a handful of times in my life, but each time it’s been like magic.

Each course was small and exquisitely presented, like a work of art that tasted delicious. I’m a fairly big eater, and after each dish I felt I could eat about another ten portions of what I’d just enjoyed. They give you just enough to appreciate what they’ve done, and then it’s gone so that you won’t fill up on one thing when they have so many wonders to share with you.

As exciting and delicious as the food was, the service was just as good. I kept thinking back to a meal we had several years a go at Chez Panisse, another world famous Bay Area restaurant. The waitress had an air of condescension so pronounced that it completely ruined our experience. The meal was expensive and terrible, in spite of the food being quite good. I was so disappointed and offended that I wrote to Alice Waters about how awful our experience had been. She did not reply to my letter, and we have not been back to Chez Panisse since. CP is still in business, though, so I assume that waitress is long gone. But maybe not.

Each person who assisted us with our meal at The French Laundry was modest but knowledgeable, helpful but unobtrusive, there when we wanted something and not there when we needed nothing but privacy in which to enjoy each new dish. We asked two of them where they went when they wanted a first class meal, thinking they’d be spoiled by eating the staff meals at the French Laundry on a regular basis. Both admitted that they had never eaten there as a customer. The staff meals, though very good, were nothing like the food we were being served.


(above) The dark blue door on the ground floor is the entrance

The Only Disappointment Was Its End
I brought my camera with me in case I saw something to shoot on the drive, and in a way I wish I’d been able to take a picture of each of the many dishes. But we have The French Laundry Cookbook to remind us of the amazing presentation. I did take a few shots before we left, and right after meeting the man himself, Thomas Keller. We’d parked behind the restaurant in a small lot with spaces for five or six cars, covered with tan gravel that was so smooth when we arrived they must have someone rake it each morning. As we entered the lot, a man in a chef’s white coat passed and thanked us for coming. I had just seen a picture of Thomas Keller, chef and restaurateur extraordinaire, the day before, and the man looked familiar. I asked if he was Thomas Keller, and he nodded, almost shyly. We shook hands and thanked him for a fabulous afternoon. If I hadn’t had so much to drink I might have asked him to pose with the wife for a photo!

After three hours, we were full but not uncomfortable. After drinking most of the wine, I was quite comfortable, in fact, since my darling wife had graciously offered to drive home. Such generosity and courtesy on her part are a bit of why the past ten years of marriage have gone so quickly (for me, at least). Perhaps ten years from now, we’ll be ready to visit the French Laundry again. I can hardly wait!