Both Thomas Keller and the French Laundry have been picked clean—lauded, pilloried, lauded again, damned to hell, praised to heaven…. Something must emerge from the haze of hype and hyperbole. Will that something be worth eating? That’s what I asked myself when ducking into this...celebrated restaurant for the first time.
California-style fine dining, largely thanks to Alice Waters, brought a nouveau riche energy to a staid, stuffy mode of not just culinary art but dinner service. Bring your jackets, yes, but maybe not your black ties. Two forks is all you get. Turtle soup is out. This is the west! We’re living off the fat of our own land—an admirable if remarkably privileged stance. (If only everyone had this land’s fat to live off of!)
But what was once nouveau riche gets…if not old, then at least accustomed to itself. The cowboy brazenness of the Bay Area, which always seemed innocently defensive to me, has mellowed into unabashed self-importance. Today, the most monied men in the world are Silicon Valley snot-noses, and god knows where the cigar-chewing east coast steel men are. The plucky, perky energy of western privilege has become the default American dream. Can the default still be casual or creative or cowboyish? I’m not so sure.
After being seated, I overheard another patron of the French Laundry complaining about the real French and their snooty ways. “There, you have to eat the way they want you to eat,” he said. “Here, I can do whatever I want.”
Can the French Laundry live up to such libertarian standards? Again, I’m not so sure. I turned down my assigned sommelier’s suggestions and ordered a reasonably priced half-bottle. “What do you think?” I then asked, mainly as a courtesy. His eyebrows twitched in response. Later I posed a question about a non-alcoholic beverage he poured us, and he demurred. “If you don’t like it, don’t drink it.” (Here, I can do whatever I want….)
The patron was wrong. This is a restaurant about food, not freedom. No, not about food. About flavor! About wild juxtapositions so minute (“molecular” gastronomy) that your head and tastebuds spin in time with the celestial spheres. Where is the flavor in the French Laundry? Is it in the logo—the rustic little clothespin? Is it in the affirmations emblazoned above the kitchen—“a sense of urgency”—that reminded me of Jeff Bezos’ “Day One”?
The French laundry is a little like a food-making app. It spits out ingenious dishes on demand—it MUST, given the reputation (all those stars!) and the price. The food has a kind deep surveillance quality, as though Thomas Keller were listening in on your secret gustatory desires in order to push them ads. Oysters and caviar? Why did no one else think of that? Actually, plenty of other people HAVE thought of it, but no one else TRADEMARKED it and turned it into a signature dish, into intellectual property. If the French Laundry were to IPO, everyone involved would become billionaires...until the investors got wind of the cost of Ossetra caviar, anyway. (“Surely the kitchen could be persuaded to use paddlefish from time to time?”)
You certainly can’t accuse the French Laundry of cheapness. Wagyu, caviar, farm-to-table produce, plenty of Lafite-Rothschild in the cellar…. Keller dangles prices over you like sets of keys in front of a bored infant. $155 will buy you a truffle mac and cheese dish that tastes exactly like paper money. $10,000 will buy you a bottle of J.L. Chave Cuvée Cathelin. Keller wants you to swallow the gold leaf, and swallow it you do. If you choke on it, however, you’re on your own. Michelin does not award stars for exemplary performance of the Heimlich.
Yes, these dishes are rich in countless ways, including with ideas. Do they even need diners—do they need ingesters? Or are they content to sit prettily on their plates? (Conceptual food!) Perhaps a few courses required my tongue: an amuse bouche of crusty, seeded ice cream cone and lox, for example. Everything bagels are a simple pleasure. My body responded simply and pleasurably to this gambit. One point for Keller.
I think about the real France while eating these fanciful morsels, where the customer is often happily fed on a skeleton crew of one chef, one plongeur, and one waiter. But then, this is the French LAUNDRY, not a French bistro. Keller has drifted so far afield of his original inspiration that it is French in nom only—and with respect to its hedonistic ratio of macronutrients. Keller himself has claimed to eat no carbs. The bread course I received was a pastry possessing more butter than flour, upon which I was invited to slather even more butter. Owsley Stanley would have been proud.
Keller once belonged to Owsley Stanley’s California, and to Alice Waters’, and perhaps even to Steve Jobs’—a land of plenty, of opportunity, of sunshine, of ostensibly meritocratic values, of boundless creativity and imagination (and wild drugs). Today, he belongs to Elon Musk’s California, which is but a stone’s throw from Walt Disney’s. But this is not Keller’s fault. The state has folded in on itself like a Mad Magazine cover. What can a genius do in Toontown?
He can hitchhike to Tomorrowland, for one thing. The Laundry is a hologram, a simulacrum, a caricature of a half-remembered thing that exists far, far away, if at all. The dishes have strange, pixelated frames around them. A “salad” is a small heap of vegetation. A slice of duck compressed into a cube like a sausage seems more like a box labeled “duck” than an actual duck. It prompts me to envision a future where all food is a styrofoam-like generalized nutrient substance into which highly realistic flavors are injected at will. Would Keller embrace such a future, or fight it? (He claims to care about farmers. He might want any transitions to an all Soylent Green-diet to move slowly.)
After the meal, I was invited to tour the recently remodeled kitchen. It is clean, very white, white like heaven is white, with chrome appliances. Five large stars hang on the wall as a reminder to the staff that they are reaching for ne plus ultra at all times. But ne plus ultra as compared to what, exactly?
I saw the five stars and instantly thought of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters who were obsessed with imitating nature down to the smallest detail. Their work is beautiful, and indeed shows the intensity of their study, but it is also eerily sterile and inhuman. Their attempts to reproduce reality with precision lost the forest for the trees, and instead created a kind of hyperreality or surreality. (Their method of combing through details and making strict visual comparisons was not so unlike the way AI models now create images on demand.)
The lesson seems to be that trying to imitate reality quarantines you from it—you can’t experience reality from the outside in a manner that would make such a reproduction worthwhile. “Reality” as compared to what, exactly?
The final course of chocolate truffles was sublime.More