Well, to put it briefly, the French Laundry is, depending on who you ask, either the best restaurant in
So I expected to blog about the food, and S even left the menu home with me (instead of bringing it straight to the salivating chefs at work) so that I could remember the details. The food was great. There are three prix fixe menus (and what a prix it is): the seven course dinner menu, the nine course “Chef’s Tasting Menu,” and the nine course “Tasting of Vegetables.” S had the nine courses and I had the nine vegetable courses, though some of them were fruit and chocolate. We had champagne and white wine and red wine. I had an amuse bouche of a tiny cracker cone filled with eggplant and topped with a scoop of chopped tomato that was one of the best things I ever put in my mouth (chef/owner Thomas Keller is known for culinary jokes: he invented the coffee and doughnuts dessert that has become semi-ubiquitous at copycat upscale restaurants, and the little faux ice cream cones are one of his standards--S’s had red onion crème fraiche inside and a scoop of salmon tartare on top, and it was mighty tasty as well). Also beyond sublime was the green apple sorbet that came with my apple tart and tasted like the essence of ur-appleness.
I could go on, but if you click here you’ll find a sample menu that pretty much sums it up, even if it doesn’t specify the “Warm salad of Dutch white asparagus, with Meyer lemon ‘confit,’ Meyer lemon ‘mousseline’ and shaved Piedmont hazelnuts” and the “Roasted globe artichokes, creamed arrowleaf spinach, fennel bulb, pearl onions, sweet garlic ‘en cocotte’ and saffron-scented onion broth” that were the highlights of my meal (though it probably will include the “‘Oysters and Pearls’: ‘Sabayon’ of pearl tapioca with ‘Beau Soleil” oysters and Russian sevruga caviar” and the “‘Fricassee’ of Maine lobster mitts with caramelized Belgian endive, glazed chestnuts, Perigord truffles, and creamy lobster ‘broth’” that were the highlights of S’s, because they are menu regulars these days).
But delicious as it was, the food was not what preoccupied me as I thought about the French Laundry, both during our meal and over the next few days. In fact, I found the whole experience somewhat disturbing.
First, there was a way in which it was like being at the most high-end McDonald’s ever. Counter-intuitive, I know, but stick with me here. The French Laundry has seventeen tables. They seat three or four tables every half hour, starting at 5:30 (when we arrived), and everyone tells you that dinner will take three hours. Which it did--precisely. When you sit down, your primary server (who will be backed up by about a dozen other servers), gives you a little speech about the menu and urges you to begin with champagne or sparkling wine, which you do. You feel very special and cared for, secure in the knowledge that your very own server is really looking out for your individual and unique French Laundry experience. Then you notice, at 6:00, when the next tables are seated, that their very own servers are giving them the exact same speech, and they too are obediently ordering champagne to start. At the 6:00 table adjacent to ours sat a couple very much like us: fortysomething, low-key, and clearly at the French Laundry for a huge treat. The man had the nine courses and the woman had the vegetable nine courses. I kept track, and they stayed exactly two courses behind us for the entire evening--exactly. Even as the food was delicious and the service impeccable (when S blew out our candle by mistake, I watched to see if our server would notice, and sure enough, he was soon there with a match), the whole experience felt totally programmed, and I kind of missed the convivial chaos of Zuni the night before.
Then there’s the money issue. Which usually I don’t get too worked up about. Yes, it was a ridiculous amount of money to pay for food, but people pay ridiculous amounts of money for things all the time, and it’s one of the issues I choose not to worry about, especially since I’m hardly ever in the ridiculous amount of money realm. I’ve been to expensive restaurants before, and I’ll certainly go again.
But there was something about the elitism of the French Laundry that just took me over the edge. It’s not just all the money. It’s that you have to drive all the way up to Yountville, which means you need to spend the night in Yountville, unless you take a limo, which somebody clearly had, as one was parked outside when we left to walk back to our bed and breakfast. Then there is the seventeen tables piece and the fighting to get a reservation. Then there is the fact that all this effort, yours and theirs, is exhausted on a few plates of food that are gone as soon as you eat them. S suggested that I think about it as art. But the thing is, I’m just not that into the idea of an evanescent art available only to a privileged very few.
I keep thinking about Alice Waters. Alice Waters is the Mother Theresa of American food (without the abortion problem). The last 30 years of American food are due to her, both theoretically, through the model she established at Chez Panisse, and genealogically, through all the chefs who worked for her and then started their own restaurants [if I were really devoted I’d link a bunch of them, but I’ve already spent way too much time on this post]. She also jumpstarted the organic farm movement in Northern California, which in turn has had a major influence on the organic farm movement across the country. And Chez Panisse is all about community. Besides the people who make pilgrimages there, there are hordes of regulars. You don’t need a reservation upstairs, and you can eat a fabulous meal without breaking the bank. And now that she’s famous,
So put Thomas Keller and Alice Waters in Celebrity Chef Smackdown, and I’ll take
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