 |
From
three Michelin stars for Per Se in New York and five Mobil
stars for the French
Laundry
in Yountville to multiple James Beard awards for himself,
his
restaurants, and his cookbooks, there isn’t an industry
award that Chef Thomas Keller hasn’t received. Both restaurants
have been named among the ten best in the world and best in
America, while his critically acclaimed Bouchon in Yountville
and Las Vegas offer a more casual experience with the same
standards of excellence. Chef Keller began his career in the
kitchen of the Palm Beach club managed by his mother, before
traveling to France and working at Guy Savoy and Taillevent,
among other similarly lauded places. In the late 1980s he opened
Rakel in New York, but left for California a few years later.
He found renewed success when opening the French Laundry in
1994, and hasn’t lost it since. The Main Course caught
up with him at Per Se a couple of weeks before the opening
of Bouchon Bakery in New York, his latest project.
How do you
deal with being a bi-coastal, almost tri-coastal, chef?
You
just get on an airplane [laughs]. I think the best way to deal
with it is to really give up day-to-day control to
people who have the same desires, the same ambitions, the same
goals, who have embraced your philosophy and extended that
beyond yourself, who understand the culture that we're trying
to establish. This is really how you do it. As much as chefs
are kind of control addicts, because I think we are, and that's
kind of in our nature, to learn to give that up is a difficult
thing. But if you're really going to achieve a larger impact
than a single restaurant, which, today, seems to be the direction
that our societies take us to, having more than one restaurant
is part of the evolution of a chef.
Is it more of an external
expectation than something that you impose on yourself?
No,
the opportunities are there externally. But the expectations
are certainly real. You have to be able to analyze those
opportunities and look within yourself, and around you, and
see if you can
accept those opportunities, number one, and then, if you
can give those opportunities to other people. I think that's
really
a wonderful thing to be able to do, is say ‘here's a
restaurant in New York City, ladies and gentlemen. We have
this opportunity to do it. We're going to take the opportunity,
but it's really going to be your restaurant. You're going to
run it. You're going to be part of that process.’ That
is just really the thing to do.
Are the chefs de cuisine who
work with you in these situations able to have their imprints
on the different restaurants, or
are they doing your cuisine?
Of course [they have their own
imprints], very much so. We have to separate that. When you're
talking about Per Se and
French Laundry, which is really a personality cuisine, based
on Thomas Keller's philosophy, there's a lot of flexibility
in that, a lot of tolerance in that, as it relates to what
they're allowed to do, as long as they're working within the
philosophy of Thomas Keller.
How do you define that philosophy?
It's a collaboration. That
philosophy began within me at the French Laundry. Well, not
just the French Laundry, but certainly
became more apparent there. The more success we had, the more
the philosophy became apparent, and easier to track, which
meant it was easier to teach, and for people to understand.
It became part of the evolution of that philosophy.
How long
do people typically work for you before you put them in charge?
There's
no typical time period. It just depends on the quality of their
work.
You could have someone as a chef de cuisine who's been
with you for a year or less?
I don't say that. There's no really
typical time that someone is with me to become chef de cuisine,
because we don't plan
things out and say, ‘okay, you're going to be a chef
de cuisine in five years from now, and this is where you're
going to go.’ It's not that easy, for many reasons. We
don't really know what our opportunities are going to be. We're
exploring them all the time. They're coming to us all the time.
It's not something that you want to have mechanized, if you
will, especially at this level. A Bouchon Bakery, those are
certainly different kinds of situations, where you can kind
of start to apply timeframes, to say, ‘let's open a bouchon
every two or three years,’ and starting to find your
second, third generation chefs within your framework that
you have today, to start to train them. And that's something
we're
doing, planning. We want to open a Bouchon in the next two
years, possibly, in Los Angeles, for example, but we have
a sous chef now who's been with us for five years who would
really
qualify to be a chef de cuisine at a Bouchon. So, what do
we need to do to for him to make sure that he has the quality
that we need for him to be a chef de cuisine? He has the
qualities
of cooking. He understands our food. He understands the parameters.
He understands the concept and the philosophy of Bouchon.
Then, it gets to management, and financials, and human resources,
and all these other elements that really are very, very important
for a chef to understand.
Are people fighting to work for you?
I don't know. I don't think
that people fight to work for you. What's happening today
in the hospitality industry is really
kind of scary, because the hospitality industry is exploding.
It's just extraordinary. I think true hospitality comes from
within. I think that you are almost born with the hospitality
gene in you. You want to make people happy. As many people
would want to be in the hospitality service industry, they're
not really cut out for it, sometimes. Therefore, they don’t
really follow through with that genuine kind of experience.
Unfortunately, the great hospitality people today are becoming
fewer and fewer, but not because they're actually becoming
fewer in numbers. They're just becoming fewer in the percentage
of how many restaurants, or how many hotels, or how many service,
how many hospitality outlets are opening today. It's just extraordinary,
so there’s far more competition for employees. French
Laundry and Per Se, it's a huge commitment. What we do here
really extends out to life itself. You have good habits because
you have good habits. You don't have good habits only at
work. You have respect because you have respect. You don't
just have
respect at work. You're responsible because you're responsible.
What you learn here with us, you should be able to extend
out to your life, and therefore become more successful at
what
you're doing.
Is that pressure hard for some people?
Yes. Some people just
want to go to work and go home.
One article, when you opened the French Laundry, said that
the only negative part of your restaurant is that your prix
fixe made it a special event dinner.
Do you think that's still
true today?
I think that's true with any restaurant, when you
start talking about the amount of expense, that it becomes
a special occasion
restaurant. Certainly, the style of restaurants of Per Se and
French Laundry's caliber is one that is special occasion. We
want to give somebody an experience, and this is what we feel
the experience should be. That in itself is defined as a special
occasion or special experience. I think that fine dining should
be something special.
When you left New York, close to 15 years
ago, did you always have in mind to come back?
No. But if I
was going to do another fine dining restaurant the choices
for me were far and few between. I'm not talking
because we didn't have opportunities, I'm talking about the
choices I would make. And New York would have been my first
choice, firmly was because of the relationship and the history
that I had here, and being here for 10 years. I grew up in
my career for a portion of it. A lot of my colleagues lived
here, a lot of my friends lived here. I had alliances with
press here. I had a lot of resources in New York. So, it was
an easy decision.
How did you decide when you opened the French
Laundry to go for that concept over something more casual?
The
decision was made for me because that's what the restaurant’s
format was. It was a prix fixe menu. They didn't offer any
choices in their prix fixe menu. It was one menu. It was like
Chez Panisse. Sally and Don Schmitt, who opened French Laundry,
opened it about the same time that Alice Waters opened Chez
Panisse, and it was just about ‘come to my house and
have dinner. This is what we're cooking tonight.’ They
offered a four-course menu at that time, and when we first
opened, we offered a four-course menu, and then we added
a five-course menu to it. And it just evolved from there,
slowly
but surely, then we eliminated the four-course menu, and
we added a nine-course menu. We added a vegetable menu. The
process
of evolution. Then we changed the five courses to seven courses.
So, little by little, it evolved to what it is today.
Is that
the best way to experience your cuisine?
I think it’s
the best way to experience anybody's cuisine who's in this
group that I'm in, if you will, and I don't say
that in an arrogant way, because I don't know [laughs]. I
mean, the idea of writing a menu for me, now, is becoming
obsolete.
But
would you be able to switch to a non-menu format?
I hope so.
That's my direction. If you come in tonight, you should have
enough confidence in this restaurant, in this staff,
in the chefs in this restaurant, and their ability to procure
the best ingredients, and say, ‘okay, the chef is cooking
for you tonight.’ You would say, ‘fine.’
And
you don't think people trust you?
I think people have become
accustomed to having way too many choices in our society
and our cultures. It becomes confusing.
Dining's about experiencing the person you're with and having
a good time, and having really good food in a really wonderful,
environment, with great wines, and service in the correct
way. I feel most comfortable, and this is from my experience,
going
to my colleagues’ restaurants, and saying, ‘Daniel,
just make whatever you want,’ because I know that you're
going to do something great. And certainly, he does. So when
I start to think about this, this is very interesting, because
I go to these restaurants. I don't order a thing. The wine
comes. The food comes. I can spend time with the person I'm
with. I enjoy the food. I don't really have the expectations
that I have about what I'm ordering. To me, that's extraordinary.
And that's the way it used to be. The original restaurants
didn't have menus. You'd go in and they would feed you. But
as things evolved, people felt that they had to have choices.
You look at wine lists today.
Why do you have to have 2,000
choices on the wine list? To really look at the wine list,
and study the wine list, in a way to be able to make a choice,
you spend half an hour or 45 minutes. And what is your guest
doing while you're looking at the wine list? You and I are
out to dinner, and I'm going to spend 45 minutes with the
wine list, and you're going to sit there and look at me?
You're
going to be kind of upset, no?
Probably!
Right [laughs]. So I'm going to say, ‘we'd
like some really nice wine. Maybe a Pinot Noir, from California,
or from
France, and I want to spend around 300 dollars tonight on
a
bottle.’ The sommelier comes back with two choices.
Okay, because I trust the sommelier. That's his job. He should
know
his wines in his wine cellar.
I think that a lot of people
just want to be in control of what they're eating.
But what
is the definition of pure luxury? Not to be in control. To
go into an environment, and trust the environment, and
just enjoy it. When I go on vacation, I don't want to go
to a place
where I have to have choices. I want to go to a place where
everything is taken care of. I don't have to ask for something.
How big is your wine list here at Per Se?
Too big. It's ridiculous. I'm talking to my sommeliers about
that. But sommeliers are saying ‘we need to have more
wines, more wines.’ Forgive the phrase, but it becomes
like a pissing contest. Who can have the bigger wine list.
But you asked about directions of the menus. Hopefully we’ll
get to [abolish menus]. Like next door, at Masa. There’s
no menu. You can go in there, and you have one of the most
extraordinary meals of your life. Did you need
to choose anything? No. He did it all for you. And in many ways, it’s
such a relief, having that part done for you at this kind of restaurant.
How
far are you from that?
I don’t know. Maybe a year or two.
Would you want to open a third fine
dining restaurant?
I don't know. It really depends on not so much me as much
as my staff, and their desires to do that. One thing I realized in opening
this restaurant
is that I didn't need to open it. My point is that I had already done one.
I had done the French Laundry. And that was exciting and it still is very
exciting and it was a challenge personally for me. This one, when we looked
at the opportunity, it was very challenging and very exciting for me as
well, but once it was done, I said, ‘that was wonderful. But I already
did that once.’ So do I really need to continue to do it for myself?
No. I've satisfied my desire to do something. So then, do we have opportunities
to do another fine dining? Yes, we do. Where we would do it? I don't know.
Who would do it is the bigger question. My staff is certainly younger than
I am. Some of them have never opened this kind of restaurant, so for them,
it would be their first time. With my support, my knowledge and our resources,
we could make it easier, because of our experience. But I don't personally
need to open another restaurant. I don't have an ego that continuously
needs to be fed with press. The financial rewards, I don't need that enough.
Not to say that I'm rich but I also realize that no matter how much money
I have, I still have a modest lifestyle. I'm not an extravagant person.
Would
you have time for a more extravagant lifestyle anyway?
Right… My dream,
at one point in my life, was to buy a nice sports car. Wow. Then I finally
bought a nice sports car last year, but it sits
in the garage. You kind of want to have the lifestyle that goes with it,
you know, the commercials that you see. But you realize it's just not you.
That's not you.
What new challenges do you have?
I'm challenged right now with trying to
maintain my health, making sure that I'm working out, exercising, and making
sure that I'm eating correctly,
doing those kinds of things. And at the same time, trying to have an impact
on my staff in a positive way, give them a real strong foundation for them
to grow from and have some security in their jobs. And to have opportunities
to go forward. If I can do that, that's kind of what I see as having an
impact. Having an impact on people is important to me. Leaving a legacy
is important to me. So those are the two things that I'm trying to work
on now as well as thinking about myself for a little bit. When I was in
my late 20s, 30s and 40s, it was always about other people, trying to turn
that around. I'm 50 now, I've done a lot of things and maybe I should start
thinking about doing things for myself and making sure that I'm good to
go, and, and part of that is giving up the control that I just spoke about
at the beginning.
What are some of the things you'd like to do other than
anything cooking-related?
I don't know. This has been a big transition for
me this past year and a half, two years, opening Per Se, opening Bouchon
Las Vegas, because until
that point, I was in one place, and it was very much home. I didn't have
to go anywhere. Walk down the street, two blocks, it was great. But since
we have restaurants now outside of Yountville, we have to travel to them.
It's different for me because I'm not behind this job as much as I was
before. I am part of that first generation of modern chefs. Up until our
generation, you had one chef, one kitchen, one menu. Now you have our generations
of chefs, you have more than one restaurant, you have more than one kitchen.
Certainly, you have more than one menu, even if you only had one restaurant.
Things have really changed. And there's no historical data based on well,
what did the guy do last? What did that other guy do, in the last generation?
So we're really establishing building blocks for the generations of chefs
to come and that is a very wonderful thing to be thinking about.
So what
is a modern chef?
A chef is not so much somebody who you own. Before the
French Revolution, when you think about chefs and where they came from,
they were always owned.
The aristocrats, kings and queens and dukes, those were their chefs. After
that, they took on the same kind of definition. But the general public
owned the chef. And if the chef isn't working, then I'm not going to the
restaurant. Because that's my chef. And restaurants are treated a little
differently than other service industries, or other entertainment industries,
even differently than other entertainment venues, if you will. If you don't
have a table, some people yell and scream at us. You have to have a table.
You have to make room. You go to a Broadway play and they don't have a
seat, you're not standing at the box office screaming at them [laughs].
It's different. Chefs are treated differently than other people are. And
I think it's time that we understand that chefs aren't necessarily in their
kitchens all the time, or down in the markets buying the food all the time.
It doesn't mean that they're not doing their job. It doesn't mean that
they've cashed in, or sold out as some media says. It doesn't mean that
it's a negative thing. I think it's an extraordinarily positive thing to
be able to say that we are establishing a framework. We're establishing
a foundation for culinarians, for service people, for wine people to really
expand on what they do in a way that establishes exposure.
Is the change
coming from the chefs themselves?
America has a very entrepreneurial kind
of philosophy. You're always pushed to succeed and our culture is set up
like that. So I think the modern chef
is really part of the American culture. It has been exported around the
world and you see that.
Do you think some chefs resent your success?
Well, envy's not a bad thing.
I get envious, all my life, about what other people, what other chefs are
doing. It only drives me to try and do a better
job. So envy, if you look at it from a different point of view, can be
a good thing. It's establishing goals by setting examples. Establish your
goals and set the examples for other people to follow. My colleagues, I
think that's exactly what they do. There's just this wonderful large loop
that just keeps going around and around and around. It’s a spiral
that continues to go up. So if someone does something that I like and then
I interpret that and I do something, it just keeps going around and around.
We all continue to set the standard for each other.
How do you deal with
sustainability issues pertaining to caviar, or fish?
It's a good question.
It's something that we're really starting to deal with right now. There
is some real danger here. What’s going on with
the caviar trade, since the fall of Russia, has certainly become paramount
for us, and trying to find something of quality that's going to replace
that is challenging. How does a chef deal with the sustainability of it?
We can become part of that, but by the time it gets down to us, there have
been so many other people that have had the opportunity to be responsible
and step up to plate. All of a sudden, everybody looks at the chefs and
say ‘okay, chefs, what are you doing?’ Well, excuse me, I have
a small restaurant. Am I really supposed to be standing out there in the
forefront, talking about the sustainability of food products? There are
dozens of people in front of me who should have been there before.
They
may not have your platform.
Governments? Come on. People look to chefs to
be the policemen for the world? I'm sorry, that's not my job. Excuse me,
I'm a cook. My job is to
find the best products, treat them respectfully, and bring them to my guests
to make them happy. You want me to be a policeman now? Well, that's not
what I signed on for.
There's nothing you wouldn't serve?
We don’t serve Chilean bass just
because we don't like it. But I don't think we would serve it now in light
of what's going on. I think
your question is, do I think it's my responsibility to make sure that the
government or that the farmer or that the fisherman does things correctly?
No, no, no, so we're looking for alternatives to the problem. Which really
puts us now to the forefront of this, of the problems. We're going to try
to find other resources for this. But right now, unfortunately, the commercial
industries, whether it's the sturgeon farms in California or in Norway
really haven’t got to the point where they're producing quality product.
So you probably say, we've had 40 years to do this? What the hell's going
on with you guys? How come you can't get a consistent product? Sometimes
it's great. Sometimes it's shitty. They have no answers for that. And what
happened to the sturgeon that was in the Hudson River 100 years ago? Right
here, outside our doors, they would give caviar away in front of bars so
that you would go inside and have a beer. Norway, Germany, this is not
something that just happened over the past decade. This has been going
on for a long, long time. The sturgeon fish has been on this planet since
prehistoric times and it's been exploited for hundreds of years. It's a
sad thing that now we're losing something that has such great history to
it, great tradition to it, and all because of why? Because a few government,
a few people, have been way too greedy, way too irresponsible. And I would
hate to see that the chefs get burnt because of their notoriety. The government
is now legislating what you can eat. It's a stupid thing. There's enough
bad things going on in the world. Why do they want to tell us what to eat?
Do
you travel and see things in other cuisines, in other countries, that might
interest you?
Very little. We try to be inspired from within, rather than
from without. We want to take what we know, what we do, who we are and
interpret that
ourselves, and be inspiring to one another, a very collaborative form.
That helps maintain and grown the philosophy, rather than going out and
saying oh, I saw something interesting in Japan, let's do that ourselves.
Certainly, getting fresh Greek bottarga is very inspiring. You just serve
it as that. It doesn’t become a component in one of your dishes.
So
your dishes are basically simple.
Simplicity is the hardest thing to achieve.
How do you define your cuisine?
My food is American contemporary cuisine
based on French classics.
What's the relevance of French cuisine today?
That's the most important
cuisine in the world. Of course, if you went and said that in Japan or
China, they would be upset. It's really the flavor
profiles that the French have established that make it very important for
me. I love the definition of the plates, how they are composed. In French
cuisine, you would have a sauce. You would have a protein. I just like
that. It doesn't always happen in cuisine.
Some people didn’t like
Gordon Ramsay’s TV show Hell’s
Kitchen it because it portrays the kitchen as a hostile environment, which
is the antithesis of what you do.
The kitchen is violent and there's a race
to what goes on there. Does it have to happen in a violent way? No. We're
very respectful, but when you
think about the kitchen, you think about the kitchen and the dining room.
You try to define the two. Well, the dining room is luxurious and the kitchen
is violent. Because you have 800 degree heat. You have knives. You have
water. You have people. When you think about the power of that fire, it's
very violent in a way. But it doesn't have to be emotionally violent. And
it's not. It should be very respectful and calm. But you see that perpetuation
of that kind of image from the last generation, and it's easy to fall back
to that. It's easy to go back to that place. I can go back to that if I
want to, emotionally.
Were you ever a chef like that?
As a younger chef? I got emotional, sometimes.
Overly stimulated emotionally [laughs]. But I've learned to get away from
that. It doesn't mean that,
every once in a while, I don't go back there. But I want, for my next generation
of chefs, to have that experience less and less so that it doesn’t
become a normal thing for them, so that when they become chefs, they've
lost that, they’ve lost that emotional place.
Do you think that the
rise of professional culinary schools is changing the way future chefs
see their profession?
It's interesting because what's happening today is
different than what happened before. There is a lot of conversation about
the X generation,
the Y generation, whatever generation it is, how their expectation of life
is much different that my generation was. And the expectation is that they'll
get promoted or they'll get offered jobs just because who they are. The
whole kind of thought process of, I really need to do my work and do it
really well, to get promoted is kind of lost. There is a little bit of
conflict. The work ethics aren't the same. And how to get back to those
work ethics, lighting a fire underneath someone's behind, used to be the
way to do it. It's not the way to do it anymore, but you have to have some
way to get people to feel that sense of urgency that we talk about in the
kitchen.
Do you have that sort of conflict here?
I can't generalize it. But work
ethic is a problem sometimes.
Is there any way to teach that to somebody?
You teach by example. This is
what you have to do in order to achieve the next level. This is the expectation.
We're going to give you all the tools
that you could possibly ask for, and in return, this is the level you have
to achieve. If you're not willing to do that, we should realize that right
now. Because neither one of us wants to go down that end of the road.
Is
it hard to be you?
Yeah. Sometimes, I really want to be bad and do something
terrible but I realize I can't do it anymore. I have the responsibility.
You have to
be strong enough to accept the responsibility. And strength comes with
experience. So hopefully, I'll continue to be able to set the right example.
But I guarantee you that I always won't. I mean, I'm a human.
-Anne E. McBride
|
