Who was going to receive one star, two stars, three stars? So we have to our expectations in our kitchen, in our restaurant, in our service. When I started to cook, the first cookbook that I received was from my mother, and she gave me a cookbook called A Treasury of Great Recipes. It was about Pauls dream realized, America reaches the podium. The new restaurant got off to a good start, but the stock market crash of 1987 cut deeply into their business. A bowl, or whatever the serviceware was, you had a piece set up on the counter, on the drain board, where they were supposed to put it. Double boiler, single boiler? It was not very appetizing, but you already made the commitment to do it, right, so you had to follow through and you had to serve it and you had to take kind of the feedback, the critical feedback, and just say, Okay, yeah, I made a mistake. And really mistakes are such important building blocks for success. And as time went on we realized that we started selling more and more tasting menus. Culinary Skills & High Standards He is known for his meticulous attention to detail, which he says is necessary for creating a memorable dining experience. You are trying to prepare a dish without having the proper ingredients or necessarily even the knowledge of those ingredients, and that really became for me a real building block, because I understood that. And Rakel was in an area that wasnt really supported by a community or a neighborhood around it. I dont know why, I guess because of the age difference, my brother Joseph was allowed to handle a knife, therefore he was allowed to work with the cooks. Im the first owner. In 2013, Keller and Kwak introduced gluten-free pancake, waffle, brownie and pizza mixes. Our job as chefs and as restaurant owners today is not just about our restaurants. We all promised him that we would do our jobs collectively in organizing a foundation that would support a U.S. culinary team to compete in Lyon and actually reach the podium. We can all cook. Its always been an important part of our culture, that consistency. Thats what really we want to be able to instill, to teach our young staff is that the person standing next to you is your colleague. He was the first hotelier to really bring in a great restaurant with a great chef and that was Bradley Ogden. So hes tasked with many different things and having to juggle many different things. We just received three stars. But Paul Bocuse, who has been an icon in our profession, someone who Ive always looked up to, somebody who changed the way our profession is perceived, somebody whos changed the way we eat, literally changed the way we eat, started a competition, international competition 30 28 years ago to bring the world together on an international level for a culinary competition that resulted in relationship building, in teaching, in awareness and camaraderie, and helping to expand the awareness of our profession around the world. So typically, artisanal work or work that youre doing with your hands, manual labor, would have a chef. Sixth place. We also support the Semper Fi Foundation, which is actually in Camp Pendleton. No. Thomas Keller: It was my second failure in a restaurant. And he said to me one day, he said, You know, Thomas, the reason cooks cook is really to nurture people. And at that moment that really resonated with me and I said, Wow, I want to become a chef.. I learned six disciplines at the dishwasher which have, I think, become a foundation for my career, and I think for many people who aspire to have success in their careers. I had already closed two restaurants. The story of The French Laundry for me is an incredible story, because everybody who was part of the process, who was part of the evolution, was part of that project, has impacted it in so many different ways. Thomas Keller: Per Se. Thomas Keller: Herb Caen was a great writer. Theres sous-chefs responsible in pastry in the same way. So it was one menu every day. When he was hired as chef de cuisine at La Reserve, he was the first American to lead one of New Yorks distinguished French restaurants. What the Marines say so much about is that discipline, is that commitment to what youre doing, and more important, the commitment to each other. And that became part of our and it changed, not every day. But Gourmet magazine picked it up and they thought it was very important. [7] Keller spent nineteen months raising $1.2million from acquaintances and investors to purchase the restaurant, then re-opened it in 1994. Keller remained in New York, consulting, but was completely unsatisfied. So between private placement, commercial bank loan, and an SBA loan over the period, and with the help of Don and Sally Schmitt and Bob Sutcliffe, my attorney, as well as the 52 partners, we were able to put together enough money to buy The French Laundry, and on May 1, 1994 we finally closed on the deal. Thomas Keller stands in front of the original exterior wall of the French Laundry in Yountville. I was a semi-well-known chef with, I guess, a checkered reputation, and now I needed to go out and raise the money to buy this restaurant. And they would just be, you know, they were 50 years younger than he was, and he would just be telling them stories and theyd just be like listening on the edge of their seats, and that was one of the favorite things that he did. A typical person who wants to be a chef might think, Im going to go study with a really good person in Chicago or New York, or even a really good person in Paris. Shortly after, he opened a second Fleur de Lys at Mandalay Bay. That same year, the bible of international food connoisseurs, the Guide Michelin, paid its first visit to New York and awarded Kellers Per Se its highest rating: three stars. Theres a lot of great chefs out there who can do a lot of great things, but to be consistent 300 days a year lunch and dinner over and over and over and over again is really for me what defines greatness. The French Laundry was open almost at the same time that Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse. My mother passed away in 1982 so I had gone to France in 1983 but my father was, I have to say. It was a daunting task for us every day to produce this menu. Its an extraordinary event, extraordinary undertaking. Its extraordinary what we have available to us and how important our farmers have become. And it was a small kitchen. Another great milestone for you was the Legion dHonneur. After two years in Paris, Keller returned to New York, confident of his abilities in the kitchen and eager to prove he could run a kitchen in a first-rate establishment. You made him a real last supper, didnt you? We have to give them training. You had to do different things at different times of the day, which began which were part of the ritual of your job. And during my time working for him and of course I was just a lowly cook so Im not sure why I was having this kind of conversations with him but the conversations were really about cooks and our career and our profession. Organization as a dishwasher really meant that you had to set up a template for the servers to, you know, where to put their dishes. Was it a restaurant that was progressive and contemporary? Thomas Keller: This was a time in my life when I started to embrace the idea of doing things myself outside of the kitchen, having a garden. As much as I would have appreciated and certainly had deep respect to go to France and to receive it at the lyse, I knew right away that I would prefer to have somebody else pin that medal on my chest. Over the next few years the restaurant earned numerous awards, including from the James Beard Foundation, gourmet magazines, the Mobil Guide (five stars), and the Michelin Guide (three stars). He opened the restaurant for more days of the week and gradually evolved a policy of offering two nine-course tasting menus, one vegetable-based, and a second based on animal protein. So he has to be able to motivate them. And I arrived at the front door and a large matronly woman met me and she was very harsh, and she took me up to my room, which was this small cubicle with a window, but the window was covered with dust, which I thought was dust. So we were one of the first restaurants to kind of fail. But nonetheless I built my own little smoker out of an old refrigerator and cured and smoked my own salmon. French kitchens are very delineated, arent they? And were watching Philips name being inserted into the walkway that leads up to the front door: Philip Tessier, U.S.A.. Theres now 13 rows of gold, silver, bronze plaques with peoples names on them. And then going to France and in a five-and-a-half hour period producing those two proteins and serving it to 24 international judges. An executive chef would be somebody that would be in a position in a hotel for example, or where there are many different restaurants, and he would be the executive chef over all of the chef de cuisines from each different food and beverage outlet for example. On my makeshift desk was I clipped out of The New York Times during this time during this period in my life there was an article which was titled Having a Dream Is Hard. So thats where I chose to go. You got one more to go.. Was it a restaurant that was breaking new ground? [13] The former French Laundry Chef de Cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth won the Bocuse d'Or USA semi-finals in 2008, and represented the U.S. in the world finals in January 2009 under Keller's supervision where he placed 6th, equaling the best performance of the U.S. in the contest to date. Twice named Best Restaurant in the World by Restaurant magazine, it was soon joined by other Keller establishments: Bouchon and Ad Hoc in Yountville, and Per Se in New York City. He migrated towards cooking much earlier than I did. He became a cook. I learned skill, knowledge. Thomas Keller: Not really. With Lena Kwak, the research and development chef of The French Laundry, Keller had developed Cup4Cup, a gluten-free flour. And this olive oil was a small olive oil company I began to kind of keep me solvent in some ways, but also keep me motivated and keep me busy and have kind of I wouldnt even call it plan B. Our money ran out and I left and went to work at Caf du Parc, and the poor guys had to kind of lick their wounds and go back to being flight attendants. We fell to tenth. Of course its such an uncomfortable story for a lot of people that my publisher didnt want to include it in the book and I made her. You, as a dishwasher, even though you may have been perceived as the lowliest position in a kitchen, you touched everybody, and your job was critical in their ability to be successful. No. Keller is the first and only American-born chef to hold multiple three-star ratings from the prestigious Michelin Guide and is the first American male chef to be designated a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, Frances paramount honorary order. What are we going to do? I could only hope for the next 20 years that Im able to continue to dedicate and commit myself on a different level to our profession and to my teams and continue to offer them the ability, the platform to elevate themselves. And I learned at that moment a profound respect for the ingredients that we have, a profound respect for those individuals who bring them to us, and how committed they are to what they do, and how committed I have to be to what Im doing to respect what they do. Prove that you can by acting on it and youll be successful. He is also featured in "My Last Supper" by Melanie Dunea. He combined his thorough knowledge of French tradition with his own flair for humor and imagination, offering his guests a seemingly endless series of exquisite small plates, such as a miniature ice cream cone of salmon tartare, or a small serving of oysters and caviar resting on a bed of tapioca. Theres also the idea of a restaurant meal as a special event, rather than just getting something to eat. We did so many different things. I wanted to have a large group of people, because of my experience at Rakel. After his second summer at La Rive, he decided to try his luck in New York City and was hired as chef at Raouls. It wasnt until I had an executive coach for a period of time and he asked me, he said, So Thomas You know, one of his first questions to me. I have to say that period of my life and that period of my career in France was so, so important to who I am today and really helped me understand a lot of things about running a restaurant that have supported my career and my success. Hello, my name is You know, I have this idea of and Id like you to consider it. Chef Thomas Keller is renowned for his culinary skills and high standards. And I walked on the property. Were they going to come from France? At that time Serge and I started to talk about opening our own restaurant and that became Rakel. When Keller returned to the United States, he was ready to take on the world, but the world still had a few bumps in store for him, including an economic . Of course, when it tries to jump forward, Im holding a leg. Thomas Keller: Well, we all learn that. So that was a mistake I made that I never made again, and I learned from that. So he was very proud to be able to talk to our suppliers and get them to either give us extra or to reduce our price. His employers there, Pierre and Anne-Marie Latuberne, recommended him to Ren and Paulette Macary, who operated a restaurant of their own, La Rive, in Catskill, New York during the summer season.