French cuisine on the American coast. Thomas Keller, owner of a Michelin-starred laundry About distinctive restaurants

OR HOW TO WISELY LOSE MILLIONS ON EGG SAUCE

At the beginning of the 21st century, Parisian gastrocritics unanimously recognized The French Laundry tavern as the best French restaurant in the world. This would not be a big sensation if a tavern with such a sign were registered on the Champs-Elysees, in Lille or on Cap-Ferrat. However, it dug in in California, and its chef and owner - one hundred percent American Thomas Keller - did not graduate from the Cordon Bleu school1, nor did he study with Bocuse and Ducasse. Actually, he never studied serious cooking anywhere and doesn’t even have a diploma from a hamburger cooking course.

Everything he knows in gastronomy, Keller came up with with his own big-eared head. “This is some kind of incomprehensible magic,” the international press writes about him. “It’s just persistence and arrogance,” he says about himself.

Keller's persistence and arrogance brought him all possible professional credentials. Today he is fifty dollars, the age when men are already

1 Cordon Bleu is a prestigious Parisian culinary school founded at the end of the 19th century. Today it has branches all over the world. they are not interested in the shapes of secretaries perfected by fitness and diet, but they are not yet concerned about the natural curls of schoolgirls. Keller has the appearance of a typical film actor, the kind who audition for the roles of gangsters and university professors with equal success. He has two restaurants in California's Napa Valley, two in New York and one in Las Vegas. This whole motley crew is damn profitable. Only seventeen tables of The French Laundry bring him seven and a half million USD annually. net income.

His book on kitchen principles has already gone through sixteen editions and sold a total of a quarter of a million copies in the United States. This is a surprising amount, considering the overheated market of the American culinary press, the living goddess of American housewives, Martha Stewart, and the cost of Keller's book - fifty units of convention.

Keller has an existing contract with the thoroughbred tableware company Christofle, which pays him large sums for the right to use his name in a line of silver glasses and egg cups.

Keller is generally fine with money, critical reviews and self-esteem. Moreover, unlike most modern gastro stars who have gained publicity by participating in television shows, Keller earned his money without leaving the stove. Origin of the master

He didn't intend to become a chef. In his youth - and his youth was in the late 60s - he looked into the classroom at the University of California on the subject of either sociolinguistics or linguosociology. The smell of the campus, the student life of the era when Jim Morrison was still alive, did not impress Thomas Keller. He did not participate in the burning of army summons, did not get carried away by the tactics of guerrilla warfare with the police and other struggles against the occupation regime of President Nixon.

Keller left troubled California to travel. Laziness mixed with curiosity makes people run away from life towards the train station and airport.

Existential tourism occupied Keller for several years. He didn’t think about money; it came naturally. He didn’t choose the roads either; they themselves led him to where he needed to go. The tan stopped disappearing from my face, which is not surprising for a person leading a sunflower lifestyle.

The American magazine Time once published a sensational article about such people, “Hippies at the End of the Road.” It was later even published by our “Around the World”. It spoke of a generation that chose a dead end as the main line of life and drove itself into hemp-smoke-fuelled communes in third world countries. People who wanted to change the world only changed the temperature regime of their own existence, settling in the tropical paradise of Goa and Thailand, and at the same time solving the problem of wealth and poverty: in the tropical paradise one could live for a month on a dollar.

Keller, however, was not captivated by the prospect of living on a dollar. He did not register for permanent residence in Goa, but returned home to California.

By the time he returned, his mother, out of some fright, decided to open a diner. “Who will be your chef?” - asked Keller. “This place is still vacant,” the mother replied. “If you want, you will.” And Keller wanted to complicate his own life.

“I didn’t even know how to boil soft-boiled eggs. Customers placed an order, I looked for the recipe in a cookbook and tried to repeat it. To be honest, it happened quite rarely. But I was a philosophical youth and blamed it not on myself, but on the authors of these same cookbooks. Actually, then I decided to write a book that would not lie about recipes and products. The first thing I did was go to France to look for the truth, not in books, but in restaurants.”

For several years, Keller traveled around France, eating in famous taverns. If there was not enough money, he worked for dinner as a dishwasher or peeler of vegetables.

“During my years in France, I entered into, so to speak, an intimate relationship with food. I began to feel them, like a hunter feels an animal. I learned their character, habits, learned what they love and hate. I understood the main thing - you need to treat potatoes and beets the same way as people. If you want to achieve results from them, you need to discover the best sides of their natures.

And here, as when playing musical instruments, drill is important. My favorite sauce is Olandez: eggs, lemon juice, butter - nonsense, in general. But it took me years to find the right mode for whipping it.

Or meat. I spent a long time studying the nuances of color, how it changes with temperature and time. And now I know what each specific piece of beef can give me in a gastronomic sense. I know as accurately as if he had presented me with a very detailed CV.”

Keller's time in France involved more than just building an intimate relationship with potatoes and beets. Keller interned, for example, with Guy Savoy, who at that time (late 70s - early 80s) was the main gastronomic upstart in Europe.

The old guard of chefs accused Savois of almost witchcraft, and fashion magazines were delighted with him. Savoy, together with his colleagues - Guerard, Bocuse, Robuchon and others - made a somersault out of French cuisine. They figured out how to lighten the sauces, how to bring the flowering complexity of Gallic cooking into line with the dietary creeds of the era.

It was a revolution. And Keller found himself at the epicenter of it. This happened for the second time in his life. But Keller fled from revolutionary hippie California; on the contrary, he lingered in revolutionary cookery France. This determined his future biography. Because in France he was among the winners, and history, as we know, is written by them. American Psychopathy

Having indulged in the ashes of the old French kitchen to his heart's content, Keller returned to his homeland. Gastronomically, it was then a blank slate. There was something relatively edible being done in New Orleans, some decent places were smoldering in New York, but on a global scale it was practically nil. The phrase “American cuisine” evoked strong associations in the brain with a hamburger, a hot dog, or, at best, a beef steak. But more often than not, the combination of the words “American cuisine” caused - especially among the European public - malicious laughter. It seemed to everyone that “American cuisine” was almost like the “Stalinist democratic constitution” - a pure oxymoron.

However, it was in the early 80s, literally at the moment when the Boeing with Keller on board landed at J. Kennedy Airport, that a new appetite awoke in America. This was due to the development of winemaking in California, which, thanks to billions of dollars in investment, jumped from the eighth century to the twenty-first in a dozen years, with the aggressive advance of the glossy magazine culture, and with a whole bunch of economic and social upheavals. America has taken on the task of overcoming the gastronomic inferiority complex with terrible force.

Keller already knew how to behave in revolutionary situations, and he used this knowledge in the most careful way.

He opened the Racel restaurant in New York. This place became a sensation in the capital of the world, although from a modern point of view Keller did not offer anything sensational to New York. He simply tried all the products in all the markets, traveled all over the area in search of suitable suppliers and served New Yorkers with beef, potatoes, asparagus, broccoli, etc., the existence of which they did not even know existed before Keller.

Gastronomic critics began to compare Keller with Michelangelo, who said that he did not do anything special with marble, he simply removed the excess. Keller did not try to capture the imagination of New Yorkers with tricks, he found products that were beautiful in themselves, with little interference from the culinary arts.

The choking delight of New York critics continued for five years. Until Keller once again packed his things and left for California. French liaison

In California, in the town of Yountville, in what is called the heart of the Nala wine valley, in 1994 Keller opened The French Laundry restaurant. The name came to him along with the bucolic-looking house. All around, the berries of cabernet and other sauvignon swell picturesquely in the sun. In neat wineries, alcohol farmers turn bunches of grapes into bottles of purple wine called, for example, Qingfan del.

In the 1990s, California winemaking experienced a boom. Wine critics gave the wines there loud epithets and gave them the highest tasting scores. Qingfan del, cabernet and other sauvignon from the Nala Valley have found their way into the cellars of collectors around the world. As a result, wine tourism has flourished. Connoisseurs from London, New York and even Paris frequented the Californian hills to see for themselves that the excellent wine on their table is not a fiction, not a commercial chimera, but the most natural thing of flesh and blood.

It was here that Thomas Keller was waiting for all these experts.

The main ideological foundations of his French Laundry were the quality of the products and what Keller called the “principle of diminishing pleasure.” He came up with the idea that rhythm and portion sizes are important in lunch. The most delicious soup after the third spoon no longer surprises, but only satisfies, and the eighth spoon kills with the memory of the most important thing - the spoon that was the first.

The portions at The French Laundry are tiny. But they can serve a dozen soups alone, and lunch lasts for several hours. Keller managed to make the completely traditional practice of long lunches - this is how they always eat meditatively in France and Italy - dynamic and exciting, like a good Hollywood film.

A marinated oyster nestled on a mound of cucumber noodles gives way to pea soup with Parmesan chips. Asparagus, tossed in the world's most carefully prepared Olandez sauce, gives way to a picturesque salad of black figs, sweet peppers and fennel. The black truffle from Umbria paired with mashed potatoes follows the classic intrigue of its counterpart, the black truffle from Périgord with foie gras and apple. Cod cakes compete with sea bass, which appears on the table in company with green ravioli. And so on ad infinitum, which even followers of tragic existentialism would not call “bad.”

This complex ritual suddenly revealed remarkable commercial potential. The French Laundry almost instantly received the title of best restaurant in America. Then another dozen gastronomic awards. And finally, an Oscar from the British magazine The Restaurant - as the best restaurant in the world, as well as a certificate from the Association of Parisian Restaurant Critics, which recognized Laundry as the main French restaurant on the planet.

A table there needs to be booked years in advance. Keller began receiving offers to open branches of the Laundry, oiled with checks for millions of dollars. Keller didn't want sequels at first. When he was offered to create a cafe in the AOL Time Warner skyscraper in New York, he struggled for a long time. “There always comes a time in the life of a successful chef when he needs to change from a creator to a manager, because he needs to replicate success, he needs to move on. Sign a couple of papers, trade your face. And the kitchen - to hell with it. I can't do that. I need to control everything. I can't do that."

In the end, of course, he was able to do everything. The sequel to The French Laundry in New York is called the Latin formula Per Se - "In itself." This pretentious sign justified in Keller’s eyes what he hated more than anything else: the exploitation of the same technique. Per Se was positioned as an independent project that had nothing in common with The French Laundry except the name of the creator. In fact, of course, Per Se is the same “Laundromat”, only with a view not of the vineyards of Napa, but of a piece of New York. And the menu is about the same, only shorter, like an anthology compared to a complete collection of works.

For the sake of Per Se, Keller closed The French Laundry for four months. He, you see, had to personally teach the Per Se cooks how to whip up the Olandez sauce. It cost him two and a half million dollars in losses, but he generally takes money very lightly. On the day Per Se was supposed to open, there was a fire. “My partners almost went crazy when they found out that we almost burned down the AOL Time Warner building, which is worth, I think, a billion and a half dollars. I agree, the building would be in trouble in this case. But can a fire really change anything in my life?”

He hasn't starred in popular cooking shows, and his books have too much thought and attention to detail to achieve widespread fame. So it may very well be that the name Thomas Keller means nothing to you. However, some of the creations of this American chef are probably well known to you, and you have seen them more than once. Intrigued? Read on.

Thomas Keller

Thomas Keller is one of America's top chefs and one of only two chefs in the world to have two restaurants simultaneously awarded the highest award. Michelin. His specialty is classic French cuisine, the basics of which he learned in America and then perfected while working in famous restaurants in Paris. The result was his own signature style, embodied by Keller in several restaurants - The French Laundry, Per Se, Bouchon and others, the first two of which received three Michelin stars. The focus of these restaurants is, of course, different.

The French Laundry is a contemporary American restaurant with a strong French influence located in Yountville, California. Instead of serving a la carte, this restaurant offers each visitor a choice of several options at a fixed price of $240 - a tasting or vegetarian menu, each of which includes a specific set of dishes, changing every day. For example, the menu for September 10, 2008 includes dishes such as Mediterranean sea bream fillet with a crispy crust, artichokes, sweet peppers, nicoise olives and pudding or Figs with mascarpone and pine nut ice cream and 100-year-old balsamic vinegar. Sometimes you can order additional dishes for an additional fee - foie gras, marbled beef, white and black truffles, etc.

Restaurant The French Laundry

Another Keller restaurant, Bouchon, professes a different concept. The word bouchon itself means a type of snack bar in the city of Lyon, France. These bistro eateries serve home-style, rustic dishes instead of fine dining, and Keller's Bouchon follows a similar path. In his restaurant, a visitor can order classic French dishes - onion soup, baked leg of lamb, crème caramel, and so on. Keller perfects each recipe, turning it into a work of art.

Well, now about how and when you could get acquainted with what Thomas Keller does. You all, of course, remember “Ratatouille” - a wonderful cartoon from Pixar (however, it doesn’t make any others) about a gourmet rat. The dish with which the main character managed to win the heart and stomach of a picky culinary critic was “cooked” by Keller. The film's producer was allowed into the kitchen of The French Laundry restaurant in order to practice as a cook and understand how restaurants work from the inside, where he chose confit baildi - a version of the classic dish ratatouille - as one of the culinary masterpieces of the tailed chef from the cartoon. Unlike the traditional French dish, Keller's version consists of equal-sized vegetable circles, which makes it very cute. In addition, in the cartoon “Ratatouille,” Keller played the episodic role of a restaurant visitor (by the way, the same role in the French translation is played by one of Keller’s teachers, Guy Sava, and in the Spanish translation by the genius of Spanish cooking, Ferran Adria).

Thomas Keller Caesar Salad

A few years earlier, Keller took part in the production of the film Spanglish, where he taught Adam Sandler how to make “the best sandwich in the world.” In addition, Keller has published two books - The French Laundry and Bouchon, which, as you can easily understand from the titles, include detailed instructions for preparing the dishes served in his restaurants. Considering that Keller has more than two restaurants, I hope his creative impulse has not dried up.

THOMAS KELLER,

OR HOW TO WISELY LOSE MILLIONS ON EGG SAUCE

At the beginning of the 21st century, Parisian gastrocritics unanimously recognized The French Laundry tavern as the best French restaurant in the world. This would not be a big sensation if a tavern with such a sign were registered on the Champs-Elysees, in Lille or on Cap-Ferrat. However, it dug in in California, and its chef and owner - one hundred percent American Thomas Keller - did not graduate from the Cordon Bleu school1, nor did he study with Bocuse and Ducasse. Actually, he never studied serious cooking anywhere and doesn’t even have a diploma from a hamburger cooking course.

Everything he knows in gastronomy, Keller came up with with his own big-eared head. “This is some kind of incomprehensible magic,” the international press writes about him. “It’s just persistence and arrogance,” he says about himself.

Keller's persistence and arrogance brought him all possible professional credentials. Today he is fifty dollars, the age when men are already

1 Cordon Bleu is a prestigious Parisian culinary school founded at the end of the 19th century. Today it has branches all over the world. they are not interested in the shapes of secretaries perfected by fitness and diet, but they are not yet concerned about the natural curls of schoolgirls. Keller has the appearance of a typical film actor, the kind who audition for the roles of gangsters and university professors with equal success. He has two restaurants in California's Napa Valley, two in New York and one in Las Vegas. This whole motley crew is damn profitable. Only seventeen tables of The French Laundry bring him seven and a half million USD annually. net income.

His book on kitchen principles has already gone through sixteen editions and sold a total of a quarter of a million copies in the United States. This is a surprising amount, considering the overheated market of the American culinary press, the living goddess of American housewives, Martha Stewart, and the cost of Keller's book - fifty units of convention.

Keller has an existing contract with the thoroughbred tableware company Christofle, which pays him large sums for the right to use his name in a line of silver glasses and egg cups.

Keller is generally fine with money, critical reviews and self-esteem. Moreover, unlike most modern gastro stars who have gained publicity by participating in television shows, Keller earned his money without leaving the stove. Origin of the master

He didn't intend to become a chef. In his youth - and his youth was in the late 60s - he looked into the classroom at the University of California on the subject of either sociolinguistics or linguosociology. The smell of the campus, the student life of the era when Jim Morrison was still alive, did not impress Thomas Keller. He did not participate in the burning of army summons, did not get carried away by the tactics of guerrilla warfare with the police and other struggles against the occupation regime of President Nixon.

Keller left troubled California to travel. Laziness mixed with curiosity makes people run away from life towards the train station and airport.

Existential tourism occupied Keller for several years. He didn’t think about money; it came naturally. He didn’t choose the roads either; they themselves led him to where he needed to go. The tan stopped disappearing from my face, which is not surprising for a person leading a sunflower lifestyle.

The American magazine Time once published a sensational article about such people, “Hippies at the End of the Road.” It was later even published by our “Around the World”. It spoke of a generation that chose a dead end as the main line of life and drove itself into hemp-smoke-fuelled communes in third world countries. People who wanted to change the world only changed the temperature regime of their own existence, settling in the tropical paradise of Goa and Thailand, and at the same time solving the problem of wealth and poverty: in the tropical paradise one could live for a month on a dollar.

Keller, however, was not captivated by the prospect of living on a dollar. He did not register for permanent residence in Goa, but returned home to California.

By the time he returned, his mother, out of some fright, decided to open a diner. “Who will be your chef?” - asked Keller. “This place is still vacant,” the mother replied. “If you want, you will.” And Keller wanted to complicate his own life.

“I didn’t even know how to boil soft-boiled eggs. Customers placed an order, I looked for the recipe in a cookbook and tried to repeat it. To be honest, it happened quite rarely. But I was a philosophical youth and blamed it not on myself, but on the authors of these same cookbooks. Actually, then I decided to write a book that would not lie about recipes and products. The first thing I did was go to France to look for the truth, not in books, but in restaurants.”

For several years, Keller traveled around France, eating in famous taverns. If there was not enough money, he worked for dinner as a dishwasher or peeler of vegetables.

“During my years in France, I entered into, so to speak, an intimate relationship with food. I began to feel them, like a hunter feels an animal. I learned their character, habits, learned what they love and hate. I understood the main thing - you need to treat potatoes and beets the same way as people. If you want to achieve results from them, you need to discover the best sides of their natures.

And here, as when playing musical instruments, drill is important. My favorite sauce is Olandez: eggs, lemon juice, butter - nonsense, in general. But it took me years to find the right mode for whipping it.

Or meat. I spent a long time studying the nuances of color, how it changes with temperature and time. And now I know what each specific piece of beef can give me in a gastronomic sense. I know as accurately as if he had presented me with a very detailed CV.”

Keller's time in France involved more than just building an intimate relationship with potatoes and beets. Keller interned, for example, with Guy Savoy, who at that time (late 70s - early 80s) was the main gastronomic upstart in Europe.

The old guard of chefs accused Savois of almost witchcraft, and fashion magazines were delighted with him. Savoy, together with his colleagues - Guerard, Bocuse, Robuchon and others - made a somersault out of French cuisine. They figured out how to lighten the sauces, how to bring the flowering complexity of Gallic cooking into line with the dietary creeds of the era.

It was a revolution. And Keller found himself at the epicenter of it. This happened for the second time in his life. But Keller fled from revolutionary hippie California; on the contrary, he lingered in revolutionary cookery France. This determined his future biography. Because in France he was among the winners, and history, as we know, is written by them. American Psychopathy

Having indulged in the ashes of the old French kitchen to his heart's content, Keller returned to his homeland. Gastronomically, it was then a blank slate. There was something relatively edible being done in New Orleans, some decent places were smoldering in New York, but on a global scale it was practically nil. The phrase “American cuisine” evoked strong associations in the brain with a hamburger, a hot dog, or, at best, a beef steak. But more often than not, the combination of the words “American cuisine” caused - especially among the European public - malicious laughter. It seemed to everyone that “American cuisine” was almost like the “Stalinist democratic constitution” - a pure oxymoron.

However, it was in the early 80s, literally at the moment when the Boeing with Keller on board landed at J. Kennedy Airport, that a new appetite awoke in America. This was due to the development of winemaking in California, which, thanks to billions of dollars in investment, jumped from the eighth century to the twenty-first in a dozen years, with the aggressive advance of the glossy magazine culture, and with a whole bunch of economic and social upheavals. America has taken on the task of overcoming the gastronomic inferiority complex with terrible force.

Keller already knew how to behave in revolutionary situations, and he used this knowledge in the most careful way.

He opened the Racel restaurant in New York. This place became a sensation in the capital of the world, although from a modern point of view Keller did not offer anything sensational to New York. He simply tried all the products in all the markets, traveled all over the area in search of suitable suppliers and served New Yorkers with beef, potatoes, asparagus, broccoli, etc., the existence of which they did not even know existed before Keller.

Gastronomic critics began to compare Keller with Michelangelo, who said that he did not do anything special with marble, he simply removed the excess. Keller did not try to capture the imagination of New Yorkers with tricks, he found products that were beautiful in themselves, with little interference from the culinary arts.

The choking delight of New York critics continued for five years. Until Keller once again packed his things and left for California. French liaison

In California, in the town of Yountville, in what is called the heart of the Nala wine valley, in 1994 Keller opened The French Laundry restaurant. The name came to him along with the bucolic-looking house. All around, the berries of cabernet and other sauvignon swell picturesquely in the sun. In neat wineries, alcohol farmers turn bunches of grapes into bottles of purple wine called, for example, Qingfan del.

In the 1990s, California winemaking experienced a boom. Wine critics gave the wines there loud epithets and gave them the highest tasting scores. Qingfan del, cabernet and other sauvignon from the Nala Valley have found their way into the cellars of collectors around the world. As a result, wine tourism has flourished. Connoisseurs from London, New York and even Paris frequented the Californian hills to see for themselves that the excellent wine on their table is not a fiction, not a commercial chimera, but the most natural thing of flesh and blood.

It was here that Thomas Keller was waiting for all these experts.

The main ideological foundations of his French Laundry were the quality of the products and what Keller called the “principle of diminishing pleasure.” He came up with the idea that rhythm and portion sizes are important in lunch. The most delicious soup after the third spoon no longer surprises, but only satisfies, and the eighth spoon kills with the memory of the most important thing - the spoon that was the first.

The portions at The French Laundry are tiny. But they can serve a dozen soups alone, and lunch lasts for several hours. Keller managed to make the completely traditional practice of long lunches - this is how they always eat meditatively in France and Italy - dynamic and exciting, like a good Hollywood film.

A marinated oyster nestled on a mound of cucumber noodles gives way to pea soup with Parmesan chips. Asparagus, tossed in the world's most carefully prepared Olandez sauce, gives way to a picturesque salad of black figs, sweet peppers and fennel. The black truffle from Umbria paired with mashed potatoes follows the classic intrigue of its counterpart, the black truffle from Périgord with foie gras and apple. Cod cakes compete with sea bass, which appears on the table in company with green ravioli. And so on ad infinitum, which even followers of tragic existentialism would not call “bad.”

This complex ritual suddenly revealed remarkable commercial potential. The French Laundry almost instantly received the title of best restaurant in America. Then another dozen gastronomic awards. And finally, an Oscar from the British magazine The Restaurant - as the best restaurant in the world, as well as a certificate from the Association of Parisian Restaurant Critics, which recognized Laundry as the main French restaurant on the planet.

A table there needs to be booked years in advance. Keller began receiving offers to open branches of the Laundry, oiled with checks for millions of dollars. Keller didn't want sequels at first. When he was offered to create a cafe in the AOL Time Warner skyscraper in New York, he struggled for a long time. “There always comes a time in the life of a successful chef when he needs to change from a creator to a manager, because he needs to replicate success, he needs to move on. Sign a couple of papers, trade your face. And the kitchen - to hell with it. I can't do that. I need to control everything. I can't do that."

In the end, of course, he was able to do everything. The sequel to The French Laundry in New York is called the Latin formula Per Se - "In itself." This pretentious sign justified in Keller’s eyes what he hated more than anything else: the exploitation of the same technique. Per Se was positioned as an independent project that had nothing in common with The French Laundry except the name of the creator. In fact, of course, Per Se is the same “Laundromat”, only with a view not of the vineyards of Napa, but of a piece of New York. And the menu is about the same, only shorter, like an anthology compared to a complete collection of works.

For the sake of Per Se, Keller closed The French Laundry for four months. He, you see, had to personally teach the Per Se cooks how to whip up the Olandez sauce. It cost him two and a half million dollars in losses, but he generally takes money very lightly. On the day Per Se was supposed to open, there was a fire. “My partners almost went crazy when they found out that we almost burned down the AOL Time Warner building, which is worth, I think, a billion and a half dollars. I agree, the building would be in trouble in this case. But can a fire really change anything in my life?”