The French Laundry

I got up bright and early on the Wednesday, the 7th of May, jumped into my rental car and headed north towards San Francisco. I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) -- an absolutely stunning drive, even with a lane of traffic between me and the beautiful coastline.

Despite the lovely scenery, I had no time to stop and enjoy the view. My 7PM reservation at The French Laundry beckoned and I wasn't going to miss it because of an extended lunch stop.

I arrived in San Francisco feeling refreshed, despite the ten hours I had spent in the car. I stopped by my hotel, checked in, and freshened up. I dropped off my rental car and hopped in a cab to meet up with my dining companion, the unrelenting Erik Olsen.

I was so nervous about being late that we left SF around 4:15 to avoid imaginary traffic jams on the way to Yountville. Of course, there was no traffic to speak of, so we ended up arriving in Yountville very early, around 5:30. We walked down the main street, circled the restaurant once, me on tip toes to try and sneak a peak inside the kitchen. They seem to roll up the streets at 5PM in Yountville, so we had a drink at Bouchon and then wandered over to The Laundry at 6:30PM.

We walked into the restaurant and were seated at a two-top on the first floor. The room was a small offshoot of the main first floor dining room, with only four tables. Erik & I ordered the chef’s tasting menu, a nine course offering, and I asked the sommelier to pair matching wines from TFL’s half bottle and by-the-glass offerings.

The food was delicious. The ingredients were clearly top notch and the preparation was technically flawless. I will post a full menu later, but of the nine courses, only one, a fish course, didn’t work for me. When we left the restaurant over three hours later, however, I found that I was content, but not ecstatic about the meal I had just had. I have a few thoughts on why this may have been.

My largest issue with the meal was the lack of culinary innovation. When Keller reopened The French Laundry in 1994, he put Yountville on the map by pushing the envelope of American cuisine. Everything we ate at TFL was delicious, but with four dishes straight out of the 1996 Cookbook, I got the distinct feeling that the kitchen has decided to settle in and perform variations on a theme. This probably works for the majority of their clientele, special occasion diners, but disappointed me, since I expected to walk out of the dining room amazed at the creative flavor combinations. Instead, I left feeling like I had witnessed a very solid, but somewhat tired, performance.

This might dovetail with my second major complaint: the service was somewhat perfunctory. The French Laundry menu descriptions regularly run to four lines and typically include a menagerie of quotation and question marks. These are dishes that cry out for additional explanation when they are served. Instead, we got the tersest descriptions possible: “lobster with pea shoots”, “oysters and caviar with tapioca”. When I had a question about a powder sprayed across one of the dishes, the server did not know what it was.

In addition, I know, from both my reading about TFL and because Trio and the Laundry share a number of food suppliers, that many of the ingredients in these dishes have very interesting back-stories. One of the butters served at The French Laundry, for example, comes with a handwritten note from the dairy farmer with a description of where the cows were and what they ate before they were milked for that particular batch. This lack of enthusiasm for the food by the service staff greatly influenced our own excitement about the meal.

Other, more nitpicky, concerns included a waiter who smoked in his work uniform, then tried to cover the smell with some sort of mint spray. Every time this guy walked by our table, we got a big whiff of stale cigarette smoke, with an overtone of artificial mint. Another odor disaster occurred during our intermezzo, when a European couple was sat down next to us. The woman was absolutely drenched in Tressor, a perfume I happen to be quite fond of, but while I am trying to enjoy dinner. The stench was so strong that I was able to smell this woman’s perfume from the second floor of the restaurant. We were served what I assume was a wonderful 25 year-old Port with our chocolate dessert, but I could barely even taste it through the overwhelming odor. Is this something that the restaurant could have prevented? Probably not. But for me, it was a disappointing end to the meal.

Posted by pmk at May 10, 2003 6:28 PM