Yes, these dishes are rich in countless ways, including with ideas. Michelin does not award stars for exemplary performance of the Heimlich. If you choke on it, however, you’re on your own. Keller wants you to swallow the gold leaf, and swallow it you do. $155 will buy you a truffle mac and cheese dish that tastes exactly like paper money. Keller dangles prices over you like sets of keys in front of a bored infant. Wagyu, caviar, farm-to-table produce, plenty of Lafite-Rothschild in the cellar…. You certainly can’t accuse the French Laundry of cheapness. (“Surely the kitchen could be persuaded to use paddlefish from time to time?”) If the French Laundry were to IPO, everyone involved would become billionaires.until the investors got wind of the cost of Ossetra caviar, anyway. Oysters and caviar? Why did no one else think of that? Actually, plenty of other people HAVE thought of it, but no one else TRADEMARKED it and turned it into a signature dish, into intellectual property. The food has a kind deep surveillance quality, as though Thomas Keller were listening in on your secret gustatory desires in order to push them ads. It spits out ingenious dishes on demand-it MUST, given the reputation (all those stars!) and the price. The French laundry is a little like a food-making app. Where is the flavor in the French Laundry? Is it in the logo-the rustic little clothespin? Is it in the affirmations emblazoned above the kitchen-“a sense of urgency”-that reminded me of Jeff Bezos’ “Day One”? About flavor! About wild juxtapositions so minute (“molecular” gastronomy) that your head and tastebuds spin in time with the celestial spheres. This is a restaurant about food, not freedom. “If you don’t like it, don’t drink it.” (Here, I can do whatever I want….) Later I posed a question about a non-alcoholic beverage he poured us, and he demurred. “What do you think?” I then asked, mainly as a courtesy. I turned down my assigned sommelier’s suggestions and ordered a reasonably priced half-bottle. “Here, I can do whatever I want.”Ĭan the French Laundry live up to such libertarian standards? Again, I’m not so sure. “There, you have to eat the way they want you to eat,” he said. Can the default still be casual or creative or cowboyish? I’m not so sure.Īfter being seated, I overheard another patron of the French Laundry complaining about the real French and their snooty ways. The plucky, perky energy of western privilege has become the default American dream. Today, the most monied men in the world are Silicon Valley snot-noses, and god knows where the cigar-chewing east coast steel men are. The cowboy brazenness of the Bay Area, which always seemed innocently defensive to me, has mellowed into unabashed self-importance. (If only everyone had this land’s fat to live off of!)īut what was once nouveau riche gets…if not old, then at least accustomed to itself. This is the west! We’re living off the fat of our own land-an admirable if remarkably privileged stance. Bring your jackets, yes, but maybe not your black ties. celebrated restaurant for the first time.Ĭalifornia-style fine dining, largely thanks to Alice Waters, brought a nouveau riche energy to a staid, stuffy mode of not just culinary art but dinner service. Will that something be worth eating? That’s what I asked myself when ducking into this. Something must emerge from the haze of hype and hyperbole. Restaurants with Outdoor Seating in Yountvilleīoth Thomas Keller and the French Laundry have been picked clean-lauded, pilloried, lauded again, damned to hell, praised to heaven….Restaurants for Special Occasions in Yountville.Best Pulled Pork Sandwich in Yountville. French Restaurants for Special Occasions in Yountville.American Restaurants for Lunch in Yountville.American Restaurants for Large Groups in Yountville.Hotels near (STS) Sonoma County Airport.Hotels near (OAK) Metropolitan Oakland Intl Airport.Hotels near (SMF) Sacramento Intl Airport.Hotels near Yountville Chamber of Commerce & Welcome Center.Yountville Hotels with Laundry Facilities.
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