The French Laundry
Guy Treby of the New York Times finds his way to the famed French Laundry restaurant in Yountville, in California's Napa valley, which will soon also be home to an inn, spa and boulangerie designed by Antoine Predock and part of the growing French Laundry empire.
The joke was going to be that in order to get into the French Laundry I had to get a job there. And like a lot of wisecracks, this one contained more than a kernel of truth. Despite what one reads about the dot-com debacle, the Silicon Valley money that helped transform this one-time mining, timber and prune growing region into a viticultural wonderland still seems immune from what most Americans would consider economic reality. For the moment, at any rate, there is no apparent shortage of lotus eaters willing to spend the $300 or so that dinner for two can easily cost at Thomas Keller's celebrated Yountville restaurant.
...It is no secret that Mr. Keller was not always renowned for his finesse, and that his highly pitched scale of standards was often expressed with performances not notable for their delicacy. "I don't explode anymore," he once told a reporter. "I let it out in different ways."
That was in 1996, two years after Mr. Keller first assembled nearly 50 limited partners and the $1.2 million it took to purchase the original French Laundry from its longtime owners, Don and Sally Schmidt...Since that time the trajectory of this chef with no formal training has carried him... [all the way] to his 1997 award from the James Beard Foundation as the Outstanding American Chef.