Thomas Keller

• 1. Introduction

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  Thomas Keller is the only American chef to have held three-star Michelin ratings at two different restaurants at the same time. That kind of recognition rarely goes to one person, and it rarely arrives without a long and uneven road behind it. This documentary follows three questions. Where did Keller's devotion to exacting technique come from? What did he do when his first big restaurant faded? And how did a man who cooks for a few dozen diners a night end up in cookbooks, classrooms, an animated film and a television drama?

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• 2. Learning The Craft

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  Thomas Aloysius Keller was born on the 14th of October 1955. His mother was a restaurateur, and when her cook fell ill, she put her son to work helping out. Four years after his parents divorced, the family moved east and settled in Palm Beach, Florida.

  The Palm Beach Yacht Club gave him his first teenage summer jobs. He started as a dishwasher and was promoted to cook almost at once. There he found that he loved cooking, and he became fixated on making hollandaise sauce perfectly.

  Summers in Rhode Island brought the encounter that shaped his technique. The chef Roland Henin spotted Keller and assigned him the staff meals at The Dunes Club. Under Henin, Keller learned the fundamentals of classical French cooking. Henin stayed in his life for years afterward.

  La Rive, a small French restaurant in Catskill, New York, in the Hudson River valley, offered something rarer than training: freedom. Keller worked there alone, with the owning couple's grandmother as his prep cook. He built a smokehouse to cure meats and formed ties with local livestock suppliers. He also learned to cook offal, with Henin dropping in on some weekends to teach him. After three years, the owners would not sell him the restaurant, so he left for New York and then Paris. In Paris he apprenticed at several Michelin-starred restaurants.

  In 1984 he returned to America and was hired as chef de cuisine at La Reserve in New York. In early 1987 he left to open Rakel. Its refined French food suited the expensive tastes of Wall Street executives, and The New York Times awarded it two stars. Then the stock market bottomed out and the crowds thinned. At the end of the 1980s Keller left, unwilling to water his cooking down into simple bistro fare.

  The consulting and chef jobs that followed, in New York and Los Angeles, would last only until the spring of 1992.

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• 3. The French Laundry

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  In 1978, Sally Schmitt and her husband Don bought a building in Yountville, California, that had once housed an old French steam laundry. They converted it into a restaurant. In the spring of 1992, Keller came upon that restaurant and decided he wanted it.

  Buying it took him nineteen months. He raised 1.2 million dollars from acquaintances and investors, a sum he gathered one conversation at a time. The restaurant reopened under his ownership in 1994.

  Recognition came steadily over the next few years. The James Beard Foundation honored it, and so did gourmet magazines. The Mobil Guide gave it five stars, and the Michelin Guide gave it three.

  One person from that kitchen's management side figures in Keller's private life. In April 2009, he became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Laura Cunningham, who had served as the restaurant's general manager.

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• 4. A Growing Table

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  In 1998, Keller and his brother Joseph opened Bouchon, a short walk down the street from the French Laundry. Joseph is now the owner and chef of Josef's in Las Vegas. Bouchon serves moderately priced French bistro food, and Keller has joked that he opened it to give himself somewhere to eat after finishing work at the French Laundry.

  Bouchon Bakery opened next door a few years later. In 2006, a branch of the bakery opened in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. A second Bouchon opened in Las Vegas on the 26th of January 2004.

  The 16th of February 2004 brought the opening of Per Se in that same Time Warner Center complex. Jonathan Benno ran the kitchen as chef de cuisine. The space was designed from scratch and built to order as part of the larger construction. It was an immediate success, with tables booked months ahead, and both The New Yorker and The New York Times published glowing reviews.

  In September 2006, ad hoc opened in Yountville. Every night it serves a different fixed-price comfort food dinner, family style. It was meant as a temporary project while Keller planned a long-held dream: a restaurant serving hamburgers and wine. Guests loved it so much that he kept ad hoc and moved the hamburger idea to a new location.

  The Yountville group now also includes addendum and Regiis Ova. In Miami, he runs The Surf Club and Bouchon Bistro.

  In March 2019 he opened the TAK Room at Hudson Yards, his first New York restaurant in fifteen years. It closed permanently during the coronavirus pandemic.

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• 5. Beyond The Stove

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  In 1992, before the French Laundry reopened, Keller and the girlfriend he had at the time started a small company called EVO, Inc. It distributed Provencal-style olive oil and red wine vinegar.

  Later ventures put his name on objects rather than food. He helped develop a line of white Limoges porcelain dinnerware made by Raynaud, called Hommage Point as a tribute to the French chef and restaurateur Fernand Point. He also lent his name to a collection of silver hollow ware by Christofle and to a set of signature knives from MAC. Today he teaches three online cooking classes through Masterclass.

  Competition cooking pulled him in through the Bocuse d'Or, where he became president of the American team. He recruited and trained the 2009 candidates. Timothy Hollingsworth, a former chef de cuisine at the French Laundry, won the American semi-finals in 2008. Under Keller's supervision, Hollingsworth finished sixth at the world finals in January 2009. Explaining why he took the job, Keller said, "When Chef Paul Bocuse calls you on the phone and says he'd like you to be president of the American team, you say, 'Oui, chef'. He's the role model, the icon".

  In 2012, Keller announced that he had reached the point in his career for stepping away from the kitchen. He said the priority was giving young chefs the right mentoring, "if we're not truly working to raise the standards of our profession, then we're not really doing our job."

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• 6. Books And Screens

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  The French Laundry Cookbook appeared in 1999, and Keller regards it as his definitive statement on cuisine. That year it won three awards from the International Association of Culinary Professionals: Cookbook of the Year, the Julia Child First Cookbook Award, and a Design Award.

  In 2004 came The Bouchon Cookbook, though Keller gives most of the credit to Bouchon chef Jeffrey Cerciello. Further titles include Under Pressure: Cooking Sous Vide, Ad Hoc at Home in 2009, and Bouchon Bakery in 2012. He also wrote forewords for other authors, among them Michel Richard, Claire Clark, Maria Helm Sinskey, and the writers Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn. He introduced a new edition of Ma Gastronomie by Fernand Point as well.

  On the set of the film Spanglish, Keller taught the star Adam Sandler to make a sandwich often called the world's greatest. It was meant as a believable dish for a talented bachelor cooking for himself. It resembles a BLT with a fried egg added. Speaking to Vogue Man Arabia, Keller called the BLT "the perfect sandwich".

  For the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille, he served as a consultant. The producer interned in the French Laundry kitchen, and Keller designed a layered, upscale ratatouille called confit byaldi for the characters to prepare. He also appears briefly as a restaurant patron in the American version. In the French release, that part went to his mentor Guy Savoy, and in the Spanish one to Ferran Adria.

  The television comedy-drama The Bear mentions Keller often, and he plays himself in the Season 3 episode "Forever". A different character, played by Joel McHale, is very loosely based on him, with exaggerated negative traits.

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• 7. Honors

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  In 2005, Per Se received three stars in the first Michelin Guide to New York City. A year later, the French Laundry earned three stars in the first Michelin Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area. Across his restaurants Keller holds seven Michelin stars: three at Per Se, three at the French Laundry, and one at the Surf Club Restaurant. Bouchon held one star from 2007 until 2021, and the Surf Club has held its star since 2022.

  The James Beard Foundation named him Best California Chef in 1996 and Best Chef in America in 1997. It later honored the French Laundry for outstanding wine service in 2001 and outstanding service in 2003, and named it outstanding restaurant in 2006. Per Se won the foundation's Best New Restaurant award in 2005. TIME magazine called him America's Best Chef in 2001.

  Restaurant magazine ranked the French Laundry the best restaurant in the world in 2003 and 2004, and the best in the Americas from 2005 through 2008. The restaurant was a perennial winner of that list, and the voting rules were later changed so that previous winners no longer qualify.

  On the 29th of March 2011, Paul Bocuse made Keller a Chevalier in the French Legion of Honor at a ceremony in New York City. In 2014 he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.

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• 8. The Housing Dispute

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  In 2026, a plan for a 120-unit apartment building drew Keller into a local fight in Yountville. The building would stand several blocks from the French Laundry. It was meant for town workers who had been priced out of the area's expensive housing. Keller strongly opposed it, arguing that the workers neither wanted nor needed such housing.

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