French laundry tv#

French laundry tv#

The early 1990s minted a new class of celebrity chefs who got rich on cookware lines and TV shows. Just as Sally was angling to step away from the limelight, the modern restaurant business was coming into its own. Under Keller, the French Laundry, where the nine-course chef’s tasting menu costs $350, became a restaurant with global gravitational pull, a must-visit for food obsessives.īut there’s been an unintended byproduct of Keller’s outsize success at the restaurant: the minimizing of the Schmitts’ tenure there in the collective culinary consciousness.Īnd it’s not just well-heeled diners who’ve apparently forgotten: When Don Schmitt, who also had served as Yountville’s mayor, died in 2017, the many publications that once breathlessly covered his restaurant did not carry an obituary for him. Keller’s re-imagining of fine dining there was a revelation. Especially at the time.ĭespite all of this, what happened after the restaurant changed hands in 1994 was on another level. I just put food on the table.”īut it was a statement.

I didn’t really have a statement to make. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything to the world about simple, fresh, local food. “I didn’t have a mission,” Sally said recently from her favorite armchair in her cozy living room when asked about the philosophy behind her cooking. The Schmitts, “along with Chez Panisse, probably shaped the whole Bay Area dining scene for decades” with unfussy food that, owing to their restaurant’s set-menu format, required diners to trust Sally’s French-inflected, California-influenced taste, Bauer said. In the late 1970s, Napa Valley was shedding its identity as a rural outpost and embracing its potential as a high-end culinary destination, with the French Laundry front and center.