The Reach of a Chef

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First Published in 2006 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Michael Ruhlman, 2006

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Ruhlman, Michael, 1963–
The reach of a chef: beyond the kitchen / Michael Ruhlman.
p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4295-2278-X

1. Cooks—United States—Biography. I. Title.

TX649.R8 A3 2006 641.5092—dc22 2005057908

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FOR DONNA, ADDISON, AND JAMES

who extend
my
reach in ways I could never have foreseen

I entered the Per Se kitchen through the back door at seven
P.M
., more than an hour after service had begun on what ought to have been a normal Thursday night, to find chaos. Per Se is Thomas Keller’s ultra-luxurious and fantastically expensive Manhattan restaurant, one of the country’s temples of haute cuisine, a hushed world of urbane refinement and grace on the fourth floor of the Time Warner Center overlooking Columbus Circle. Normally during service it’s like a watchmaker’s shop. Tonight it’s a circus.

It had been six years earlier that Keller sat on the back deck of my home in suburban Cleveland, beneath a towering black locust tree on a perfect July evening. He had then but a single restaurant, not four. He had no books, no lines of porcelain or silver, no signature-engraved knives for sale. He may have been, at that moment, cresting the apex of his professional career, the artist-monk of the French Laundry, financially successful, lionized in the press, admired by colleagues. His Napa Valley restaurant had one year earlier been called “the most exciting” restaurant in America by
The New York Times.
It became so popular that reservations were almost impossible to come by.

He’d gotten here by the relentless pursuit of perfection. He had always sought perfection, but he was careful to clarify for me on that summer evening that perfection is not an end, but rather a direction. “Perfection doesn’t exist,” he’d said, “because once you reach it, it’s not perfect anymore. It means something else.”

He was in a calm place mentally, relaxed, away from the day-to-day responsibilities of running and cooking for the French Laundry, summer birds and humming insects a backdrop for his thoughtful voice, words that would conclude his story in a book I titled
The Soul of a Chef.

We had been talking about cooking and how a person takes a single, fundamental lesson from youth—say, from one’s mom on how to clean a bathroom so that it shined—and translated that into everything one would do later in life. We spoke, that is, of how standards are created and of how Keller’s standards had become him: that to extricate his standards from his personality would be to end him altogether, so that he would cease to be recognizable as Thomas Keller.

Keller had, since that suburban-pastoral moment of peace and reflection, brought those standards to bear on a bistro, elevating French classics to a four-star level. Then he opened another, this one in Vegas, the food Gomorrah of America. Working with his designers and the prominent porcelain manufacturer Raynaud and silversmith Christofle, he helped design and put his name to lines of fine dining products. If he was going to be a brand, he said, he wanted that brand to be like Hermès. His cookbooks were so lavish that they were sometimes criticized for being
too
fine (and too big) to actually use. Like everything Keller put his hand to, they seemed sprinkled with magic dust and sold in big numbers.

And here he was, in the fall of 2004, at the helm of his most ambitious project yet. He had returned to New York, the city from which he’d departed in defeat in 1991, and he intended to succeed big with Per Se. He was now one of the most famous chefs in the world, after all. He had the magic dust. His Manhattan shrine to haute cuisine would have a kitchen bigger than the dining room. The dining room would have a huge wood-burning hearth and a sweeping northeastern view of Central Park. It had cost a staggering amount of money for a restaurant, and some in the business thought he’d never be able to pay it back, given the profit margins of a four-star Manhattan restaurant—Keller
hoped
it would be four-star, that is. He couldn’t abide just three stars. But that was not up to him, but rather to a
New York Times
reporter named Frank Bruni.

Wary of the press that had given six-star Michelin chef Alain Ducasse such a powerful thrashing for his perceived arrogance and his expensive menu, Keller wooed the media, going so far as to close down the French Laundry to demonstrate how absolutely committed he was to this new Manhattan restaurant.

In Manhattan on other chef business then, in November 2004, I decided to stop in at Per Se. It would be my last chance to see Keller before I sat down to write.
Could he be any higher?
I wondered. His entire oeuvre—he had an oeuvre now!—had drawn raves and financial success, as well as, tonight, a crew from
60 Minutes Wednesday.
I’d stopped by the restaurant to check out the scene, but I was surprised by the unusual energy the show’s commotion had stirred in the place. I felt it the moment I entered. I moved through the back corridor past the bakery, past the small enclosed patisserie station, past the offices, and turned right to the corridor leading to the kitchens, now with tables squeezed in along the wall where people in street clothes were eating dinner. I had to slide sideways between their chair backs and reach-in coolers as I said hello to producer Steven Reiner, some crew members, and the correspondent Lara Logan, looking movie-star perfect even with food in her mouth. They were having family meal but receiving white-tablecloth service per Keller’s instructions. I turned left past a glassware station and a stock/ prep room—the walls throughout are tiled white with blue tile trim; the kitchen has the mazelike feel of a fantastically clean Parisian Metro station—then past a kitchen that is huge not only by Manhattan standards but by the standards of American restaurants generally. It’s not even the main kitchen, but rather the private-functions kitchen, where chef de cuisine Joshua Schwartz and his brigade were cranking out dinner for a big party in the private room through the doors opposite this kitchen.

I then reached the primary Per Se dining-room kitchen and the bizarre carnival of busyness and unfamiliar people—camera and sound crews miking a server at the pass, where all plates arrive and are finished before being floated away to the dining room. Per Se chef de cuisine Jonathan Benno had also been miked for the
60 Minutes Wednesday
Keller profile, in between calling out “Ordering four tastings, two by two…. Fire agnolotti…. Fire beef.” Servers stepped over dangling cords to and from the pass. I turned to see Jeff Cerciello, executive chef of Bouchon, Keller’s Yountville bistro, in a dark gray sweater, a black traveling bag over his shoulder, looking a little disoriented himself, head fogged with a cold. Because of the strangeness of the commotion, I didn’t immediately realize that it was unusual for Jeffrey to be here. He was feeling it too, I could tell, because he squinted and said, “What are
you
doing here?”

Laura Cunningham, who is a standardbearer in the casual elegant service she has created at both the French Laundry and Per Se, is severely refined, unsmiling, and apparently tense given the craziness of the evening. She’d had to ask a diner if he would mind being miked for the show; he’d agreed, but it would alter the mood of the meal, needless to say. Men in jeans and pullover shirts carrying cameras on their shoulders tried to be inconspicuous in the otherwise library-quiet room filled with men and women dressed for an occasion that would cost about three hundred dollars apiece, buffed Riedel glassware, Christofle silver, and a fire crackling in a hearth encased in glass, the whole scene offset against handsome dark walls of Australian walnut.

In the kitchen, Thomas Keller, dressed in a crisp, clean chef’s coat, walked back and forth near, but not at, the pass in his busy new kitchen. Something was wrong, but I couldn’t place it. At first I thought maybe it’s all this craziness—there’s simply too much chaos and noise in the kitchen—this doesn’t happen here; it felt like a mess. Maybe this was what was bothering him, why he looked off center. But then, no, there was more to it—he didn’t look right physically.

Then I recognized the strangeness. He was a couple of inches shorter than normal. Keller is tall and lanky, about six-two with trim dark hair and dark eyes—and now he shuffled rather than walked, sliding instead of striding on the tiled kitchen floor. He was in stocking feet in the middle of this crazy service, and he was obviously self-conscious about it. He passed me, saying hello, adding, “I can’t find my shoes.”

It already felt like a carnival here, but this was an especially disorienting detail. Keller is a maniac for details and impeccable organization. This is a man, for example, who, after he takes his own laundry out of the dryer at home, shelves all the towels in a hotel threefold. He used to wear cowboy boots but no longer. At home in Yountville, a dozen pairs of cowboy boots line a high shelf leading into his bedroom, a miniature museum display of a period of his life. In the kitchen he wears clogs, the traditional kitchen footwear of chefs and cooks (and also, not insignificantly, of surgeons), primarily for the comfort they give to those who work long hours on their feet. He used to wear showy white clogs, but he long ago switched to the more conservative black leather ones, with a light pale-wood sole, an elegant, clean shoe—at least until today. He couldn’t
find
them, and it was driving him to distraction. Chef can’t find his shoes. He’d been wearing black dress shoes all day long, and they were killing his feet. Adding to the strangeness was the reality that he could comfortably do so—walk around in socks. The floors of most restaurant kitchens are covered with fat black mats that let the slop fall through and also give the cooks traction on spills. Such is Keller’s mania for cleanliness that his sheer black dress stockings were completely comfortable here. The tile was cool and pristine. The cooks worked on soft carpeted mats, which were shaken out before service. But it was still not right; he was unnerved and couldn’t quite concentrate because of it.

As if to get away from the commotion, Keller stepped into Josh’s private-party kitchen, which was plating several rows of a single course, banquet style. I followed him. A window looks from this kitchen into the Per Se kitchen, and Keller fell back against the ledge here.

I said the first thing that came to mind: “How is your mental health?”

Keller shook his head, looked at his toes, looked at me, and said without irony or humor, “I’m losing my balance.”