How I Built This with Guy Raz - Chef and Restaurateur: Thomas Keller

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

Thomas Keller is one of the best—and best known—chefs in America, but it took him 40 years to get there. He took a long, winding path through the culinary arts; from whisking his first hollandaise sauce at the Palm Beach Yacht Club, to learning the painstaking art of pastry at one of the finest restaurants in France. He also worked in some of America’s most demanding kitchens, and failed at two of his own restaurants before purchasing The French Laundry in Napa Valley—a place he would transform into an international destination. Thomas has grown his business to include 10 restaurants and bakeries, and is one of the few chefs to hold three Michelin stars in two restaurants. He has also mentored countless younger chefs, passing along a lesson that was once taught to him: cooking is nurturing. This episode was produced by Alex Cheng, with music by Ramtin ArabloueiEdited by Neva Grant, with research help from Alex Cheng.You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And now, on to today's show. I'm not sure if you ever call people that you don't know and ask them for money. Yes. Yes, I have. It's a really difficult thing. Yeah. I drafted a 10-page brief to share with two individuals that I thought would be a good benchmark for investment.

I turned to Michael. I said, Michael, what do you think? And he said, it's a horrible idea. It's never going to work. It's too expensive. People in Napa Valley don't want that kind of restaurant. Forget about it. I was crushed.

I was just crushed. It was like, shit, what am I going to do? I turned to Bob, and Bob said, great idea. Let's do it. That's all I needed. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Thomas Keller's

love of food and obsession with detail helped him build a business that includes two of the best restaurants in the world, per se, and the French laundry. How do you become the best at something? Practice, of course, and commitment and, well, time. It takes time. And hopefully, on that journey to mastering your craft, you've dealt with some setbacks, which almost always makes you better. All of these things and more are part of Thomas Keller's story. When it comes to living chefs in America, Thomas Keller is widely acknowledged to be the best. In the world of food, earning a Michelin star is like winning an Oscar.

Very difficult and very rare. Earning three Michelin stars is almost impossible. Only around 140 restaurants in the world hold that distinction. Thomas Keller has three Michelin stars. at two different restaurants, the French laundry in Napa Valley and per se in New York. And just to add to that list, he also has a one-star restaurant in Miami. That makes him the most decorated American chef of all time. But perhaps more importantly, he's also mentored many of the best chefs working in the U.S. and abroad,

people like Grant Ackids of Alinia in Chicago and Rene Rzeppe of Noma in Copenhagen. In total, Thomas Keller oversees 10 restaurants and bakeries. He's authored half a dozen cookbooks, and he's created his own brands of olive oil, chocolate, and gluten-free flour. It's a big business, easily worth over $100 million. But even though his recipes and his restaurants have set the tone for many who have followed, Thomas Keller was somewhat of a late bloomer. He didn't have his first big success with the French laundry until he was 40 years old. and at the time he was nearly broke.

Before that, as you will hear, he worked in so many kitchens and in so many places that we won't even have time to mention them all. But in each of those stops, Thomas was learning how to be better, observing other chefs, practicing the same steps over and over, even forcing himself on one occasion to learn exactly where his food was coming from by slaughtering 12 rabbits, pretty much with his bare. hands. And along the way, he also had a long string of false starts and all-out failures. He knew he could cook, but at times he wondered if he had it in him to be a restaurateur,

a businessman. But over time, he learned from his failures, his temper, his poor relationships with management, challenges in building the right team. And he really believed deep down that cooking, nurturing, was his true calling. Thomas Keller was born. at Camp Pendleton in Southern California. His dad was in the Marine Corps, and a few years after his birth, his parents split up. Thomas ended up living with his mom who managed restaurants. And by the late 1960s, when he was in high school,

the family had landed in Palm Beach in South Florida. And there, Thomas' mother put him and his older brother, Joseph, to work in the kitchen that she managed at the Palm Beach Yacht Club. So I washed dishes. You know, I was the dishwasher, and Joseph was a prep cook or a meal. line cooked. And that's where we really kind of began that process of truly understanding what a restaurant was like. I mean, Joseph and I were of a specific age where we can actually work in the restaurant. All right. So tell me a little bit about, I mean, I guess your mom, if she's running a

restaurant, she was probably gone all the time. But what was your home life like? Did you kind of have to sort of raise yourselves in a sense? More or less. I mean, you know, there wasn't, And that's why people ask me all the time. So what was your food culture like at home? I mean, did your mother cook a lot? Did you have these experiences like where you're sitting on your grandmother's niece during the blanquet? The bolanese.

Yeah, whatever. It's like, no, you know, my childhood was primarily, you know, I ate whatever my older brothers, right, or whatever we could produce for ourselves. And primarily at that time, you had, you know, Swanson's TV dinners was always, you know, like a night out. And then, you know, whatever came. hamburger helper or, you know, those kinds of things, which are fairly easy to do. But at the same time,

you know, after school or during our homework, we would go to the restaurant. So many nights, we would just eat at the restaurant. Yeah. But you were not, I mean, you were not sort of dreaming of being a chef. In fact, I think, I guess you didn't really know what you wanted to do, right? I mean, I've heard you describe yourself as a pretty mediocre student, for example, in high school. Exactly. But my mother had great expectations, and certainly she was very focused. on detail, work ethic. And so even as a dishwasher, I mean, my job was to make sure that my job was done at the level that she would have proved.

Whether it was cleaning the restrooms in the morning or whether it was taking out the garbage to the end of the night and sweeping up, I mean, that was, you know, always based on what my mother's expectations were. And still today, you know, I asked myself, you know, would my mother approve of this? The restaurant where she managed was called the Palm Beach Yacht Club, I believe. Right. And I guess there was a point when you were like 21 or something when she needed a chef because she couldn't find one and kind of pressed you into doing this job with very little experience. Can you help me understand?

Was this like a fancy restaurant? Was it just like burgers and fries? What was like a little? Yeah, what was it? Yeah, the Palm Beach Jock Club was a small price. private club and basically cater to local businessmen for lunch. And lunch consisted of, you know, for the most part, hamburgers, flank steak with au jus, omelets, right, eggs Benedict. So it wasn't really a struggle for me to understand how to prepare those dishes. And then I had my brother

Joseph, who really was my second mentor after my mother, who helped me, helped me, taught me how to make a Hollande sauce. And so that was really my first understanding of cooking. I mean, it's cooking a steak or doing an omelet, those things were fairly easy. But the actual intricacy of making a holiday sauce was a little more detailed, a little more intense. Yeah. Like today, I'm imagining a restaurant like that, 90% of its stuff would just come from the Cisco truck, right?

It would just back in, and there'd be stuff that would just be unloaded, and, you know, maybe the fries would be frozen, and the burgers would be pre-made. And was it like that already in the mid-70s? Well, it was interesting, because I always described it. There are two people I called every night putting my orders in. I called the bakery to order the bread for the next day. And then I called Cheney Brothers, which was our local supplier and purveyor, for everything else, right? From brooms and mops

to chemicals, to silverware, to the steaks or the fish or the vegetables. Here's your chlorine bleach and here's your fish. Right, right. So everything came on, as you point out, Everything came on one truck. I mean, that was it. So I guess eventually you started leaving Florida in the summers to work in kitchens up north. And I guess you spent a few summers in Rhode Island. And I read that your first job up there was, this was like 1976 at a restaurant called the Clark Cook. Clark Cookhouse, is that right? Yep.

And the way that we did things there for me was very exciting. You know, I mean, to get a leg or veal, seam it out and make sense. scallapini out of it, you know, over a period of the entire day, right? That's how long it took to do that was fascinating. You were on a line, so you had a station, like you would get one job to do. Yeah. Yeah. You have six individuals on the line, all of them with different disciplines, right? You had your sautier, your Poissonier, your entomitier, but focused on one goal, right, was to get to the chef what he needed when he needed it so he can give it to the guest. Right. And that really kind of started to, for me, mold this idea of, of running.

a sports franchise. You know, one of the things that I had hoped to do at a young age, and that's in my early teens, late tweens, was to play baseball. Like, play professionally. Yeah, I mean, you're 12 years old, you're 11 years old. Yeah, sure. Your dream is to be, you know, Willie Mays or something like that. And I found that, that same kind of environment, that same kind of teamwork, that same

kind of focus that are required in a baseball team in a kitchen. Yeah. So I guess the next summer, summer of 77, was really kind of the beginning. of your transformation into becoming eventually a chef because there was a restaurant in a Rhode Island called the Dunes Club and they had a chef there from Lyon, the capital, the food capital of the world, right? I mean, Leon, France. And this is a guy who you just kind of idolized. Yeah, he became a good mentor.

His name was Roland Enon. Enon. Henan, yes, Henan. Henan. Yeah. Roland, who was a very intense chef. Somewhat intimidating, extremely powerful. It was a chef that you actually felt his presence before he walked into the kitchen.

I mean, you just knew he was in the building for some reason. And he came to me one day and he asked me, he said, you know, Thomas, do you know why cooks cook? And I'm trying to answer the question. I don't really know how to answer the question. And he answered it for me. He said, cooks cook to nurture people. At that moment, I realized in my heart that I was a nurturer, that this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to nurture people.

And there's no better way to nurture people than becoming a chef. He was a French chef. He was somebody admired. And so I followed his path. I wanted to be like Roland Henan. The end of the day, I wanted to be like him. And he suggested that I go to France and do an internship in the great restaurants in France. But you wouldn't do that for a few, another few years, I think.

Exactly. But it was by focus. I wanted to go to France from the beginning. It took me three years to get there. Okay, got it. But in the meantime, you went back to Florida and you actually helped two investors open a restaurant as the head chef. I think this is your first head chef job. But I think that enterprise failed pretty quickly, like maybe even within a year, right?

Yeah. You know, I mean, primarily, none of us had the experience of running a restaurant. The two gentlemen who actually owned it and opened the restaurant and funded it were not from the hospitality profession, not from the restaurant profession whatsoever. They're like a carpentry shop, right? One of them had a carpentry shop. One of them was a flight attendant. Right.

And, you know, they always had this dream of opening a restaurant. And, of course, you know, everybody thinks opening a restaurant's easy. You get the right chef, right? You get the right location. You serve the right food, charge the right price. and you're going to be successful. Done. And we, relatively quickly, I think within a year, you know, we closed the restaurant.

And it was a heartbreak because they, the two young men who opened it and financed it, you know, they were relying on me as their chef, right, to produce a menu, one that they would put us on the map. And that just didn't happen. There's a line in a book called The Soul of a Chef by Michael Rulman. He writes in his book that after the failure of that restaurant, You can imagine like the movie scene with like the tracking shot and the music and says Keller returned to his itinerant life, you know, as an itinerant sort of a traveling chef, right? And you did this for a number of years into the early 80s and eventually, I guess, ended up in upstate New York at a seasonal restaurant, a French restaurant.

Yeah, called LaReeve. So, right, I went to work for another French chef who just opened his restaurant in Lake Park, Florida, which was, you know, just north of West. Palm Beach. And he introduced me to his friend who owned a restaurant in Catskill, New York. I was on the side of a small mountain next to a flowing river. And the name of the restaurant was La Reeve. And so Renee and Paulette, Renee was the husband, Paulette, of course, brought me to LaReeve. And it was just a wonderful experience for me, working with Renee and Paulette and Mimi, who was Paulette's mother. I was the only person in the kitchen, except for, a helper and a dishwasher.

And Paulette's mother, who would who would check my hair of Cove Air or peel my shallas for me, you know, while she was watching Wheel of Fortune upstairs, which is where they lived. So you did all the cooking, so you had one prep person to cook for like 50 to 100 meals a night? Exactly. And so you had to be really organized, right? I mean, the organization was key. Establishing efficiency in the menu was key. It was really exciting.

I mean, trying to develop menus that allowed you as the single culinaryian in the kitchen to prepare for anywhere from 30 guests to 100 guests over a period of three or three and a half hours. It was, I was on the baseball field. I mean, this was, you know, we played a baseball game every night. We played the World Series every Saturday. Yeah. And then you started to extend yourself and express yourself in different ways, whether that through a new technique on dessert that you read from. Jacques de Pains La Technique cookbook, or we had a small garden. It was at a time where we smoked our own salmon.

I mean, all of this different things that were part of this burgeoning culinary culture in America. That was happening everywhere around our country, right? I was embracing the opportunity at La Rive and trying to execute at that high level. Yeah. I mean, the rabbit story comes from L'Reve. That was a very important moment in my life, right, killing 12 rabbits. Tell me the story. So I had a butcher.

Actually, we had a farmer that raised rabbits. And every week, I bought 12 rabbits from him. Of course, they would come butchered, right, and dressed. And I asked them one day, I said, would you mind bringing the rabbits living and show me how to slaughter a rabbit? I thought I was a chef. These are things I should understand, right? The slaughtering of an animal, even though it's a very small animal.

And he said, okay, he brought 12 rabbits the next week in a cage. And he reached inside. He said, the most important part of this process is make sure that you grab both of their hind legs at the same time. Right. You want to make sure that you get that secured in your hand. And then he picked it up, cracked its skull and took his knife out and then gutted it and skinned it. And that was it. Wow.

And he left. I'm like, okay, shit, what am I going to do with this? 12 rabbits. So of course, now I'm looking at this. I need to kill 11 rabbits because I need these for my menu this weekend. And I reached inside the cage and I made the fatal mistake of not having securely, you know, embraced both of the legs in my hand. And by not doing that, the rabbit immediately responded by trying to jump, right?

That's what rabbits do. And their hind legs are the strongest part of the animal, the strongest muscle. And what happens now, because I'm holding one leg and his other leg is loose and his reflexes to jump, it snaps the leg I'm holding. And the rabbits screamed. I mean, it was just, it was one of the most blood-curdling sounds. It was so loud that Renee and Paulette came out of their house, which was probably 100 yards away, to see if there's something that happened to me.

And of course, you know, I was, I was traumatized and now I had to really play. take mercy on this poor rabbit and, you know, and kill it. And got through that first one. And it took me a while to get through the next one, the next 10. But I did it. And what it did for me, yes, I mean, it was brutal, you know, but it's understanding that these animals had, you know, sacrificed their lives to nurture us. And the sense of respect that I garnered from that was immediate and complete to the point

where I'm thinking, you know, if I'm burning a piece of bread, there was a farmer who planted the weed, harvested the wheat, there was somebody who milled the wheat, there was someone who made the bread. It's like I'm diminishing their life by not taking care of the products that we have in our restaurants, whether it's a live animal or whether it's products that are grown or produced for us. And so this high level of respect for food really enveloped me. Yeah. All right. So you spent three summers at at La Reeve. And eventually you found your way to New York City, which was definitely the place to be for a young up-and-coming chef in the early 80s. And you worked in a bunch of different kitchens there. We won't be able to talk about all of them. But I mean, you cooked at the

Polo Lounge, which was kind of a proving ground, right, for elite chefs at the time. And then, and you also met a restaurateur in New York named Serge Raoul. And I guess he would become a really important partner and eventually you'd hire you to be to be the chef at a restaurant downtown called Raouls, right? Exactly on Prince Street, which was, you know, before Soho was Soho, Serge had opened Raoul with his brother Guy and Guy was the chef and Serge ran the restaurant and to be able to get a job at Raoul's, which is a very, very busy restaurant, French bistro, classic French dishes was something that was very exciting for me. And I jumped at that opportunity. I'm going to go be the chef at Raoul's.

Yeah. Unfortunately, Ghee left fairly quickly, so there was no transition. I didn't have the opportunity to learn to be mentored by a previous chef, which really impacted me. And I made sure going forward that that wasn't going to happen had I ever opened my own restaurant. This idea of transition became really important for me because that was the biggest failure for me at Raouls. Meantam, you were still thinking or plotting how to get to France, right? Like you were still... All the time.

You were in New York, but you were still trying to figure it. out how do I get to France to do a stage, like an apprenticeship. Right. That was be my college. That was my education. That was my finishing. That was my MBA. Yeah. You would end up spending about a year, a little over a year there, I think, and working in different restaurants. And what was it like? I mean, you would work for some of these incredible kitchens, Michelin three-star kitchens. I mean, and presumably you were the only American in a lot of these kitchens with limited French. Was it, I mean, it sounds like that wouldn't be. easy. No, but you know, for me it was there was never a fear, right? I just got on the plane and went

and ended up in this small kitchen in Arbois, which was, which was really horrible. I mean, I come from the polo lounge. I mean, this is, this was some of the most cutting edge cuisine in America. And I go to this kitchen where, you know, the lights are still on, unlike, on wires hanging down from the ceiling. The floor is always wet. And the room I stayed. And the room I stayed, in, the window was covered with what I didn't know at the time, covered with soot from coal. And my first job in the morning for the only three days I was there was to fire the ovens with the coal. I mean, this was, I was going back in time, you know, 100 years.

And I went, why am I here? I just came from the polo. And within three days, you know, I snuck out the back door. And I got on a train and went to Paris. Wow. And the rest was history. And I just started calling people. I had this huge file and I just started asking for help and just sending my resume out and finally getting a job.

And once you got your first job and you did a good job, then the chef would help you and refer you to his colleagues. And so, you know, going from one to the next just became part of my life through that year plus. Thomas, what were you, what in your mind were you chasing, right? As a you're now getting close to 30 and obviously you're working towards something. And was it to be, presumably to eventually come back and start your own restaurant with your own vision, but was it also to like learn how to become the best chef ever? I mean, I don't know. Education, education, education.

That's what I was going for. This was my graduate school. And when I finally got to France, I had amassed, you know, a certain amount of skill, knowledge, experience that really helped me look beyond and learn beyond just the fundamental things that happen in a French kitchen, right? What are the nuances, right? What are the details? How do they actually make their stock? And why do they make their stock like that?

So the refinement of the processes that are executed in a true three-star mission restaurant, I became privy to. I mean, I would, you know, after coming back from lunch every day at Taly Yovant, you know, I would go upstairs with the pastry chef and make the Marquis de Chocolat. The most famous dessert of that. restaurant at that time, which is one of the most famous restaurants in all of France. And most young stagiers didn't even get to see the pastry kitchen. Yeah.

You know, I mean, you come back to New York. You're 30, almost 30, around 30. And obviously with all of these skills now under your belt. And I have to assume you came back to New York with a goal of finding a partner to open a restaurant. And you would. It would take you about two years. But in the meantime, you will. you went to work as the chef to cuisine at a restaurant called La Reserve.

It was a high-end French restaurant, and you were eventually fired. You didn't see eye to eye with the owner. What happened there? Well, I came back from France with a certain arrogance, you know, a certain expectation, and it wasn't always aligned with the owner. And my purpose was to bring back to America. these techniques, these compositions, the purpose of the modern French cuisine. And he wasn't of that genre.

He wanted to have a very classically run restaurant. And so he butted heads. And I didn't realize that I was threatening his position. He was the owner. And he didn't let me do that for very long until he terminated me. You at the time had a reputation for being a yeller in the kitchen. emotional. Emotional.

Yeah, and that's not uncommon, right? I mean, there's obviously there's sort of the caricature of the chef throwing pans at people's heads and stuff and Marco Pierwhite and all these sort of stories. Sure. Of our culture. Right. You don't have their reputation today, of course, but tell me about where that come from. Was it the pressure to be the best? Was it expectations?

Was it, I don't know. I mean, because ultimately, if your kitchen isn't working well, it's your failure as the leader of the kitchen, right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So it comes down to your purpose, right? My purpose as a chef is to give the guests this experience. Yeah.

And in a restaurant, there are many people that are part of the process from the prep cooks, the comies, the butcher, everybody that's involved in preparing the food. And then you have all the service staff. So there are a lot of people. in between me and my goal. And if something goes wrong or somebody makes a misstep in that process, then that's where I got upset. And I expressed that in an emotional way,

which is not necessarily a positive way. That wasn't going to get me to where I wanted to be. I mean, if I sit there and yell at you because you've done something wrong, you're not going to necessarily understand what you've done wrong because you're feeling insignificant. Yeah. If I whisper in your ear and say, you know,

you really disappointed me, and this is what you need to do to do better, then I get a better response. So, but I didn't approach it in the proper way. And so eventually I failed. And that's on my shoulders. Yeah. That's on my shoulders.

One of your, I mean, you finally had the chance to, once again, open your own restaurant. You had done it in Florida in your 20s, but that doesn't really count. I mean, this was different. This was going to be a joint venture, a restaurant that you are going to be a co-owner of, and it was Raquel, that you were. that you were going to do with Serge Raoul, whose restaurant you had worked in a few years earlier.

And he was going to finance this restaurant, the two of you were going to work together and open it up. And it became successful. I mean, it became quite a well-reviewed, well-regarded restaurant. And this was kind of, I guess, your dream, right? I mean, you finally had this opportunity to build the restaurant that you wanted to work in. Absolutely. I mean, Raquel was that. I mean, there's New York City, Serge, and I became very close friends, and we named it Raquel of after Raoul and Keller, which was going to be a contemporary American French restaurant.

Yeah. A bit elegant, refined in a way, but also have a little bit of the downtown sense of casualness to it. Like a lot of people don't, I think a lot of people don't realize is that the head chef of a restaurant is like, you're like the director of a film, right? You're essentially overseeing everything. And there's a lot of moving parts because you're not just cooking in the kitchen. And I have to assume you were cooking in the kitchen every night. You were in that kitchen. But you're also like once service ends, you're preparing for the next day.

Like you're not going home until one, two in the morning. Pretty much. I mean, it was, it was, you're consumed commitment 100%. And my biggest mistake at the time was I thought I could do everything. And I realized after the failure of Raquel that I needed to have support. I needed to have people around me. Yeah, you've jumped ahead a little bit, but yeah, Raquel didn't last. But before we get to why, I'm just, I'm curious about the lifestyle, right?

Because you're still young at this point. You're in your early 30s, but still, it's grueling. Like I read an account at the time that it was like Keller works six days a week, 12 to 14 hour days. And then when it was one day off, he sort of gets some barbecue, picks up some smoke salmon, watches a baseball game, and then collapses by nine. Right. Did you ever get like, I don't know, depressed or sad or did you ever have moments where like, I can't, I want to get off this hamster wheel? Not at all. It's what I wanted to do. I was all in. I wanted to be one of the best French chefs in America. And I wanted to be successful. Was I sad when Raquel closed? Was I disappointed? Was I crushed? Yes.

Why did it close? What happened? I mean, it got great reviews in the New York Times. I mean, of course, there was. was a financial downturn in the late 80s, early 90s, but that can't be the only reason why there must have been some failure in the execution or the managing of the restaurant, too. No, it was the managing of the restaurant. I mean, there's never one reason that a restaurant or business closes. Yeah. It's a number of different things. So certainly the downturn in 1989, the economic crash, that certainly was part of it.

But at the end of the day, it was on my shoulders once again, that I didn't understand the structure I needed to operate effectively and profitably, and that was making sure there were people who had skill levels that I didn't have that were part of the team, a general manager, right, who really understood how to run a restaurant, somebody in the financial side, right? Somebody who actually understood the revenue streams, what we were doing, what we were spending. Yeah. So, so, how could you have really pissed off in yourself for not realizing this over a period of five years? I mean, you just spent five years of your life, of your career, of your partner's life and career and money, and ultimately it failed. It threw me into a place where I was questioning my career choice.

This is, can I, I'm a really good cook, right? I may be a good chef, but I'm not necessarily a good businessman. Yeah. Anyway, I didn't really have any, any opportunities that were becoming a parent in New York. So I ran away. Yeah. So you moved to Los Angeles and get a job as a chef, which makes sense because you got to pay the bills. And the restaurant, the hotel, I remember this hotel.

I mean, the hotel is still there. I think it's a Hilton now. But I grew up in L.A. And it was a really cool hotel called Checkers Hotel. And so tell me about what your charge was at that time. So the Checkers job was just there and became an easy job or an easy opportunity, but not, you know, for long-term career choice, but to get me a new start. You ended up, I think, staying there for about a year and you had a conflict again with the new owners. Yep.

And they fired you. Yep. I'm going to ask you a question not to pile on here. That's okay. It's a question that I would, I certainly have asked myself at times when I felt like I screwed up. I mean, was there ever a point where you thought, you know, maybe it's me. That's the problem. Maybe I'm the problem.

Of course. In all honesty, there's still today where I'm asking. myself that question. We make mistakes every single day. Sometimes we learn immediately from those mistakes. Sometimes it takes us a little longer. We continue to ask ourselves the same question. What you knew, though, or what was probably becoming clear, was that you couldn't work for somebody else, that you weren't there to realize somebody else's vision that you had to probably run it. It had to be your vision. Had to be my vision, yes. No question about it. I mean, that was, that was, you know, my goal was to own my own restaurant that was successful.

When we come back in just a moment, Thomas struggles for nearly a year and a half to pull together the money to buy the French laundry, the restaurant that will change everything for him. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this. One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 1992 and Thomas Keller is living in L.A. Between jobs and kind of at loose ends.

You know, I'm trying to make a living, doing whatever I could, starting an olive oil company called Evo at the time and standing basically at the end of the aisle of like the grocery stores, Gelsens. You were literally the guy there at the table like pouring olive oil for people? Yeah, I had little pieces of baguettes, right? And, you know, offering people a taste of the olive oil as they walked by on their grocery tour. But you were like two years before that on food and wines, 10 best young chefs in America.

And did people, anybody ever be like, wait, aren't you Thomas Keller? I don't know if anybody recognized me at that point. Yeah. You know, you do what you have to do. I mean, you still have a vision. You still have a goal. You still have your aspirations. You still have your hopes.

I just needed to find a way to do that. So standing, you know, at the end of the aisle is like, Gelson's, you know, on a Sunday afternoon, it wasn't demeaning for me. The purpose behind it was the semi-olove oil. The semi-olvo meant that I had money, which meant that I can continue pursuing my dreams, right? I wasn't going to go work for somebody else. I was, I was liberated by the work that I had to do to a certain extent, which allowed me to think about what I was going to do in the future, even though I had no future, had no money, and had no prospect of a future. Yeah. Tell me about how you, So you're kind of in this interregnum period where you're doing freelance work as a chef and trying to start an olive oil business.

And I guess you hear about a restaurant that is in Napa in Yountville called the French Laundry and that the owners were looking to sell it. Tell me how you first heard about this restaurant. So I'd heard about the French laundry, you know, before, even when I was in New York City at Raquel, I had heard about the French laundry. And when I went to Napa, I was dating a woman in Los Angeles who was a wine broker who would have to go to Napa Valley. And we were driving up one day and we drove through Yonfville, stopped at the French Andri walked around the property. It was the day they were closed. And I fell in love with it. I said, this is it. This is my destiny. This is my fate. This is what I want to do. Right there? Right then and there? Right then and there. Right then and there. Right. And it was not a

fine dining restaurant. It was a very good restaurant, but it was like a local, seasonal cooking. If I could say, it was very, very similar to what Alice was doing at Chapinese. At Chapinese, okay. Right. It was one menu a day. Farm to table. Yeah, exactly, all of that. But 1992 is when I first discovered it. And, you know, fell in love with it and actually called the Schmitz, I think when I get back to L.A. the next week and said, I'd like to come up and meet you and talk to you about buying your restaurant. And the Schmitz were Don and Sally Schmidt, the owners who had run this restaurant for like 12 years at that point.

Yeah, they opened in 1978. Okay. And of course, I went back up. We had a nice chat. I remember Sally making me a tongue sandwich in her kitchen next door where her house was. And we agreed that I would be the person to buy the restaurant. Wait, stop. How did you, did they, was it just that there weren't many people like it was for sale?

They just weren't that many people interested? I mean, they agreed with you that then and there that they would sell it to you? It's a really remarkable story. I brought with me my whole portfolio of my career, right? All the articles have been written about me, the ideas that I had. And they embraced them. And they said, great, go raise the money. And we're happy to sell you our restaurant.

How much did you have to raise? We had to raise $1.2 million. That was their price. That was their price. And how much did you have in savings? Savings? I didn't have anything in savings. Huh. I was living week to week, just trying to make my house payment or my car payment or my insurance payments or anything that I needed.

So when they said $1.2 million, you didn't flinch at that. You didn't think, how am I going to do this? I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I was expecting them to say, here, take the restaurant. You run it. You know, you're Thomas Keller. You've done all these things before. Then we were happy to sell you the restaurant. But for the time being, you take it. they know I didn't have any money. We went into escrow on a $1.2 million property for $5,000. You gave them $5,000 as a down payment. $5,000 is a down payment, which I had to scrape together.

But in the meantime, before that, before we went into escrow, I had to now find somebody who was going to represent me as an attorney to actually do a business plan, a partnership agreement, the escrow agreements, and the purchase agreements. And I went to see, an attorney in Los Angeles, whose name was Bob Sutcliffe, you know,

I gave him like this whole pile of information that was my version of my business plan. And he looked at it, he was somewhat impressed. And he said, okay, for $60,000, I will draft these agreements for you.

Yeah. And I said, I don't have any money. It's can you do it on speculation? And I opened up my briefcase, and the only thing that was in my briefcase on that day was a bottle of our extra virgin olive oil that I was producing. So I put that on the table.

I said, this is what I'm doing now. This is how I'm going to fund this. And he was even more intrigued. He said, okay, he said, if you pay me $5,000, I'll do this on spec. So now I have to raise another $5,000. Yeah. Which came in the form of going to the ATM machines every week and withdrawing as much cash as I could. And then that began the process of drafting all the agreements.

and the process of me starting to try to raise the money. I think it took you almost two years to raise the money. Yeah, 18 months. And during that time, there was no possibility that some other buyer would swoop in and just offer them cash, and that's it? That'd be end of it? I was terrified. Every single day I woke up with that idea in my mind, that somebody else with more credibility,

with more experience, somebody who is better than I, I was, was going to just reach out to the Schmitz and buy the restaurant. I woke up every single morning with that on my mind for 18 months. And I had to continue over the period of time to convince Don and Sally that I was the guy. Yeah. Right? That I was actually going to make this happen. And how did you do that? Well, we built a strong bond, a strong relationship through just communication. Yeah. They believed in me and they're counting on Thomas Kemp. Keller to actually do this, a guy who has certainly a checkered past in his ability to operate restaurants, right?

The failures that he's had. But yet they believe that I can do it. And that also motivated me to great ends to do everything I could possibly do to execute this, not just for myself, but for them. Did you have a hard time convincing investors to back the project? I mean, because 18 months. is a long time. I mean, of course, not that long in the grand scheme of things. But still, like, it is, restaurants are inherently risky. And, you know, what was the, the response you got from

people when you called them up with your cup out asking for cash? Yeah. I'm not sure if you ever call people that you don't know and ask them for money. Uh, yes. Yes, I have. Yeah. It's a really difficult thing. Yeah. But in many ways, it's also, it's also very exciting, right, to convince somebody who you do not know that the project that you're embarking on has merit and so much so that they're going to write you a check. Yeah. But I drafted a 10-page brief to share with two individuals that I thought would be a good benchmark for investment.

These two gentlemen both owned wineries, both came from financial background. And I gave each one of them a copy of this brief, right, would explain the French laundry, my vision, how much it was going to cost. The next day they came down, I turned to Michael, I said, Michael, what do you think? And he said, it's a horrible idea. It's never going to work. It's too expensive.

People in Napa Valley don't want that kind of restaurant. Forget about it. I was crushed. I was just crushed. It was like, shit, what am I going to do? I turned to Bob, and Bob said, great idea. Let's do it. That's all I needed.

That little bit of encouragement that led me, again, to really pursue, you know, with the total commitment to buy this restaurant. Yeah. You even had some investors, I guess, who's who offered to back the restaurant, but they wanted to control. Yeah, there was one investor who offered to bankroll me all the way. And I was sitting in the garden at the French laundry with him at the time. And he said, but I want control over everything that you do in your future. He wanted a stake in everything you did in your future.

thing I did in the future. So he would give you the money for this restaurant, but then he owned a part of you forever. Exactly. You know, actually, I felt I was like talking to the devil for a moment, even though he was a friend. Yeah. And I was fearful because if he was going to do that for me, would you do it for somebody else? Right. If Thomas Keller said, no, would you go out and get another chef?

Yeah. So I had to go to Donna and Sally and explain it to them. And they said, don't worry about it. We're supporting you, which was, again, you know, great encouragement. and made me feel really safe in my endeavor. I mean, it's stressful because you're vulnerable, right? And this is somebody who's got a lot more, you know, means and resources. Essentially, you're thinking in your head, okay, this guy's just going to find another person like me

and just replace me and back this thing and that restaurant's going to go to him. Yep. So this was a daily emotional challenge for me is the feeling of this. There was something, you know, again, there's so many stories that are wrapped around purchasing the French army, but there was, Again, significant things that happened. There was a article in the New York Times, and I didn't really read the article because the headline of the article became really important to me.

And the article, the headline was having a dream is hard, living it is harder. And I really, you know, I thought that was me. I cut that out. I still have that in my office today, but I put it on my little makeshift desk in my small apartment in Los Angeles. and that became something I read every morning when I started making phone calls to strangers to ask them if I could send my business plan to them

that they would invest in the restaurant. Yeah. And I used to go up on weekends to have open houses at the French laundry. I would invite prospective investors to come. I would make my little coronets. I had slideshows of what the menu looked like. Your cornets were the little mini ice cream cones

filled with like salmon and... Yeah, salmon, tartar, and red onion. cream. Yeah. I'd have the menus there. You know, I would take people around trying to convince them that this was, this was going to be a place where they wanted to invest. All right. So May 1st, 1994, you had raised $1.2 million, the money you needed to buy the French laundry. I think you had like, something like 50 or 60 investors, mostly small investors and maybe a few loans. Right. So you get the money, you buy it. And when you finally opened up, which was, I think, a couple months later, how was it?

Like, was there a wait to get in? It was a catastrophe. Wow. Total disaster. July, the night of July 6th was a day that you wanted to forget. In fact, Ron Siegel, one of our chefs at the time, when he won the award for Best New Chefs, he was asked the question, what was the most difficult or what was the most memorable night you had in opening a restaurant? and he said the night we opened the French laundry.

It was like the sinking of the Titanic. It was catastrophic, miserable, and it lasted all night long. You know, I had not cooked for close to two and a half years. We didn't have the money, you know, to spend a month on development, R&D development, training, all those different things that we do today. We opened the restaurant. I think the day before I was shoveling gravel in the parking lot. There were several nights that we worked on producing the food, but actually putting it together

in the compositions, I knew what I wanted, we talked about it, but we never practiced, or we had very little practice. But the next night, we modified everything. We bought some more equipment, some more tools that we needed, and we opened on July 7th, and John Mariani, who was one of the most significant food critics in that period of time, he wrote for Esquire Magazine. Esquire Magazine every November published their 10 best new restaurants in America.

And on the second night, John Mariani came into the French Laundry. And that November, we were one of the 10 best new restaurants in America. And that was just how dynamic we were and we became. I mean, that became a cornerstone of what we do and changing the menu every single day. That's where it all began.

Was that second night, that first night. every night from that point on, we've changed the menu at French Andri and per se. Tell me about what you were serving and what, where did you get your ideas from? I mean, you had a dish, I think early on, which is still, I think, one of your most famous dishes called Pearls and Oysters, which is caviar oysters and tapioca's feeders. Oysters and Pearls is the name on the menu. And I'm happy to share where that came from. Sure, because it's still on your menu to this day. Yeah, it's one of those compositions that, you know, you're required to keep on your menu

because people have read about it so much. You can't disappoint them by not having that dish available to them. It's like going to a Rolling Stone Rock concert and them not playing satisfaction. I'm sure they're tired of playing satisfaction, but they played every single time because they know the fans want it in the same thing, The Oysters and Pearls. The guests really want to have that experience with that. But that was very simple, walking down the grocery store aisle with a great sense of awareness and seeing a purple box that said pearl tapioca.

And I picked it up and I said, I'm thinking, where do pearls come from? Where they come from oysters? And that became the inspiration for that dish, right? And then you add the caviar to it. It becomes a complete dish in celebration, right? You have the oysters, you have the caviar, you have a glass of champagne.

What better way to begin your meal than that kind of experience? Yeah. I think early, very early on, maybe in like the first few weeks, you had an applicant named Laura Cunningham who would eventually become the general manager and then your sort of life partner and professional partner and I think is like widely credited with helping you really kind of build this business out to what it is today how did Laura come to to your world well Laura grew up in Napa valley one of her best friends was one of the Schmidt's

daughters you know she's spent significant amount of time at the French Laundry as a young girl. She had worked for people like Jonathan Waxman. She'd worked for people like Jeremiah Towers. So she was semi in the hospitality profession. And she found her way to the French Laundry because I was looking for somebody to help me understand the guest list that the Schmitz had comprised. So she began by going through that process of just highlighting people's names and trying

to identify who they were for me. She ultimately became the assistant manager at the French Laundry, and then finally six months later, she became the general manager. And I have to credit Laura with so many things. I mean, you're absolutely right. Laura, you know, has been a significant, significant part of the success of the restaurant, but also in changing the way fine dining restaurants operate and the service that they provide. And that has been to casualize service in fine dining restaurants. in America and around the world. I mean, she was somebody who had a strong belief in not having a formal dining room,

but a dining room that was more accessible between the guests and the service staff. And as our restaurant developed and became a much more intense experience or much longer experience, that kind of casualness allowed our guests and our service staff to really create bonds and relationships,

which has really blossomed. and it's something that the French laundry is known for and per se is known for. People are surprised when they have dinner at the French chondry and say how much fun it is. Thomas, you learned a lot of a lot from the mistakes and failures that you had had up until that point. And one of the things with the restaurant business, even a great restaurant like Raquel, is the margins can be really thin. The cost of food is high. I mean, really, most restaurants make their money off beverages. If you're lucky, you get people buying very expensive wine.

What did you, I mean, knowing what you knew at that point, now you're 40, you know, when you start the restaurant, what did you do differently that was going to ensure that this was going to work? Because obviously, you've got great reviews, but you had had great reviews of Raquel, too. So what was going to be different here? How are you going to manage it differently? Well, it's what I talked about when I realized the mistakes at Raquel. You know, there needed to be people in the proper positions that were experts in those positions. that allowed me to just be a cook, right, to be a chef. But how did you find those people?

Well, Laura was one of the discoveries, right? Yeah. One of the discoveries of a lifetime. You know, so Laura ran the dining room. She ran the wine program. I mean, I know you think about that in its entirety of a young woman, I think she was 27 or 28 years old, running what was going to become one of the most significant restaurants in America.

And then finding somebody at the financial capacity, a bookkeeper. A really good bookkeeper who could keep us on track. And so that was the triad. That was the tripod. That was the three different departments that I needed to be able to succeed at running the French laundry. When we come back in just a moment, Thomas Keller learns how to become a restaurateur and eventually steps away from the daily heat of the kitchen. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this.

Hey, welcome back to how I built this. So by 1995, just a year after it opens, the French laundry is getting rave reviews. And Thomas is able to raise the money to build a new kitchen. I've read, and maybe some of this is apocryphal, but I think it's true. Stories about your, like, perfectionism, just the cleanliness, which is great. As a diner in restaurants, I want to be clean. But things like that vegetables have to be blanched in rapidly boiling water. or that fish, like the fish needs to be held so carefully in the same position that it swims

in order to not stress the flesh of the fish. How, why is that important? Why is that stuff important to you? Well, you know, it's important to me because it becomes obvious if you just study it for a moment, right? If you take the fish as an example, right? And for years, right, fish was laid flat. Yeah. And you're laying fish flat on ice.

Yeah. Tell you buy it in the fish, in the fish, it's mongered. Right. There's ice on the bottom and there's ice on top. Yeah. And so what is happening to the fish? You've got pressure. You've got weight on both the bottom filet and the top fillet.

Yeah. It compresses it. Yeah. So the shape of the ice is now affecting the quality of the flesh of the fish. But if you stand it straight up as it swims, there's no pressure on the flesh. What is so important to you about? I mean, I hear you, and that's the fish I want to eat. So why is it important is your question?

Yeah, just that whole concept of being perfect, because it can be overbearing too sometimes. No, we want to set the example for the next generation, right? We want to elevate the standards, not just of our restaurant. We want to elevate the standards of our profession so that when people leave our restaurant, they go to their next post, and they're taking something with them from the French laundry or per se

or wherever they're coming from. And they're helping, right? They're adding value to their next post. Yeah. You know, going back to an earlier question, given how challenging it is to turn a profit or a significant profit at a restaurant, obviously you have this restaurant. It's getting a lot of buzz by, I think within a year or two, it's named the most exciting restaurant in America by Ruth Reichel, who was the most influential food critic in the United States, for sure. But it still means that you've got to, I mean, to keep those margins, to have a big staff. I mean, you had to have a big staff. because of all the prep required to produce, you know, like the, you've got an egg with custard in it. It's a perfectly like, I don't even know what the tool is, is that you take the head off the eggshell and it's just perfectly, it looks like an Easter egg, but it has like deliciousness inside, all these things. Yeah. How do you, I mean, was it, when did you realize that you had to actually expand your business? You needed to grow the business.

You had to open up other restaurants. You know, funny enough, I didn't have to. I mean, this is where the modern American chef, right? It's a dilemma. Yes. What was the example before us in terms of business? We didn't have a path. It was a restaurant and that was it.

Right. There wasn't a path, right? It's like, this is what you do to get to this point. This is what you don't do. You know, we were the explorers. I mean, we went out to cut the path. People were looking at us going, okay, that's what Thomas did. That's what Daniel.

did. That's what Rocco de Spirito did. That's what, you know. But why? But why did you do it? Why did you expand? Well, okay, so we opened the French laundry. Yeah. There were 12 of us in that restaurant, total. None of us came from Napa Valley. I mean, Laura came from Napa Valley. Yep. But most of us came from urban environments, which meant that we always had a place to go to after service. You go to a bar. Go to a bar, go to a club, go to dinner or whatever, right? We had opportunities to go somewhere else. In Napa Valley, when we closed and finished service at 10 o'clock, quiet. Everything else is closed at 9 o'clock. There was no place to go. But then we also realized that everybody in Napa Valley is in the hospitality profession. Yeah. If you work for a winery,

you're an hospitality profession, right? If you're working for a hotel, you're in hospitality profession. Yeah. So we decided the best thing to do was to open a restaurant that was open until midnight. And as many decisions were made at that restaurant, the French laundry, where so many decisions were made was sitting around the table at the end of service, not only defining our menu for tomorrow, but what would we do if we could? What would we do if? Yeah, that's a very important question that we ask ourselves. And, you know, one of the things we want to do was to have a place to go to eat. And so it was obvious that we needed to open another restaurant. And what would that restaurant B. So we all decided that it would be a French Bistro because that's what we missed

the most. And that became Bouchon Bichon Bistro. That became Bouchon. Was there any, I mean, obviously not everybody can eat a French laundry. It's extremely expensive for most people. It's a huge expense to eat there because the cost to make that food is so high. Was part of the thinking behind Bouchon to create a more affordable restaurant too where people could try your food? I mean, obviously that happened, but it wasn't in our thought. We need to do a less expensive restaurant. A bistro is going to be a less expensive restaurant anyway, just because it's the bistro.

Yeah. But I just want to just comment because you said, you know, it's very expensive to make the food. I just want to qualify that. It's also we're buying ingredients, which are extremely rare. Yeah. And produced or harvested or farmed or caught by extraordinary individuals.

And yes, we could buy a cheaper salmon, for example. You know, if I said I want to only spend $3.50 a pound for salmon, somebody would sell me salmon for $3.50 a pound. Get Norwegian salmon farmed or whatever, yeah. Is it going to be what we want? Is it going to be what we want to serve? No. Which means I don't really ask, I call them my partners, my purveyors, how much something

cost, primarily because we've had relationships with them for 30 years or more. Yeah. And they know the standards of what we're trying to achieve. so they're bringing us the best possible ingredients they have. And so is it my job to negotiate a cheaper price with them, or is it my job to support them and bringing us the best ingredients they can? And then actually the biggest expense is our labor, is our people who work for us, right?

Giving them a wage that they have work-life balance, giving them the benefits. So they don't have to worry about getting hurt or getting sick, right? They go to the hospital, they have insurance, and they have vacations, and they have opportunities, to continue their careers in ways that, you know, are going to elevate the standards of their lives, their families' lives, their communities, and our profession. Yeah.

Yeah, no, I mean, I'm just, I'm curious. Like most people listening to this interview will not have been to the French Laundry, right? Whereas when we, you know, have Howard Schulz on, most people have had a cup of Starbucks, right? Right. And, you know, especially now in this, I'm jumping head a little bit here, but we're sort of living at a time where the restaurant industry is under a lot of scrutiny, especially the fine dining part of the restaurant industry, you know, where people are sort of, you've got critics and you've got even some people inside the industry saying, well, what, who are we serving? You know, what is this ultimately about? And there's

kind of been a movement lately in the last few years to democratize fine dining, to make it more accessible, to make it more affordable. What do you make of it? Well, it's fascinating that fine dining is always kind of picked on. Nobody's talking about how much it costs to buy a ticket and sit courtside at the Lakers game. Yeah. I mean, or even sit in the bleach, like not court side. Right, or whatever. I mean. Just go into a football game, an NFL game. You're going to probably spend $300 on your ticket and parking alone. Right. So, so why is fine dining such a problem? I mean, it's a rhetorical question. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the answer is because it's perceived to be elite for elitist, right, for the elite. And I think it's fine dining restaurants. I mean,

the impact of those restaurants, what they do has a trickle down effect. It does have an impact on what other chefs do and how they think about cooking. Yes. So we run an elite restaurant, right? It's just like an elite athlete. These guys out in the football field or baseball field to the basketball court. There are elite athletes. They've worked their entire life to achieve what they do. They have God-given gifts, right? But they've been chosen to do what they do

and they're paid to do what they do because they're elite. It has nothing to do with being elitist. They're two different things, right? We run an elite restaurant, but we're not elitist. I mean, we want everybody to come to our restaurant. Yeah.

We don't profess that we're going to, you know, that it's going to be there for everybody or that you can eat there, every other week or every of the month or every other year. But when you are there, we want to give you something. And we talk about this all the time with our team because our team is there every single day. And complacency can become a problem because we're there every day.

We have to remind ourselves that the guests that's coming tonight has been planning to come there for some time, whether it's a year or 10 years. They've saved their money or not save their money, depending on their economic wealth. But they are spending money. and we want to make sure that when they leave that restaurant, they have a wonderful memory for themselves that they take home. And that's memory that lasts with them for a long time. I can tell you some of my great experiences around the table

in some of the greatest restaurants in the world. I can't tell you how much they cost. I can tell you the stories behind them, and those stories are dear to me, and those experience are dear to me. So when I think about how much I spent, and what I receive for that, it's priceless. Thomas is kind of shifting a little bit. I want to ask you about just being a businessman, right?

So 2003 French Laundries named the best restaurant in the world by the world's 50 best restaurant list. And that's a controversial list, but still it means something. I mean, I think you were on there three times. I think you can't be on there more than three times. And you win the James Beard. I mean, all of these accolades start to pour in. And in 2004, you go back to New York City to open a restaurant again, per se, which is still open, still very successful. Tell me about, you know, we can't get into all the different businesses you have.

I think you've got about seven restaurants and several bakeries and Las Vegas and New York. And then you've got a bunch of different businesses and olive oil and flour and wine. I mean, I'm just touching on a few of them. But help me understand, like as you started to really push out, like per se was the first really big push. It's a, you know, now a Michelin three-star restaurant, very famous restaurant in New York City. You couldn't spend as much time in the kitchen. And so you had to focus more on the business side of it, which is today primarily what you focus on. But at what point did you kind of make peace with the idea that you were not going to be cooking?

That's a really good question. But, you know, I am in the kitchen every night that I'm home here in Napa Valley. And when I go to New York City, I'm in the kitchen every night that I'm in New York. I was just in per se. So am I cooking? No. But you have to kind of understand the dynamic of the team. And again, if you use the analogy of a sports franchise, you know, Derek Jeter would love to play shortstop for the New York Jankies tomorrow.

But he's not going to be. Yeah. He couldn't walk out on the field and be a part of that team. he has to understand that his time is over. Yeah. So he needs to find a different thing. And that's kind of the same thing of my career and all Cook's careers, right, is we come in as rookies, we become season players, some of us become franchise players.

Yep. And then eventually, in the same way that Derek Jeter or Joe Montana, they can't do it anymore, they have to retire. So it's heartbreaking for them as it is for me, but you have to find a different purpose. So again, you know, you find. your way into the dugout, right? And you become the field manager. You find your way into, into the ownership, and you become the general manager. You become an owner. And that's kind of what I'm doing today. And do I miss cooking? Of course I do. Do I want to be 25 and, you know, working the

Poisson-A station like I did when I was with Danielle Ballou at the Polo? Of course I do. Which is a struggle for me. I mean, you know, I talked to my best friend, who's one of my closest colleagues, a renowned chef himself here in America. And we remember our first goal was to open our own restaurant. We wanted to own one restaurant. And then when we did that, we had more opportunity. We opened a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth, or whatever. And now, you know what we talk about today, him and I, owning one restaurant. Wouldn't it be nice to just own one restaurant? I mean, you could, for example, there are certainly many examples of this, you could lend your name to a restaurant chain, right?

And Wolfgang Puck is an example. You go to airports and see Wolfgang Puck restaurants, but he's not controlling the quality of those restaurants. And so obviously you can make a lot of money doing that. You could have, you know, Thomas Keller presents, you know, bakeries all around the world. And I wonder whether, A, would you be willing to do that? And B, do you think you could do that and still control the quality of those places?

Because you've got, it's a lot, but you have a relatively manageable number of places now that you can make sure that they are up to your standards. That doesn't interest me. I've never been interested in lending my name to, you know, a can of soup or a pizza. God bless Wolfgang. I mean, I don't criticize any of my colleagues for the past, the past that they've chosen, right? And I'm not either. Sometimes those pizzas are pretty good, especially not hungry. But, you know, it's, I don't, I've been very successful at one-off restaurants. I mean, we know running restaurants that opening one restaurant, another restaurant, is not going to move the needle. It's not going to change your life, in other words.

It's just going to be another burden. You think about opening a restaurant is very exciting. It's seductive. It's exciting. But then you've got to run it for 20 years. You can't just close it. You have to open a restaurant that's going to be part of a community. And it lives on in perpetuity, or at least beyond you.

I mean, this is the challenge I'm faced with today. right, I'm 67 years old, what happens to my restaurants, right? I mean, the French Andre needs to be a multi-general restaurant. How many multi-generational restaurants do we have in America today? You can point to Asia and Europe and they're countless. But America, are there three or four multi-generational restaurants? And the French Andrene is one of those restaurants. That it should continue.

And it should continue, exactly. So I need to be thinking about that. One of the challenges of being a chef and the hours and the commitment is it's hard to have a family. And I don't believe you've got any kids. We don't, no. So what does that mean? What does succession mean? It means that you're going to find a person or a group of individuals that believe in your culture, in your philosophy, in your vision.

You're going to be able to structure a succession plan that holds everybody to a succession. certain standard into the future. That's it. So the French laundry, I don't know if it can ever really be sold to somebody. So what is the French laundry worth? This is the other thing we struggle with as chefs. My restaurants aren't named after me, yet they're so entwined with my name. Yeah. So what is the French laundry really worth? What is the French laundry worth with Thomas Keller? What is the French laundry worth without Thomas Keller? If I sold the French laundry and I wasn't there anymore, what is the ROI for the new owner? Yeah.

So you, I mean, in order to decouple Thomas Keller from per se and French laundry, and frankly, you know, you can go to either of those restaurants. And it doesn't matter whether you happen to be in the kitchen or not because they're going to be outstanding experiences. Like you've created an environment where, you know, at this point, the people working in the kitchen are probably even more skilled than you because they've just been doing it, right? And I'm sure you take a lot of pride in that. Yeah. But to decouple yourself from those restaurants to depersonalize them, do you need a person? Do you think that there has to be one person where the attention is focused on, like an upcoming chef or somebody that people could say, oh, this is now, you know, so-and-so's restaurant? It's a good question.

I mean, you know, so when we open per se, I wasn't the chef anymore. Yeah. We hired the right person. We trained them and we mentored them. And if you do those three things correctly, what happens is that person is better than you are, because if they're not better than you, then you have not done a good job. Then you failed as a leader. Yeah, you failed as a leader. So does it truly matter if it's a person in name or if it's a group in name?

You know, you look at the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955. You look at the, yes, there were significant people that were on the Brooklyn Dodgers, but it was the Brooklyn Dodgers who won. Yeah. Right. And that's what we have to be. That's what we have to be. We have to be better as a team through our individual abilities. Thomas, you mean, you became the first American chef and one of the very few chefs in the world to have two Michelin, three-star restaurants. You know, for people who know that, it's like being at the top of the All-Star League in cooking.

But it also makes you a target, right? And you did get a really nasty review per se did in 2016 in the New York Times. Pete Wells, the food critic. I mean, he just, it was a really harsh review. Yeah. And I imagine the instinct is to be like, screw you, you're wrong, I hate you, but you actually responded to this saying, okay, we've done something wrong. And we need to actually tell me what was going on. Why did you, I mean, was, was he right in your review?

I mean, was his review fair? because it was quite a harsh review. Yeah. So a couple of things. So every accolade that we receive or anybody receives is for what you did yesterday. Yeah. It's not what you're doing today or what you're going to do tomorrow. So, you know, we appreciate criticism. I mean, that's the one thing we ask.

It's like, what didn't you like? I mean, I don't want to know what you liked. I want to know what you didn't like because that's the only way we can make improvements. So Pete pointed out what he thought we did wrong. And I took it on as my responsibility to go to all of my restaurants and explain. what happened. And so you learn from those experiences, but at the same time, today you have countless, you know, just look at Yelp. I mean, everybody's a critic. So the resources for food and restaurant experience and knowledge is far diverse today than it was before. And so a lot of

my staff who were very young looked at me going like, chef, we don't read the New York Times. So it's okay. Don't worry about it. But it did change, it did change things about what you did at the restaurant? Well, here's what I told the team. I said, the only way that we're going to make a difference with our guests, because they're not coming back, the New York Times is not coming back, is to make sure that every guest that leaves this restaurant leaves the restaurant with one thought in their mind. What the hell was Pete Wells talking about? Yeah. Out of that conversation, we coined one of our phrases, one guest at a time. Thomas, when you think about your life and career and where you are today, you know, you've kind of sealed your place and certainly in the history of modern American food.

You know, so many chefs think of you as like the Papa Smurf of chefs, if they're all Smurfs. How much of your success do you attribute to the work you put in and how much do you think has to do with luck? Well, you know, somebody told me a long time ago, a very wise man told me a long time ago, luck comes to those who work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, you know, you're casting that wide enough. You're bound to catch a little bit of luck. You know, I'm considered one of the best chefs in the country, yet I know there are, you know, many chefs out there who are better than I am. And why was I chosen? Like, why do I live this life? Why do I sit here with you talking about my career and not another chef.

Well, some of that has to do with being in the right place at the right time, but there has to be, you know, the desire and the determination and the commitment to actually go out and try to do what we do in order to actually have that opportunity to be lucky. That's chef and restaurateur Thomas Keller. By the way, one of Thomas's most famous creations is a dish he developed for a rat. Thomas was a consultant on the film Ratatoui, and he came up with the recipe for the stew that's made by Remy

and served to the food critic Anton Ego. Thomas even made a cameo appearance in the film. On IMDB, he's credited as playing Food Snob Number One. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of this show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music. composed by Rumtin Arablewe.

It was edited by Neva Grant with technical assistance from Josh Newell. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Carrie Thompson, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.