Chef Thomas Keller's contributions to professional cooking

Thomas Keller: Classic Innovator

Thomas Keller

Thomas Keller: Innovating the Classics

Any restaurateur will tell you that earning a star from Michelin, the definitive organization for recognizing quality in restaurants, is no easy task. Some chefs and owners work for decades to achieve one star for one restaurant. Yet Thomas Keller, the California chef responsible for some of the most celebrated restaurants in the country, was able to garner a three-star Michelin rating for two of his establishments in a two-year period. Not only was Keller able to impress the Michelin organization with the quality of food and service at his restaurants, he was also able to parlay his love and knowledge of food into a national culinary identity through several cookbooks, television appearances, media interviews, and even film consulting. While he may now fit the definition of a "celebrity chef," Keller remains entirely committed to the act of cooking and to the philosophy that the best culinary innovations are grounded in a respect for tradition.

Like many chefs, Keller began work in the restaurant business when he was just a teen. His mother owned the Palm Beach Yacht Club, a small lunch place for businessmen, and Keller worked there first as a dishwasher and then as a cook (Keller ____). It was during this time that Keller had an experience that would form the foundation of his culinary philosophy. As part of his daily cooking duties, Keller was responsible for making the daily hollandaise -- a classic and delicate French sauce that relies on the perfect emulsion of egg yolk and butter. Hollandaise is tricky to master, and is unforgiving with little mistakes. "The process fascinated me," Keller remembered. "There was no lying about it; it either separated and looked like it had curdled because you had done it wrong, or it was light and beautiful because you had done it right" (Ibid). As the son of a Marine drill sergeant, Keller respected the black-and-white consequences of the process, and took pride in mastering the tiny details necessary to making a perfect product. This attention to detail and quest for perfection would come to dominate Keller's later identity as a chef and restaurateur.

Keller's next job became an equally important influence on his culinary philosophy. Barely out of his teens, Keller landed a cooking job under French chef Roland Henin, who not only exposed him to the traditional staging techniques of the French kitchen line, but also presented him with a cookbook that Keller would eventually carry with him wherever he went -- Fernand Pointe's Ma Gastronomie. This encyclopedia of French cooking taught Keller classic recipes and techniques, but more importantly it showed him, in Keller's words, "how to make food your own; it wasn't just the recipe but the idea of a dish" (Ibid).

These two principles -- a dedication to mastering techniques and a strong desire to express himself through his cooking -- guided Keller as he opened his own restaurants; first, the celebrated French Laundry in Yountville, CA, then the popular bistro and bakery Bouchon, the critically acclaimed Per Se in New York City, and finally the mid-priced family dining concept "ad hoc." In each of these restaurants, Keller's menus have been built upon classic fare easily accessible to diners and executed with flawless technique. However, as fellow chef Michael Ruhlman points out, dining at one of Keller's restaurants is hardly a mundane experience. "[One experiences] not only a range of luxury food items… but also an entire meal that arrives out of a unique intelligence -- quirky, eccentric, distinct" (Ruhlman ____).

Keller's ability to meld the classic with the unique made waves in the culinary community when he opened the French Laundry, and continues to guide dining trends today. While more recent restaurant concepts have either plunged completely into the back-to-basics, ingredient-centered "simple fare" or have taken the opposite route towards bold fusion and radical experimentation, Keller is unrivaled in his mastery of the middle road. His menu at Per Se features dishes like Mac and Cheese, Bacon and Eggs, and Creamsicles, but these traditional dishes are reimagined in inventive ways. The Bacon and Eggs, for instance, is a buttery cake studded with pieces of braised pig's head and topped with a poached quail egg (Platt 2005). The Mac and Cheese is reinvented nightly, and often features lobster or scallops.