Chef's Surprise

By Terry McCarthy

It is mid-January, and Thomas Keller, one of the country's most celebrated chefs, has just arrived from Napa Valley, Calif., to the coldest weather in New York City in 10 years. Over the weekend the pipes froze and burst in the new high-rise Time Warner Center building where his restaurant, Per Se, is located, so there is no water. The floor in his kitchen is being re-laid for the third time to get it level. The fire alarm keeps going off with flashing lights and a deafening siren, and platoons of electricians, plasterers and carpenters are working frantically to get the place ready for the building's opening in three weeks.

None of this bedlam fazes Keller, 48, who is used to the organized chaos of a busy kitchen. Instead he has zeroed in on a minor detail, the tiny labels on the Garnier Thiebaut linen that has just arrived from France. "Especially made for the French Laundry" they read, referring to Keller's four-star restaurant in Napa instead of Per Se, for which the linen was ordered. That few if any diners will notice the label on their napkin is immaterial; Keller knows it is wrong. And it irritates him.

Keller is regarded, even among America's top chefs, as a perfectionist. He is the first chef to win back-to-back best-chef awards from the James Beard Foundation, the Oscars of the restaurant industry. Since 1994 he has devoted himself single-mindedly to cooking in the 17-table French Laundry in the town of Yountville (pop. 2,916). The Napa Valley restaurant is regularly rated as one of the best in the nation--and one of the hardest at which to snare a reservation. Keller grosses about $7.5 million annually there, and his 1999 French Laundry cookbook is in its 16th printing and has sold 243,000 copies. He expanded his business carefully in 1998 by opening Bouchon, a bistro-style restaurant that is a three-minute walk down the street from the Laundry. Last year he added a bakery on the same street.

But this year the chef who likes to monitor every plate that goes out into his dining rooms--and every plate that comes back unfinished--is taking the celebrity-chef diversification plunge. Micromanaging is no longer an option. On Jan. 26 he opened a second Bouchon, in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Per Se is scheduled to open in New York on Feb. 16. Keller has another cookbook due out in the fall, based on dishes served at the original Bouchon. He is also marketing a line of Limoges porcelain by Raynaud that he helped design and a collection of silver hollow ware--egg cups, wine buckets--by Christofle, both destined for high-end retail stores. For dessert, he is simultaneously starting a $1.8 million renovation of the French Laundry and planning an inn on land opposite the restaurant. "This is quite a year for me," says Keller, shaking his head wistfully. "Everything has just telescoped together."

Celebrity chefs have become an industry in the past decade--but with very patchy records. Despite all the TV and franchising, some, like Rocco DiSpirito, have suffered from quality-control issues or damaged their reputation.

But Keller, like most entrepreneurs, needed to take the risk. He knew he couldn't continue at the French Laundry indefinitely. "The kitchen is such an athletic place. At some point you have to stop being, say, a running back and become a coach," he says. Despite having had two operations, Keller still experiences pain in his knees while standing at the stove.

After a decade of living and working in almost monastic seclusion in Yountville, he has had to devise a business model that allows him to oversee several restaurants spread out over 3,000 miles, while maintaining the exacting standards for which he is famous. That means more than doubling his business's sales in one year--without diluting the brand or the diner's experience.

Keller has found a typically idiosyncratic solution to the management problem. He has set up an eclectic six-member advisory council to mentor him on the expansion of his business: two bankers, an attorney, a restaurant consultant, an accountant and a psychologist. (Chefs are a little crazy, as anyone in the restaurant business will tell you.) He has increased staff training to reassure himself that the pursuit of perfection will be maintained even when he is not in the kitchen. And, as insurance, he is installing a live video link between the kitchens of the French Laundry and Per Se so he can eyeball the day's squid preparation or vegetable selection on a large plasma screen.

The change has not been easy for Keller, a legendary control freak. Team member Kristen Armstrong, a psychologist and executive coach, worked on Keller's behavior. Says he: "I am a chef. I am used to controlling. I didn't like delegating. But over the past two years she has helped me a lot with that." But even with Armstrong's coaching, Keller still yearns to stay hands on.

"Thomas wants to touch everything. He trusts his instincts, and he trusts his eye," says Adam Block, Keller's restaurant agent and a council member. "He wants to be there when a decision has to be taken." In Keller's arena there is no margin for error. He charges $135 a person for his tasting menu at the French Laundry, not including wine, and if quality slips even a fraction, his customers won't return. "Our industry is so fragile," says Keller. "The media builds you up, and then it tears you down."

Keller is painfully aware of the influence of the media. Born in California, he began working in a Palm Beach, Fla., restaurant run by his mother, and after serving apprenticeships at top restaurants in France, arrived in New York City in the monied mid-'80s, attracting a lot of media attention when he opened his restaurant Rakel in 1986. But when the market crashed in 1987 and Rakel struggled, Keller was savaged in the press. "My credibility was low after Rakel failed. I was labeled the chef who couldn't control food or labor costs."

He left New York and wandered the country, consulting for different restaurants before visiting Napa in 1992, where he came across the French Laundry. He pulled together a group of investors and opened in 1994. Keller thrived in the bucolic calm of the wine country. His manner mellowed, and he got his infamous temper under control. Keller's father was a Marine drill instructor. "He used to tear people apart and then build them up again. I used to be like that. But now if I shout at someone, I get embarrassed." He moved into the house behind the Laundry with Laura Cunningham, general manager of the restaurant. The awards stacked up. New York seemed the last thing on his mind.

But in 2001 Kenneth Himmel, head of Related Urban Development, a New York City--based real estate development firm, flew out to talk to him. Himmel's company had been given the job of attracting retail outlets and restaurants to the new corporate headquarters of Time Warner, the company that publishes this magazine, going up on Columbus Circle at a corner of Central Park in Manhattan. Himmel had five restaurant spaces to fill and needed a megastar to anchor the project. Even though Keller had left New York under a cloud, Himmel was betting he could lure him back. The enticement was prime location--floor space in one of the most exclusive parts of the city, with a postcard view of the park.

Keller went to Adam Block, who wondered aloud whether Keller was ready to return to the cutthroat New York market. It was time to try again, Keller decided. After five days and three all-night negotiating sessions with Himmel, they did the deal. Critically, Block inserted a clause into the contract that gave Keller veto rights on other restaurants in the development. Block didn't want to see Keller's brand tarnished by sharing space with a franchise. He had a $10 million to $12 million investment to protect--fancy New York restaurants don't come cheap. Keller helped line up an all-star team: Masa Takayama from the $300-a-sitting Ginza Sushi-Ko in Los Angeles, Gray Kunz (Lespinasse in New York) and Charlie Trotter (Charlie Trotter's in Chicago). Jean-Georges Vongerichten (Jean Georges and Vong in New York) made up the fifth.

Keller knew the point would come when he would no longer be able to cook full time, so his thoughts turned to creating something that would outlive him. "Most people's legacy is their kids. I don't have any kids, so my legacy is the restaurant. And to keep the continuity, the key is picking the right people and training them."

For head chef at Per Se, Keller picked Jonathan Benno, 34, who has worked with him in Yountville for two and a half years. Keller will get the kitchen in New York up and running, and then Benno will take over in May. Benno will be working with 18 other alumni from the French Laundry whom Keller has transplanted to New York. And of course Keller will be in constant video contact from Napa--"I want to create real synergy--because I am trying to create two fine dining restaurants," he says.

To the 48 original investors who helped finance the French Laundry, Keller is more a rare creative talent who needs to be nurtured--a Michelangelo in the Medici court--than an opportunity to squeeze ever higher returns out of their investment. "It is not about maximizing profit," says Joe Wender, an advisory director with Goldman Sachs in New York City who recently moved to Napa and sits on Keller's council. "Moving to New York is one of the most high-risk things he could do. It is Thomas saying, 'I want to create something great and unique in the New York market.'"

Still, Keller says he cannot afford to lose money either. To set up Per Se, he closed the French Laundry for four months. "At $650,000 a month [in lost revenue], that adds up to a lot of money," he says. He is banking heavily on success his second time round in New York--hence the long hours spent training his staff for the move over the past 18 months. "The only two ways we are going to fail is if the building is a flop, or if we fail as a team." He pauses and smiles faintly. "So the thing is, will the building fail?" And that, finally, is something even the perfectionist Thomas Keller cannot control.