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By Root 700 0

and a dill-weed tuile, Yukon Gold potato blini with shiitake mushrooms and chive butter, cauliflower panna cotta with Malpeque oyster glaze and osetra caviar, côte de saumon, an Atlantic salmon chop with russet potato gnocchi and Périgord truffles. Salmon chop? you’re thinking. Salmon ain’t got no chops! Yes, they do. Up by the head, there’s an oft-neglected triangle of delicious flesh. It’s a tricky little piece, usually discarded when chefs cut salmon for uniform portions of filet, because it’s an awkward shape and riddled with annoying little bones. At the Laundry, a liability has been turned into an asset. There it was on my plate, a perfect little côte de saumon, looking just like a baby lamb chop, one bone extending from a tiny medallion of fish. Sounds cute? It is. A lot of Keller’s dishes reveal an abiding sense of whimsy.

Whimsy and its unlovely cousin, irony, make appearances on a lot of menus these days, more often than not, unsuccessfully. You’ll see a menu item with a ‘cute’ transposition of terms – for instance, ‘tournedos of monkfish,’ which means nothing more than that the chef is bored with the word medallions or feels insecure about titling his creation ‘little pieces of monkfish.’ Rarely does the finished product bear any resemblance to the term in its original usage. Now, if you were to serve that little disk of monkfish, larded with bacon, topped with a slab of foie gras, and drizzled with truffled demiglace, you might be able to get away with calling it ‘tournedos of monkfish Rossini’ – a direct reference to the old beef classic. But why? It’s a dangerous game playing with your food like that. The line between cute and cloying (or worse – pretentious) is a very fine one.

But Keller, typically, is playing at something else here. He’s not looking to elevate a less than worthy dish by associating it with a beloved classic. More often than not, he’s taking something refined and giving it an ordinary – even clichéd – name (the best examples being his famous ‘coffee and doughnuts’ dessert, his ‘Caesar salad,’ and his ‘grilled cheese sandwich.’ ‘The one compliment,’ explains Keller, ‘that I enjoy the most is someone saying, “This reminds me of” – and they’ll tell you of this wonderful experience they had somewhere else. And I hope that when they go someplace else, they’ll say, “This reminds me of the French Laundry.” ’ Memory – that’s a powerful tool in any chef’s kit. Used skillfully, it can be devastatingly effective. I don’t know of any other chef who can pull it off so successfully. When you’re eating a four-star meal in one of the world’s best restaurants, and tiny, almost subliminal suggestions keep drawing you back to the grilled cheese sandwiches mom used to make you on rainy days, your first trip to Baskin-Robbins, or the first brasserie meal you had in France, you can’t help – even the most cynical among us – but be charmed and lulled into a state of blissful submission. It’s good enough when a dish somehow reminds you of a cherished moment, a fondly remembered taste from years past. When those expectations and preconceptions are then routinely exceeded, you find yourself happily surprised. Keller had a surprise for me.

He’d done his homework, I guess, gleaning from my book that I’m an absolutely degenerate smoker. There is no smoking at the French Laundry – maybe the only place on earth I don’t mind refraining. But, to be honest, by course number five I was feeling a slight need. To my embarrassment and delight, they had anticipated this in the kitchen. When the next courses arrived, mine was called ‘coffee and a cigarette’: Marlboro-infused coffee custard (with foie gras). My dinner companions hooted. I blushed down to my socks, thinking this a cruel but very funny joke at my expense. I certainly didn’t expect the thing to taste good. Goddamn the man, it was good. (He’d actually used the tobacco from a very decent cigar, he told me later.) Best of all, after I’d polished off my plate, I felt a very welcome, much-needed nicotine buzz.

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Une salade fraîche au truffe noire with celery branch