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and celery root vinaigrette. Hand-cut tagliatelle with Périgord truffles and grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. (The truffles were shaved tableside from a magnificent fist-sized monster.) Herb-roasted Chatham Bay cod ‘shank’ with a ‘fricassee’ of new-crop potatoes and applewood-smoked bacon emulsion. (Again, a liability turned into an asset, as the small, usually unservable tail section of fish had been cut across the bone and served like a lamb shank.) ‘Lobster Navarin,’ sweet butter-poached Maine lobster with glazed pearl onions, spring vegetables, and sauce ‘Navarin’ (another crosscultural reference – ‘Navarin’ is usually associated with a heavy, old-school French country classic of braised lamb shoulder). Brioche-crusted ‘confit’ of North American moulard duck ‘foie gras’ with braised fennel, fennel salad, and Tellicherry pepper. ‘Gastrique’ milk-poached four-story Hills Farm ‘poularde au lait’ with ‘crème fraîche’ dumplings and ‘bouquetíre’ of spring vegetables. Roasted Bellwether Farms spring lamb with a ‘cassoulet’ of spring pole beans and thyme-infused extra virgin olive oil. (These were the most fetching, tender little lamb chops I’d ever encountered.) ‘Roquefort’ ricotta cheese ‘gnocchi’ with a Darjeeling tea-walnut oil emulsion, shaved walnuts, and grated Roquefort cheese. Hayden mango soup ‘et son brunoise’ (I love the ‘et son brunoise’ thing – very funny). Haas avocado salad with Persian lime sorbet (of all the plates that made their way round our table that night, this was the only one that landed with a thud. Scott’s comment was, ‘This is waaay over my head. But then, I’m not that smart.’) ‘Coffee and doughnuts’ – cinnamon-sugared doughnuts with cappuccino semi-freddo (looking exactly like a coffee shop doughnut sitting next to a Chock Full O’Nuts cup filled with cappuccino, but marvelous). ‘Mille-feuille à la crème de vanille et son confit d’ananas mignardise.’

It was an absolutely awe-inspiring meal, accompanied, I should point out, by a procession of sensational wines. Unfortunately, I’m the wrong guy to be talking about wine. All I can tell you is that Scott, who knows about these things, used the word wow a lot. I remember a big brawny red in a cistern-sized glass, which nearly made me weep with pleasure. Cooking had crossed the line into magic.

Keller himself is quiet, with a bone-dry, gently sardonic sense of humor and the wary, observant gaze of a totally centered chef who knows what he wants to do – and is doing it – every day.

He seemed annoyed when asked about the roots of his drive for perfection. ‘Perfect is something you never actually attain,’ he said. ‘It’s something you search for. Once you reach it, it’s not perfect. You’ve lost it. It’s gone.’

Gush too much about ‘creativity’ and you’ll get: ‘There’s very little creativity – in anything.’

But instead of I, me, and my, he uses words like respect, hope, institution, future. Big words and big concepts in a trade where most of us look no further down the road than the next star, the next book deal, the next investor, the next busy Saturday night.

I was going to go on. I was going to blather on about the seamless integration of restaurant and locale. I planned to ruminate on the marvelousness of a chef finding, after years of wandering and false starts, a home. I was in love with the idea that a chef of Keller’s unique abilities and ambition could actually be content in a small town in wine country, marrying place, purveyors, personnel, and personal vision into an idyllic rural retreat, far from the carnivorous environs of the big city. The whole concept had great appeal to me. An ideal accomplished, if not by me, then at least by someone I liked and admired.

Then I opened up the New York Times and saw that Keller is planning a French Laundry in New York, that he’s moving in across the street from Jean-Georges, down a ways from Ducasse, and realized I’d learned nothing at all.

‘Unfinished business in New York,’ said my chef buddies as we sat around a table at a Lower East Side joint.

‘Rakel didn’t make it,’ said one friend, regarding