Chef: Captain Cook

Thomas Keller uses more quotation marks than a contract lawyer. His menu has “bacon and eggs,” “chips and dip,” “coffee and donuts” and even “macaroni and cheese.” But this mac and cheese consists of orzo in coral oil with mascarpone topped with lobster and a parmesan chip. As intricate and deliberate as Keller’s cooking is, he’s desperate to ward off the gravitas. “Coming to a restaurant like this can be intimidating. And that’s the last thing I want,” he says. “I don’t want people to come here afraid, like it’s some kind of temple of gastronomy. It’s just a restaurant. Coffee and doughnuts on the menu should make you smile. It gets everyone laughing and in a good mood. Anything I can do to relieve the pressure of eating in a restaurant, I want to do.”

Keller’s joint, the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley, has been called one of the top restaurants in America by Esquire, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, USA Today and Wine Spectator. He’s earned the title the hard way, by, as he says, “getting the best ingredients and not screwing it up.” He spends much of his time developing relationships with micropurveyors–a commercial pilot who grows hearts of palm, a scholar who Fed-Exes her Maine lobsters to him. Then he focuses on the details: squeezing the moisture out of fish skin; steeping a lobster so he can cook it without the shell; straining everything over and over. “You look at a fish and you realize it was alive, and you respect the life of that fish and make sure you get the best out of it,” he says.

Keller fell into the chef thing. A high school grad with some limited carpentry skills and not much of a plan, he was washing dishes at one of the restaurants his mother owned in South Florida. When the chef quit, she moved him to the stoves, where he mostly made burgers and sandwiches. At first, he had little interest in cooking and even fewer skills. He was about as likely to become the best chef in America as Pauly Shore–whose mother owns L.A.’s The Comedy Store–was to become the country’s best comedian.

He’s done it by worrying less about impressing his customers than about just letting them enjoy eating. He begins the meal with a canape of salmon tartare with red onion creme fraiche in a savory tuile that looks just like a tiny ice cream cone. What sounds precious is somehow just fun. Then, because he has the luxury of charging a bucketful, he solves the problem of your palate’s becoming bored after two or three bites by serving five to 10 mini-courses of just a few gobbles each. The only big hunks he puts on the plate are of foie gras and truffles, which he loves and feels most people only get teased by.

Having apprenticed in France, Keller produces cooking that is very French, though he insists that it’s American. His ingredients are American, he says, as are his ideas. He eats at In-N-Out, the California burger chain. The salmon canape was inspired by a night at Baskin-Robbins, when he looked at his cone in a new way. His signature dessert, coffee and doughnuts (cappuccino semifreddo, a flavored mousse, topped with steamed milk, accompanied by cinnamon-sugar doughnuts) was thought up one panicked late night at a doughnut shop when he was poor and struggling and desperate to impress the James Beard Foundation at a dinner the next night. It’s effete food with testosterone subtext.

Keller impresses without trying too damn hard, like some other chefs. He doesn’t try to shock with weird juxtapositions, as in Tabasco ice cream. You never think, “Great sauce,” at the French Laundry. You think, “Man, that sauce tastes more like ginger-carrot than eating a pound of ginger and carrots.” The epiphanies come from finally figuring out exactly what certain foods are supposed to taste like. He refuses to fool you into thinking what’s in front of you is more than just food. “I remember my first experience at a three-star restaurant in France, and it didn’t meet my expectations. I read about these guys like they were gods, and it’s only food,” he says. “It wasn’t until eight months later I realized it had been a perfect meal.”

Unlike TV chefs, which he says he will never become (there’s not even a clear shot of his face in his best-selling cookbook), Keller is in the kitchen every day, cooking. His kitchen is calm and silent now, uber-professional; he’s dispensed with the angry outbursts he was once known for. But in 2003, when Keller, 45, plans to open a restaurant in Manhattan, he’s going to segue into an overseeing role. He feels bittersweet about that. Keller, whose knees are going out on him after years in the kitchen, tapes them up each morning before going to work. “Standing on your legs every day for 16 hours a day for 17 years, it’s like Michael Jordan running up and down the basketball court. I don’t want to just stay at the French Laundry and not be able to play the game. I’m afraid if I just stay here, I’m going to lose some of the ability to do what I do.”

So he says he’ll make the transition to coach, hoping to create two restaurants that last beyond his lifetime. “If it becomes unsuccessful after I leave, I’ve only achieved individual success, and I want success in a broader scope.” Referring to the famous hotelier, he continues, “Cesar Ritz set a certain set of standards 100 years ago, and they still strive to meet those standards. He’s truly a successful man because he created a set of standards to help [the staff] strive to be better, and not just at work, either.” Pretty ambitious stuff for a cook. Especially when it would be a lot easier to just yell a lot and get your own sitcom.