The French Laundry Lives Up to Its Rep (But We Could Do Without The Birthday Torches)

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Alright, as we continue to wind through this fairly epic (and I don’t throw that word around lightly, as many folks seem to these days) Napa excursion, this post highlights one of my favorite parts of the entire journey.

For those of you keeping score at home, by the time our Friday evening rolled around, we had already experienced three ― yes, three — different winery tastings. Now, most folks might have been ready for a warm bath and a feather bed by that point, but Dio and me and our friends Rami and Keiko were just ramping up to one of the most anticipated stops on our tour of this fabled corner of the country.

After enjoying Bella Oaks (which you can read about HERE), we headed back to our hotel to freshen up and change into our fancy dinner attire. That’s because we had reservations that night for The French Laundry (TFL) in Yountville, Ca.!

Not familiar with TFL? Well, it’s one of the most celebrated restaurants in the US and is known for an ever-evolving array of food which mixes classic techniques with modern twists.

A French-style bistro opened in 1994 by Thomas Keller (who was at that point a rising star in the culinary world), it’s located in a modest, historic house which had been a French eatery since the early 1900s.

However, the spot was reimagined by Chef Keller as a full-on gastronomic destination. Exceptional, inventive cuisine rooted in fresh, locally sourced ingredients is their trademark, and in addition to their frequently changing seasonal menu, the elegant décor, impeccable service and precision artistry on display in their dishes have collectively earned TFL three extremely coveted Michelin stars.

Dio and I had been fortunate enough to dine there once before, in February of 2023. That time, we left feeling that it was a very good but yet somehow not great example of a Three-star Michelin experience (based on a few other outstanding meals we’d had at other, similarly appointed eateries ― which seemed as though they offered their guests a bit more inventiveness in their menus and care in their presentation). We were more than willing, however, to try such a legendary establishment again, and had been looking forward to this opportunity ever since plans for this Napa trip had begun to coalesce.

On a side note, when we attended the Arrow&Branch welcome reception earlier that day at the home of the Contursi family, we happened to mention we were eagerly anticipating our second TFL meal and learned then that several other guests at the reception already had reservations there for later on that weekend. For many of them (as was the case for our friends who’d be joining us), it would be their first visit to the iconic spot. Seemingly, a number of folks made a point to use this A&B investor event as the perfect time to avail themselves of such an opportunity.

On a side note, I think the international reputation of TFL looms so large that most folks have no understanding of just how tiny the place actually is. I mean, this is a small restaurant! I would wager that one of the reasons it is so hard to get a reservation there is because of the tremendous dichotomy between how many people want to eat there and how few tables the place has.

Unbeknownst to us, we wound up dining there just before the restaurant’s big 30th Anniversary celebration (which took place a few weeks before I posted this blog entry). We could tell the place was gearing up for the big to-do. For one thing, the oversized laundry tags which they are famous for handwriting your bill on (some folks believe that lighthearted presentation is meant to playfully distract customers from the total) were made of wood and marked with the number 30 ― a number which also adorned the menus this time around.

So, we now have two different keepsake tags from TFL: the standard one from our first meal there, and the souvenir one from this most recent visit.

I should point out that sharing a meal with us at this restaurant was the main impetus for Rami and Keiko making the trip to Napa. So, together, we had all paced ourselves carefully at the earlier tastings. We knew we had a rather extravagant meal coming and did not want to arrive for dinner too full or tired to properly appreciate the experience.

I should explain that dinner at TFL is known for being a slow-paced affair. These are meals that are designed to be savored and dwelled upon rather than rushed through, and the staff there expects as much. I’m not suggesting that folks refrain from eating anything all day long in anticipation of a huge and filling meal (because some TFL guests are quite open about taking that approach), but I do recommend doing whatever one can to make sure they will be comfortable over as many as seven courses of food and copious amounts of beverages. Otherwise, you can easily wind up stuffed and miserable ― and what’s the point?

Another lesson we’d learned from our previous visit was to arrive about 20 minutes early (which we did this time). How come? Because when you are traveling with your own bottles of wine, as we were, it will take a few minutes to get all of those details squared away with the staff. But another reason to do this is so that you have enough time to take any exterior photos of the restaurant to fully document your visit. You see, most everyone who’s eating there is also eager to get at least a few photos of their own, and because the seating is so limited and the meals so slowly paced, if you don’t shoot your pictures before entering, by the time you’re done, it’s too dark for decent outside shots.

The first time we were there, we’d admired the restaurant’s beautiful private garden (where they source many of the vegetables and herbs used in their dishes), so we sauntered over there and got a few shots and video footage of it while patiently waiting our turn to grab some photos of the front of the building itself without other excited patrons in them! Check these out.

Now, about that wine we brought with us…

I’d selected a Champagne and an older bottle of red which had a lot of sediment but was basically at its peak as far as flavor goes. So, the Champagne needed to be chilled before serving, and the red needed to only be decanted for sediment immediately before being served.

Pay close attention to that last detail, because it will come up again in a bit.

Eventually, outdoor photo time has concluded, and we are shown to our seats. Below, you can see the waiting room, the glassware, and our table.

There are two main dining rooms, one upstairs and one downstairs. Last time we ate here in early 2023 (you can read about that HERE), we were seated upstairs. And, if I’m being completely honest, the upstairs area felt a bit too crowded for our taste. Almost as though they should have lowered the capacity of that room by a few people, you know what I mean?

This time we wound up downstairs in a noticeably bigger room, and our table was in one of the back corners. I chose to sit with my back to the corner, so I had a fantastic view of everything and everyone else in the room. That has to be the best seat in the house, and I distinctly felt much more comfortable than before. Everything boded well for this being a much better overall experience. Rami and Keiko drove separately and joined us just in time for the meal to begin.

This is probably a good time to explain the unique situation I found myself in as far as selecting what wine I’d bring from Atlanta for us to enjoy during our meal.

The corkage policy for TFL is: For each group of people dining together, you can bring one bottle of wine per couple. So, four of us meant I could arrive with two bottles. However ― and I honestly don’t recall if this was a hard and fast policy of theirs, but it’s generally a “best practice” in the industry ― you never want to show up with a bottle of wine that is also on a restaurant’s wine list. Meaning, a bottle that they currently offer for sale. It’s just bad form.

That’s not usually a problem for me in most places. However, TFL famously has one of the most extensive wine lists in the entire world! So, I found it more than a little challenging to come up with some special wines I had in my cellar and which I also enjoyed and wanted to share with our friends, which were not already available at the restaurant.

I spent a few days researching all of this, and at some point I realized that at the Capolinea dinner, I had recently purchased some 2012 Billecart-Salmon Champagne Grand Cru Louis Salmon Brut Blanc de Blancs (which is Dio’s favorite champagne), and I had a sneaking suspicion that TFL had not added that to their list yet. I was right, so I knew that one was a lock!

I have mentioned several times before here on HeavyPourWine that I am mainly into Bordeaux, but wouldn’t you know it ― on their list they had every single Bordeaux that I have in my cellar. So that was out. I then changed tack and went to one of my other favorite regions: Tuscany. There was literally only one bottle of Tuscan wine in my cellar that qualified. It was a 1990 Tenuta Caparzo Brunello di Montalcino Vigna La Casa. I’d been hanging onto my last bottle of this for a good occasion, and an amazing meal in Napa with dear friends seemed like the perfect moment to enjoy it. Luckily for me, TFL did not have anything like this one on their list.

Fast forward to the meal itself: We began with the Champagne, and everyone loved it. Then, they served the amuse-bouche, and the Champagne paired very nicely with those assorted vegetables and Chef Keller’s signature appetizer, “Oysters and Pearls.” It’s a custard made with pear tapioca and cream topped with a poached oyster, butter sauce (containing oyster liquor!), a scoop of caviar and a dusting of chives. I had the non-seafood version which looked exactly like everyone else’s.

At that point, the Somm came over to discuss what our next wine would be. Since the only other bottle I’d brought was a red, I asked him to choose a white for us for the next few courses. He requested some basic guidance (so he wasn’t flying completely blind on this one), and I simply told him I’d prefer a Burgundy and our price range. Now, I’m just a self-taught wine person, as I assume many of you out there reading these posts are as well. Despite what I’ve been able to learn over the years on my own, when dining at a place which operates at such a high level of gastronomic complexity, I would almost always rather place myself in the hands of their respected, professional Somm team and let them pick the wine for me. They know these wines very well, and they know this food.

They know what will work best for most palates, and they have no desire to risk disappointing a table of people who’ve been looking forward to this experience for months (or perhaps even years). You won’t be surprised to hear that based on those broad guidelines, he brought us a 2022 Vincent Dancer Meursault Les Grands Charrons, and he really nailed it!. It was amazing and went quite well with the next few courses.

Then we moved on to the savory courses, so it was time to introduce my red. And, honestly, that’s where things got a little wonky.

They brought over the wine in a decanter and poured it for us. Frankly, it was drinkable, but I have to admit it was rather disappointing. Largely because I know how good that wine really is! I’d initially had three bottles of that 1990 Vigna La Casa, and the first two (which we’d drank recently in Atlanta) were spectacular. The only reasons I can come up with for why this one didn’t seem the same was that either it had bottle shock from all the recent cross-country travel, or the restaurant had accidentally decanted it for too long ― or a combination of the two.

I didn’t inquire exactly how long they had decanted it before bringing it to the table, but I had made it clear to the staff that they should do that just prior to it being poured. My fear is that they instead decanted it a good bit earlier, as a way of trying to give it air. But wait, don’t wines always require a good bit of time to “breathe” before being served?

Ah, sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Let’s talk about wines that are described as being “at their peak.”

When a very young red wine is first opened and drank, one often notices the flavor profile is fairly simple, or primary. It might also be unusually tannic. But, if you swirl it around in your glass or you simply leave it sitting still in the glass for an hour ― or if you decant it and return 30 or 60 or 90 or even 120 minutes later, the wine, and the flavor of the wine, changes greatly. The reason is that as the air gets into wine it transforms the wine chemically, making the wine (especially young wine) better and more drinkable.

However, when wine sits for years in a bottle, a very, very minute amount of oxygen seeps slowly into the bottle through the cork over time. That’s on purpose. It’s why cork was chosen as the preferred stopper for fine wines: it ages them naturally. So, if you open many wines that are decades old, you may not need to air it out at all. Because it’s already been doing that on its own since the moment it was bottled. There’s no need to even swirl it in your glass. It’s ready to go!

That’s called being “at its peak drinking window.”

This particular wine was bottled in 1990. It had literally been aging and airing naturally for 34 years. And if one were to let it sit out in a decanter for an hour or two before drinking, instead of tasting better, it’s probably going to taste worse. Because all of this air is taking it past it’s peak right in the decanter! All of this air is making the wine taste and smell old, acidic and, well, “flabby.” That’s what’s meant when someone says a wine tastes austere. And my bottle of Vigna La Casa definitely tasted austere.

Now, it could be that the folks at TFL did just as I had requested and decanted it mere moments before delivering it to our table. If so, then it's likely that it was suffering from the aforementioned bottle shock, which sounds like the name of a crappy high school thrash band, but in reality, is a widely acknowledged problem that can occur when a fragile wine gets overly agitated before being opened (often in transit). The bottle is shaken too much and all sorts of chemical reactions take place that result in the fruit flavors of the wine becoming muted or much softer than would normally be expected.

The day before, my bottle had traveled in my car to the Atlanta airport, then on a flight to San Francisco, and then in the rental car from San Francisco to Napa. I suppose there was plenty of opportunity for bottle shock to set in. The one good thing about this phenomenon is that it’s temporary. If you have wine that has gone through a lot of traveling to get to you, or that you’ve had to bring quite a distance for a gathering, you can often let it sit for a few weeks before opening it, and those deleterious effects will have dissipated. But, of course, we were drinking this wine almost right away.

In hindsight, I probably should have brought a much younger wine instead. I was just so focused on finding a nice wine which wasn’t already represented on their list. So, yeah, I probably screwed up my last bottle of Caparzo. Again, was it drinkable? Absolutely. But was it a bummer, knowing how much better it should have tasted? You bet. I’m going to chalk this up to a valuable lesson learned ― and one which I can pass on to all of you here.

If you’d like to learn more about the concept of bottle shock, check out this informative article HERE.

Or, if you’re a movie buff, check out the underappreciated 2008 dramedy “Bottle Shock,” starring the late, great Alan Rickman.

Back to our meal, it was outstanding. Much better than our previous visit. Many of the same items were available on the menu this time around, such as their famed “Bread and Butter” (a bitter cocoa laminated brioche served with butter made from milk given by a group of seven specific Jersey cows which live their best life, and whose output is only available at Keller’s two restaurants), “Coffee and Donuts” (cappuccino semifreddo and cinnamon-sugar donuts) and “Peruvian Chocolates” (made with olive oil). But there were plenty of other dishes which were new to us.

I have put together a little video of the champagne pouring and several of the courses being served, which many of you might appreciate getting the chance to enjoy vicariously below!

The entire meal lasted some four hours and was filled not only with wondrous food and drink but with stimulating conversation. Mostly we all just talked about Rami and Keiko’s first day in Napa, and how much they were enjoying themselves.

I should also mention that there’s a common misconception about high-end restaurants of this type, where the presentation of seemingly tiny portions of food is at least as important as the food itself. Folks naturally assume that meals at such eateries are not filling. However, I will tell you that we were so full we could not have eaten anymore. Yes, the portions are small, but there are so many courses! And many of the items they offer are inherently rich and heavy. We had a ton of amazing food between us all.

At the end of the meal, they gave us each a nice bag filled with little tins of cookies to take with us, as well as keepsake menus. Then they offered us a tour of the kitchen, which I understand is a common occurrence there. We took them up on that, of course.

They then offered us a tour of the wine cellar. That had not happened after our first visit, and I have a feeling it was because they realized this time that we were really into wine. Whether this is something most people receive or not, for us it was a real treat.

We followed our head server through the kitchen and out back to the wine cellar. That’s where we also learned that Chef Keller is a cigar aficionado (as am I) with an impressive cigar humidor. I would love to get the chance to share a Cuban cigar with him one day. Unfortunately, he was not on the premises at the time.

You can see a video of our trip into the cellar here:

To sum things up, this second trip to TFL exceeded our expectations and more than made up for our slightly disappointing inaugural visit. We will definitely be back. That said, I would be remiss if I was not completely honest about the one negative aspect of dining there, which remained the same both times. That was the birthday parties.

Don’t get me wrong: I completely understand why someone would want to have dinner at this world-famous restaurant for their birthday ― and it seems an awful lot of people do, as there were at least four such celebrations which took place just in our dining room alone while we were eating. It kind of felt like we were the only people in the whole place who were not celebrating a birthday! That’s basically the same way it was the first time we ate there, too.

But it’s how the restaurant chooses to mark those occasions which was, truly, kind of overbearing to the rest of the patrons. They bring out a giant slice of cake adorned with what I can best describe as a Fourth of July torch. Such a presentation can’t help but draw the rest of the diners’ attention to the birthday boy or girl. Inevitably one or more of the celebrants’ friends or family starts singing “Happy Birthday” to them, and you know how that goes: if you’re sitting just a few feet away, you can’t help but feel compelled to join in, out of a sense of decorum. Then the torch is blown out. The whole production takes a couple of minutes.

But here’s the thing: the place is really small, right? So, first of all, the second time everyone is pressed into service to sing “Happy Birthday” to a stranger it’s already starting to feel a bit old. Imagine that happens four times during one dinner. In a rather tiny room.

Now, imagine that you ― and probably most of the other people there, including the birthday folks ― have waited a long time for the chance to sample amazing delicacies paired carefully with amazing wines, but every time one of those giant candles goes out the whole room is filled with acrid smoke. The place stunk like sulfur dioxide for at least five minutes or more after every one of these situations.

This negatively affected the taste of the food and the wine, and collectively it added up to a good bit of time in which our lovely experience was overpowered, and not in a good way.

You know it’s bad when folks start to cough, and their eyes start to water because there’s too much smoke in an enclosed space.

I’m not sure why the restaurant can’t just bring someone a piece of cake and wish them a happy birthday in a gentle and sweet manner, without generating any noxious smoke or fire.

I will say that the outdoor seating looked quite lovely when we passed it on the way in, and I’m pretty sure that if the weather is nice the next time we’re lucky enough to dine there, I’ll request we sit outside. Perhaps that will mitigate the unwelcome by-products of all those candles…

Did I come off like a sourpuss there at the end? I don’t mean to! Birthday brouhahas notwithstanding, dining at TFL is an incredible experience that everyone who reads this blog deserves to have for themselves at some point. I hope each of you make it there, and that it’s as inspiring to you as it is for me.

As always, thanks for keeping up with my wine-centric adventures. Until next time…