Thomas Keller

Thomas Aloysius Keller (born October 14, 1955) is an American chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author.

She and her husband Don purchased the building in 1978 and converted it into a restaurant.

Its popularity waned as the stock market bottomed out and at the end of the 1980s, Keller left, unwilling to compromise his style of cooking to simple bistro fare.

Following the split with his partner at Rakel, Keller took various consultant and chef positions in New York and Los Angeles.

After returning to America in 1984, he was hired as chef de cuisine at La Reserve in New York, before leaving to open Rakel in early 1987.

Rakel's refined French cuisine catered to the expensive tastes of Wall Street executives and received a two-star review from The New York Times.

In the spring of 1992 he came upon a restaurant in Yountville, California founded by Sally Schmitt, in a space formerly occupied by an old French stream laundry.

Prior to the opening of The French Laundry, Thomas Keller started a small olive oil company called EVO, Inc. in 1992, with his girlfriend of the time, to distribute Provençal-style olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Recently, Keller started marketing a line of signature white Limoges porcelain dinnerware by Raynaud called Hommage Point (in homage to French chef and restaurateur, Fernand Point) that he helped and a collection of silver hollow ware by Christofle.

He has also attached his name to a set of signature knives manufactured by MAC.

Keller spent nineteen months raising $1.2 million from acquaintances and investors to purchase the restaurant, then re-opened it in 1994.

Over the next few years the restaurant earned numerous awards, including from the James Beard Foundation, gourmet magazines, the Mobil Guide (five stars), and the Michelin Guide (three stars).

He and his landmark Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, have won multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation, notably the Best California Chef in 1996, and the Best Chef in America in 1997.

The restaurant is a perennial winner in the annual Restaurant Magazine list of the Top 50 Restaurants of the World.

After the success of The French Laundry, Thomas and his brother, Joseph Keller (currently owner/chef of Josef's in Las Vegas), opened Bouchon in 1998.

On January 26, 2004, Keller opened his restaurant Bouchon in Las Vegas.

On February 16, 2004, Keller's much-anticipated Per Se restaurant opened in the Time Warner Center complex in New York under the helm of Keller's Chef de Cuisine, Jonathan Benno.

Per Se, which was designed from scratch and custom-built as part of the overall construction process, was an immediate hit on the New York restaurant scene, with reservations booked months in advance and publications including The New Yorker and The New York Times giving rave reviews.

In 2005, he was awarded the three-star rating in the inaugural Michelin Guide for New York City for his restaurant Per Se, and in 2006, he was awarded three stars in the inaugural Michelin Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area for The French Laundry.

He is the only American chef to have been awarded simultaneous three-star Michelin ratings for two different restaurants.

His restaurants currently hold seven Michelin stars in total: three at Per Se, three at The French Laundry, and one at The Surf Club Restaurant.

Keller's mother was a restaurateur who employed Thomas as help when her cook got sick.

Four years after his parents divorced, the family moved east and settled in Palm Beach, Florida.

In his teenage summers, he worked at the Palm Beach Yacht Club starting as a dishwasher and quickly moving up to cook.

It was here he discovered his passion for cooking and perfection of the hollandaise sauce.

During summers, he worked as a cook in Rhode Island.

One summer, he was discovered by French-born Master Chef Roland Henin and was tasked to cook staff meals at The Dunes Club.

Under Henin's study, Keller learned the fundamentals of classical French cooking.

After The Dunes Club, Keller worked various cooking positions in Florida and soon became the cook at a small French restaurant called La Rive in the Hudson River valley in Catskill, New York.

Thomas worked alone with the couple's grandmother as prep cook.

Given free rein, he built a smokehouse to cure meats, developed relationships with local livestock purveyors and learned to cook entrails and offal under his old mentor, Roland Henin, who would drop by on occasional weekends.

After three years at La Rive, unable to buy it from the owners, he left and moved to New York and then Paris, apprenticing at various Michelin-starred restaurants.

Located down the street from The French Laundry, it serves moderately priced French bistro fare, with Bouchon Bakery opening next door a few years later (in 2006 Keller opened a branch of the bakery in the Time Warner Center in Manhattan).

Keller has joked in the past that the motivation for Bouchon's opening was to give him somewhere to eat after work at The French Laundry.

The latest restaurant, "ad hoc", opened in September 2006 in Yountville with a different fixed price comfort food dinner served family style every night.

Originally intended to be a temporary project while Keller planned his lifelong dream restaurant for the location, serving hamburgers and wine, he decided to make ad hoc permanent and find a new location for the hamburger restaurant due to its popularity.

The former French Laundry Chef de Cuisine Timothy Hollingsworth won the Bocuse d'Or USA semi-finals in 2008, and represented the U.S. in the world finals in January 2009 under Keller's supervision where he placed 6th.

On describing his reasons for accepting the Bocuse d'Or Team USA presidency, Keller stated, "When Chef [Paul] Bocuse calls you on the phone and says he’d like you to be president of the American team, you say, ‘Oui, chef’. He's the role model, the icon".

In April 2009, Keller became engaged to longtime girlfriend and former general manager at the French Laundry, Laura Cunningham.

Keller is the president of the Bocuse d'Or U.S. team and was responsible for recruiting and training the 2009 candidates.