Over the kitchen door at Thomas Keller’s New York restaurant Per Se is an inscription. It reads ‘Finesse. Noun: refinement and delicacy of performance, execution or artisanship‘. Ask Keller about it and he looks up at the sign and says simply, ‘Life is all about finesse.’ It certainly is if you’re Thomas Keller. He’s rolling in finesse, bearing and poise (even when wearing his trademark black clogs) and an apparently unshakeable self-confidence.

Per Se is situated in the $1.7 billion Time Warner Centre at New York’s Columbus Circle on the southern corner of Central Park. It is a massive secular cathedral, glittering with the best retail opportunities money can buy and here nothing comes cheap, certainly not a top-end restaurant. Though his people prefer not to discuss money, it is said that Per Se cost around $12 million to open – very little of it Keller’s – making it possibly the most expensive new restaurant on earth. All the crockery, with its hound’s-tooth motif, is custom made, as is the linen and the silverware. The floors are of Italian bronzed tiles, the carpets unique, the kitchens unlike any other in New York. There might, therefore, be grounds for anxiety. If so, Keller doesn’t show it.

‘If you’re really happy with what you’re doing does it matter what the critics say?’ he asks. ‘Or even what the guests say? If we’re having a good night in the kitchen the by-product is your happiness.’

It is perhaps easier to say this now that Frank Bruni, restaurant critic of The New York Times, has awarded Per Se four out of four stars, and admitted to being ‘ineffably sad’ at the finishing of a risotto of summer truffles during a meal there. In a city full of top-end restaurants, fewer than half a dozen have the top score.
Bouchon by Thomas Keller – buy it from Amazon in the US

Bouchon – UK edition from Amazon

Even so, Keller does not appear to be a man swayed by the opinions of others; he has always followed his own path. Keller, 50, began his career aged just 17 in the kitchens of the Miami country club his mother managed, when the chef quit. For years he worked his way through kitchens in New England and New York, picking lowly jobs in top restaurants over loftier positions in less well-regarded places, before heading to France for a stint at the famed three-star Taillevent. ‘Taillevent has been a model for me,’ he says now, ‘and my kitchen is modelled on that.’ In the Eighties he returned to New York and opened Rakel (the name is a combination of his name and that of his then business partner Serge Raoul). It was there, Keller says, that he started developing his food philosophy. ‘I reinterpreted the shrimp cocktail so it was true to the flavour profile of the dish but different. So there was a tomato consomme infused with horseradish and we grilled the shrimp and put it all in a highball glass.’

Such culinary high jinks enthused the critics, but then came the Wall Street crash of 1987 and business collapsed. Within a few years, Serge Raoul had downgraded the restaurant to a neighbourhood bistro and Keller quit. It wasn’t his thing. So he travelled about again, picking up consultancies he hated, and executive positions which didn’t suit him. In 1991, while living in Los Angeles, he was told about a restaurant that was for sale in the Napa Valley town of Yountville. ‘I went there, saw the French Laundry and somehow knew it was the place I was looking for all my life,’ he later said. ‘I remember thinking, Yeah, this is home.’

He raised $600,000 from dozens of small investors, which he matched with bank loans, and then set to work creating the greatest restaurant in America, a place that would become famed for the hand-rolled cornets of salmon tartar and creme fraiche with which all his meals begin, and his delicate ways with panna cotta or walnut soups and, above all, the supreme quality of his ingredients. In October 1997 Ruth Reichl, then restaurant critic for The New York Times, said the French Laundry was ‘the most exciting place to eat in the United States’. The reservation book filled up and stayed filled.

Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck has eaten at the French Laundry twice. ‘It is just possible,’ he says, ‘that the best example of precise classical French cooking is not in France but in the United States.’ Keller refers constantly to his ‘philosophy’: All his chefs are entitled to create dishes in a way that ‘brings out the integrity of the product’, he says, but they must ‘not be intrusive on another course. There must be no repetition of any one item across a menu.’ Really? ‘Absolutely. When fava beans come in and I want to use them on a meat dish, someone else can’t use them on fish. It pushes our imagination.’ It also results in the most extraordinary list of dishes. Most restaurants have a couple of dozen on at any one time. The French Laundry – and now Per Se – has a repertoire of literally thousands.

He has even written a declaration of intent for his staff describing the philosophy behind the myriad tasting menus. ‘With each course we want to strike quick, mean and leave without getting caught,’ he writes, like some Norman Mailer of the stove. ‘All menus at the French Laundry revolve around the law of diminishing returns. That is the more you have of something the less you enjoy it.’ So lots of tiny courses and lots of intense flavours. ‘Imagine one carrot having as much sweet, earthy and fresh characteristic as a pound of carrots or a spoonful of pea soup with the impact of a thousand peas.’ I don’t need to imagine. I’ve tried it.

In time, the French Laundry spawned a nearby baby brother, Bouchon, and then a bakery, and then another Bouchon in Las Vegas. Next came the approach from Kenneth Himmel, developer of the Time Warner Centre, who wanted to put together the greatest collection of restaurants in the world. He knew he had to have Keller, and Keller in turn was ready to return to New York, to vanquish the demons of Rakel’s failure. ‘It is part of America,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be ambitious, you’ve got to move on. I suppose I wanted to find out how hard I could make it for myself and how hard I could be on my staff.’ Plus, as an incentive, he was given complete power to choose who else would be in the collection.

‘It wasn’t about wielding that power,’ he says. ‘It was about making sure we had like minds around us.’ One of the criticisms of Per Se is that it is, essentially, a restaurant in a shopping mall. All Keller will say about this is that ‘if the Centre succeeds we all succeed’ but there is no doubt that he has tried to stack the house in his favour. So the famed Charlie Trotter will open his first restaurant outside Chicago downstairs from Per Se. There’s a steakhouse from Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and a Japanese place called Masa offering tasting menus at $240 a pop. The Time Warner restaurant collection is so top end, so damn bling, it hurts.

But for a while it was almost dead before it started. A week after Per Se officially opened in February a fire ripped through the kitchen, closing it down for four months. ‘We had also closed the French Laundry for four months so we could bring all the staff out here to train up the new lot to send back,’ Keller says. ‘Now we had no way of training them.’ But somehow they got back on track.

He walks into the kitchen, through the ‘breezeway’, a corridor specially created to give the waiters a chance to adjust from the clatter of the kitchen to the hush of the dining room. He leads us round, introducing chefs, telling us that his job is to make them the best they can be, to pass on leadership skills. The company now has a staff of over 500 across America, a leap from the dozen or so he started with at the French Laundry. At one point he says he has acquired an executive coach, and that’s not a fancy car. But in fact an executive coach is someone who teaches people like Keller how to run large companies. ‘It’s something I need to be able to do,’ he says.

Keller clearly loves this management stuff. He shows the manuals for his employees, hundreds of pages on fish and cheese and meat and how to serve them; the correct way to store ingredients; how to lay tables. And that’s before you get to the recipes. All are now online, on a protected website. Soon there will be video link between the French Laundry and Per Se so Keller can see what’s going on.

They also keep track of thousands of meals, making lists of what many of their key diners have had. He pulls up sheets of menus from the night before.

Ask Keller himself how it feels to be described as the best chef in the world he responds repeatedly as if he had been asked him what it feels like to be merely ‘one of the best chefs in the world.’ He says ‘I accept my place in that list because enough people have said it. Thing is, I go to work every day just as I have done for 25 years. It’s that experience that has made me one of the best.’

The problem, as ever, is hype. If Per Se were in France, it would be regarded as a top player — no doubt it would have three Michelin stars and Keller would be spoken of alongside the likes of Pierre Gagnaire, Michel Bras and Marc Veyrat. But because he is in the US, he stands proud of the pack. He has to be the biggest, the most accomplished.

The truth is that not everything works. The 15-course dinner idea sounds great in principle but, in practice, creates an unmeetable challenge. It is impossible for every course to deliver, and so it proved with our meal. A dish of ‘grouper cheek’ in a chickpea crust was underwhelming – two so-what fragments of fish goujon. The ‘salad’ course was some pretty inconsequential ingredients, shepherded together for no good reason. And, as ever in the US, the cheese was just plain lousy.

But that is to judge the restaurant by its hype. Thomas Keller doesn’t really care what the critics think. He’s too centred for that, too focused to let an opinion get in the way. And it’s exactly this that makes him one of the best chefs in the world.

Thomas Keller’s new book, Bouchon, will be published by Workman on 18 November. www.frenchlaundry.com/perse.htm