DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This is the story of the most expensive meal I’ve ever eaten.

The front door of the restaurant opens into a small foyer with a short bar along the left side. The hostess table stands to the right; it was defended by an officious and somewhat unpleasant woman who wore her maitre d’meanor (I just made that word up) like a disagreeable shade of rouge. She intercepted us as we stepped inside, blocking our passage through the foyer as if we had planned to bully our way into the dining room to commandeer a table for ourselves. “Can I help you?” she inquired, although her body language was a lot less deferential than the words she spoke. Given the notorious difficulty of making reservations, it might be true that the restaurant gets a lot of drop-ins who deserve to be shunted rudely back out the door, but still I think it’s not too much to ask to have the greeter assume that arriving guests are indeed expected and welcome.

The small bar in the foyer had room for four, and five were already crowded there, leaving us to stand uncomfortably in the doorway. It seemed everyone was having a nice time except for me — they were talking, laughing, drinking, casually previewing the night’s menu, and not being hassled by the tense hostessperson with clipboard and fangs. Worse, one of the guys at the bar, a GQ coverboy in a crisp blue blazer with a fashionable shirt and tie and unseasonable tan and digitally retouched teeth and an accent and I’ll stop there while this sentence still has a prayer of being understood on the first pass, was holding forth on the best time of year to sail to St. Maarten… I shifted my weight with a sigh and felt the unfamiliar bind of my stiff leather shoes and brand-new suit jacket, and decided that eating at the French Laundry was a big mistake: I have the wrong temperament, the wrong salary, and the wrong wardrobe.

We’d come too far, though. The reservations were two months in the making, and we’d driven an hour to get here. I’d come for the food, so I resolved not to let my buttons get pushed by the people.

The hostess, her bureaucratic mind assuaged by the presence of my name on her ledger, offered us the wine list so we could browse it while we waited for a place to stand while we waited for a place to sit while we waited for our table. She apologized for the delay, explaining that the restaurant plans for a “three hour dining experience” (!), but that some guests “linger over their meal.” While this revelation cascaded around my brain (it’s possible to “linger” over a three-hour meal?!), I opened the proffered list.

It was a padded binder containing about 40 pages. Some of the prices had four digits. Yes, before the decimal. I felt all orifices tighten simultaneously.

I flipped past the chapters of European wines to find the page on Zinfandel, the only varietal with which I could honestly claim familiarity. I was extremely surprised to see that the prices were not unreasonable — $30 to $50 per bottle. And then I realized that I was reading the prices for half bottles.

The bar opened up. We took two stools with relief. Standing in the doorway had been stressful; as ironic as it might sound, having a place to sit made my spirits lift immediately. And it cheered me up even more to hand the wine binder back to the hostess with a firm “no thanks,” pronounced so as to clearly communicate the sentiment, “$30 for a half-bottle of Zinfandel, are you out of your freaking mind?!”

The restaurant offered three fixed-price menus. The standard menu provided five courses (appetizer, fish, meat, cheese, dessert) with several choices per course, for $115. The vegetarian menu offered nine courses with no choices, for the same price. The Chef’s Tasting Menu, the creme de la creme, the Keller extrava-gonzo, ran $135 and contained nine courses plus upgrades, e.g. foie gras for a “$20 supplement.”

I’d abandoned my vegan tendencies for this meal back when I made our reservation. And upon reading the vegetarian menu, I decided that a couple of pieces of fish wouldn’t hurt either, for the vegetarian menu contained two courses I just wasn’t that interested in: something with beets, and something else with artichokes. I don’t care if God is in the kitchen wearing a white apron; I’m not paying $115 to eat artichokes. So, both my wife and I decided on the standard five-course menu, although we planned to request a second fish course in lieu of the land-meat.

As we were reading the menu, poised between awe and fear, excitement and anxiety, hunger and, well, more fear, a waiter approached with a tray bearing two small spherical rolls. He inquired, “Gruyère puff pastry?” We gratefully accepted, and I began to relax into the decadence of the evening. Then I bit into the biscuit and thought with alarm, “What the hell, it’s empty!” It’s laughable in retrospect, but from the waiter’s description I guess I’d had in mind some sort of upscale cheese stick.

Read the french laundry, part 2: appetizers.