Bouchon Bakery Review
The menu comprised of mostly soups, salads and sandwiches, and the bakery selections for dessert. I decided to get the waygu beef Reuben, made with waygu pastrami, house baked rye, sauerkraut, Russian dressing and cheese (sorry don't remember the kind), and water to drink. Soon after my sandwich arrived.
The sandwich bread was accompanied with a salad. The salad was mesculin mix, with a classic vinaigrette, sprinkled with fresh chives. The flavor of the mesculin greens really stood out, I'm guessing that the salad greens were also sprinkled with a small amount of salt to help the lettuces have a stronger flavor. As for the sandwich the flavors of the sauerkraut and bread really stood out. While I do enjoy the flavor of sauerkraut I was someone disappointed, the selling point for the sandwich was the waygu pastrami, and there was only one slice of pastrami on the sandwich. For $14 I think that a bit more pastrami flavor would of helped me feel like I got my money's worth for the sandwich. Flavors of each individual ingredient used were excellent, and while eating you could taste the subtleties of the pastrami in the sandwich.
I didn't leave hungry so I feel I can still justify to myself spending the money, and the flavor of the sandwich was excellent. Maybe it's just a bit of my background of getting more meat on a sandwich, or I was just eating with my eyes but I felt my sandwich eating experience at Bouchon was a lacking in the beef. I think if I opened a restaurant without a name backing of a famous chef, and only put one slice of delicious meat, high end products and sold sandwiches in the $14-18 price range I would be considered a bit pretentious of my sandwiches and would quickly have to change my style of sandwiches.
I will do a review of the macarons from Bouchon later, with a review of macarons from La Maison Du Chocolat.
Chef Thomas Keller
Excellent article in this months issue of Wine Spectator magazine on Chef Thomas Keller. The article focused on his numerous failures, with some mixed in successes, that eventually paved the way for one one America's greatest restaurants, The French Laundry in Napa Valley, California. And in time the empire of great restaurants he runs, Per Se, Bouchon, Bouchon Bakeries (and yes Tiffany they make macarons there), and Ad Hoc. And the Creator of culinary dishes on the big screen, the ratatouille dish created by a rat, and the sandwich created by Adam Sandlers character in Spanglish.
The article described his failures in opening a restaurant in New York (leaving so much debt he almost couldn't open French Laundry), lying in France to get a apprenticeship, working with Daniel Boulud in the early 1980's at the Westbury Hotel (well before either were famous chefs), not going to culinary school, and the job hoping in between all those events. Then to the chaos of the first night, with no menu plan and no saute pans. To the single biggest event for the restaurant, two paragraphs by columnist Herb Caen of the San Francisco Chronicle that followed a description of cab drivers using whistles to scare deer away.
His theory on the dining experience is the idea of diminishing returns. The first taste should make you say WOW and soon it is gone. "We want you to say, 'I wish I had one more bite of that,' and then the next plate comes arrives and the same thing happens, but in a different way, a whole new flavor and emotion."-Thomas Keller.
For his books and the running of his restaurants Thomas Keller believes that collaboration with everyone has been key. Kellers book Bouchon was mostly written by chef Jeffrey Ceriello and the rest of the team at Bouchon, and Sous-Vide was mostly written by Chef Jonathan Benno and the team at Per Se. He is said to be a calm chef who no matter how busy, behind or overwhelmed hew becomes, he still goes for the touchdown with every dish.
Last year Thomas Keller Restaurant Group employed over 1,000 employees and served about 1.6 MILLION meals at nine locations.
"I look at wine as another way to share the experience of the table. It's part of the equation" -Thomas Keller
"We tend to over analyze cooking, and people become intimidated by it. At whatever level, it's product and execution."-TK
"... where I learned what cooks actually do. We nurture people, we nourish them. I thought, what's more honorable than that?" -TK
"Thomas was not a yelling and screaming kind of guy. I'm not either. He taught me to put a big emphasis on responsibility. Creating a team is not something every (chef) does well. For Thomas it means knowing what you need to do, and what the next guy needs to do, and stepping in to help without getting in the way." - Eric Ziebold of CityZen, Washington DC about working for Thomas Keller