Don and Sally Schmitt and the Birth of the French Laundry

It’s fitting that Don and Sally conclude this book because they are the ultimate purveyors. They purveyed a restaurant.

Don Schmitt, as one Yountville resident put it, had built the town with his own hands, transforming it from a beer-soaked backwater into a thriving municipality and serving for many years as its mayor. When he and Sally, a housewife-turned-chef, took over the French Laundry, the building was decrepit and unlivable, abandoned, but known to all of Yountville as the French Laundry because it had once been, during the 1920s, a French steam laundry. The Schmitt family would build it into a one-seating, fixed-menu, handmade restaurant that was a harbinger of what was to become known as Californian cuisine.