“The French Laundry is not new,” Thomas Keller said the first time we spoke. “It’s twenty years old. It’s bigger than me. A lot of people make it what it is. I want this book to be about the French Laundry, not about me.”
One of Thomas’s main claims is that the French Laundry could not be what it is without his purveyors, and he wanted to include a few of their stories. I traveled from the mountains above Napa to the farmlands of Pennsylvania to the cliffs of Maine to talk to them. Almost all of them, I found, either led double lives or had fallen into purveying by accident. Ingrid Bengis, a seafood purveyor, was a writer of some notoriety in the 1970s; Keith Martin was a stockbroker before he was a lamber; and John Mood, hearts of palm grower, remains a commercial airline pilot. I found this extraordinary as the pattern emerged, but soon, it seemed almost inevitable. It was only this kind of person who might bring to the work a passion equal to that of the chef. And it was only this kind of chef who would satisfy this unusual kind of purveyor.
