Visiting The Theater Of The Mouth

Thomas Keller's kitchen hums with the work of 1,000 acts of repetition, each performed by a staff of chefs trained to move in tight syncopation to his beat.

Timing is everything: the turn of a spoon, the lick of a flame, and focus. It's the magic that makes a small northern California restaurant called The French Laundry a mecca for people who take their food seriously enough to spend hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars for the multi-course meals that Keller creates.

But Keller insists on something more; diners give him as much as five hours of their time to appreciate his full-scale culinary production. Correspondent Lara Logan reports.

"You compared this experience to a Broadway musical. People don't go to a musical and tell them, 'Shorten this song. Shorten that song,' " says Logan.

"Right, right. You go to a Broadway play, a Broadway musical because you want to enjoy that experience," says Keller. "You want to have the whole experience, because that's the way it's intended."

Ruth Reichl, the editor of Gourmet magazine, still swoons over one of her first bites of Keller's food. "It was savory. It was soft. It was buttery. It was rich. And it had a flavor like nothing that I've ever experienced before," says Reichl. "And when I tasted that, I thought, 'This is one of the most amazing things I've ever had in my mouth.' "

Reichl says Keller is creating performance art, composed of hundreds of unlikely combinations of intricate tastes: "When you get a whole series of these little tastes, you aren't just having a meal. What you're having is an experience. What you're having is theater of the mouth."

It is a carefully orchestrated piece of participatory theater, with Keller at center stage. Before the curtain rises, the chef briefs his cast.

Tonight, he's extolling the virtues of the white truffle, the rare wild mushroom that costs $2,000 a pound. He encourages the waiters to sing its praises. The staff reviews its lines and readies its costumes. These young men and women are hired for having just the right stuff, part of what Keller calls finesse, a word that he's fixed over the entranceway of the kitchen.

"Thomas always says you, kind of, have it or you don't," says Laura Cunningham, who is in charge of service and style in the dining room. She's even gone so far as hiring a ballet dancer to choreograph the movements of her wait staff, down to every last detail. "Their body language, their voice, their eye contact, how they stand. … Their kind of inner passion, their heart … their finesse."

Keller first met Cunningham just over 10 years ago, when she knocked on his door looking for a job shortly before The French Laundry opened for business.

"There's this beautiful woman standing there with her resume, saying, 'Do you need any help?' You know, I was stunned. I don't know what I said. It was probably something stupid and closed the door," says Keller.

What was Cunningham thinking when Keller walked away? "I think I was thinking, 'Jerk,' " recalls Cunningham.

But it wasn't long before she succumbed to his unique charms. During their early days together, did Keller ever cook for Cunningham? "Every night, every night," says Keller. "And we would have dinner upstairs in one of the dining rooms."

"Did you try to seduce her with food?" asks Logan.

"Always, always," says Keller. "What better way to seduce than food and wine?"

The two now live just steps from the restaurant that brought them together. Keller says great cooking comes from the heart. He's had no formal training. He spent years moving from kitchen to kitchen in this country and working as an apprentice in France, before finally creating the style of cooking and presentation for which he has become famous.

"The food has a foundation of French cuisine. Very strong classical influence. We take that and we're inspired by that and the inspiration turns to interpretation and that evolves," says Keller. "And that's what's called personality cuisine and that's Thomas Keller cuisine."

Keller has designed his kitchen down to the smallest detail, from custom-made stoves to refrigerators that keep every type of food at their ideal temperatures. But he says that's not what's behind his success.

"I think it's all about execution. You and I can have the same quality of staff. We can have the same quality of kitchen," says Keller. "But if I can execute the dish better... It really goes back, even beyond that. It goes back to the quality of the product. If I can get a better quality product than you can, then I'm a better chef."

Keller prides himself on using the very best products. His preferred butter comes from only a few very pampered cows that live in Vermont. The finished product arrives fresh every week, along with lobsters from a certain spot on Penobscot Bay in Maine. And the mushrooms are just harvested from the wilds of the California mountains. Keller even picks some of his own produce from a garden right across the street from the restaurant.

"It's the stuff of legend," says chef and author Anthony Bourdain, who says Keller's colleagues regard him as a purist.

"Chefs love talking about his standards and the way he has his cooks approach a fish, for instance. A raw fish, the way it has to be handled. You kind of approach it. Address the fish. It has to be stored in the upright, swimming position. No shortcuts, I mean. This is pretty maniacal stuff."

But behind the maniacal stuff is a scientific explanation.

Keller says his practice of handling food with such respect, even reverence, stems from the traumatic experience he had the first time he tried to butcher a rabbit.

"I reached into the cage. And, unfortunately, I didn't get both legs," says Keller. "Big mistake. And I was holding onto one and, of course, it snapped. And it broke its leg, and the rabbit screamed. It was a terrible sound. It was a moment in my life that changed everything, the way I think about food."

What did he do? "I killed the rabbit and slaughtered the other ten. And then, of course, you know, after that, I wanted to make sure I was extra careful, making sure that I used every bit of that rabbit, and didn't make a mistake," says Keller. "If I was going to be a cook, if I was going to be a chef, if this was going to be my life, that had to be something that I had to not only participate in, but do it in a way that was proper."

"And you apply that lesson now to everything?" asks Logan.

"I try to apply it to everything," says Keller. "And that's why when we make a mistake with any food, you know, it just drives me crazy."

Keller also demands a nearly surgical environment in his kitchen. He cleans obsessively, the compulsion of a man for whom spotlessness is next to godliness, a lesson he learned from his mother, who first introduced him to kitchen life. She managed a Florida restaurant while raising him and four older brothers on her own

"I don't even think I had a job," says Keller. "It was just come here to the restaurant and stand on this milk crate and wash these dishes and that was extraordinary experience."

"Most people would consider that a nightmare job, washing dirty dishes," says Logan.

"I looked at it as something that was very gratifying, you know, to be able to complete a task, and to complete it successfully, and so many times," says Keller. "It really encouraged me to continue on. If washing dishes can be so gratifying, what is cooking about?"

Over the years, Keller's earned a reputation for refusing to compromise, and he's become a tough taskmaster for aspiring chefs from around the world who flock to his kitchen.

On this night, the young cooks are left in no doubt that he is not happy with the way they have prepared the risotto.

"You have to be driven. You have to be focused. You have to be aware. You have to be a part of the team," says Keller, who adds that you don't expect anything of them that you don't expect of yourself.

When he's not cooking, Keller supervises the chefs at other restaurants he owns, including two bistros called Bouchon, one down the street from The French Laundry; the other in Las Vegas, where high rollers come for state-of-the-art steak frites. His most recent project is a new temple of fine dining in Manhattan, called Per Se, where you have to wait two months to get a reservation. The pressure to keep all of his restaurants up to standard is unrelenting.

"When you're cooking at his level, every single plate that goes out could be the end of your career," says Bourdain. "Three of the wrong people at the wrong time in your bar, casually saying, 'This place is not what it used to be' or 'This place is so last week,' can really hurt you."

But the harshest critic Keller usually faces is himself. "I guess the main source of stress for me is the stress I put on myself," he says.

"Because you're always pushing yourself to do better," says Logan.

"Or more," says Keller.

"Or more," says Logan. "And you are a perfectionist by nature."

"I strive to be a perfectionist by nature," says Keller.