Next: French Laundry

Recently, D and I had dinner in Yountville without leaving home – at Next: French Laundry.

Next has done homage menus before – like El Bulli and Trio 2004 – but this is the first one where we’ve been to the real restaurant in question.  In fact, during my first visit to the French Laundry in the late 1990s, Grant Achatz was a chef there – though I didn’t realize it until now!

Dinner started with a parade of canapés: the famous salmon cornet, potato leek soup, shrimp and avocado salsa speared on a fork, blinis with peppers and bottarga, barbecued eel with sesame and yuzu, and black truffle custard served in an eggshell.

Blinis with peppers and bottarga

Black truffle custard

After the canapés, the table was set with a mother-of-pearl spoon so I knew what was about to arrive – oysters and pearls!

This is literally one of my favorite dishes ever, such a harmonious combination of tapioca pearls in oyster-scented sabayon, delicate poached oysters, and a generous amount of osetra caviar.

“Oysters and Pearls”

The rest of the dinner continued to parallel Grant Achatz’s first meal at the French Laundry in 1996: salad, fish, meats (rabbit and beef), and a composed cheese course, followed by sorbet, two desserts, and mignardises.  That classic flow of dishes – where you know exactly where you are in the meal – stands in a bit of contrast to the less traditional style of many tasting menus these days (like Alinea!), but to me, it still speaks of luxury.

Hawaiian hearts of palm

Pompano “Amandine”

Rabbit “Saddle”

“Pot au Feu”

Chaource

“Coffee and Donuts”

If you have a copy of the French Laundry cookbook, you can find almost all of these dishes there – just in case you’d like to try your hand at them.  (I once made the “Coffee” from our Coffee and Donuts dessert, which turned out better than I expected!)

It’s not a surprise that Next could impersonate TFL so successfully, given Grant Achatz having worked there and the support of Thomas Keller.  And it was delightful to spend a few hours in California!

Our most recent meal at the real French Laundry is here.