Planet Gray: At Lespinasse in 1996, Kunz's multicultural genius triumphed over chintz and chandeliers.   (Photo: Gray Kunz)

He entered the world where cuisine and glamour meet in the early eighties as the chef at Raoul’s, a landmark among the first generation of hip eateries in renascent Soho. After Raoul’s, Keller joined the staff at the Westbury Hotel, working under Daniel Boulud, who recalls him as a very buttoned-up young cook, “boom, boom, get the job done, like clockwork.” From Boulud’s kitchen, Keller moved on to Taillevent in Paris, a Michelin three-star restaurant equally famous for its hospitality and its food. Those lessons were not lost on Keller at his next major adventure, a partnership with Raoul’s owner Serge Raoul: the spacious and pricey Rakel—“Ra” as in Raoul and “Kel” as in Keller—which was located on Varick Street. His sous chef there, Tom Colicchio, remembers splashing beet juice onto a plate so that it would spatter with a Jackson Pollock effect (it ruined many white aprons). Keller’s food was as high-flying as the stock market—until Wall Street tanked on October 19, 1987. By 1990, Rakel had downscaled to a mid-range bistro, causing Keller, who wanted no part of that, to leave Rakel and New York. His next real job (not counting a short stint as a consultant, which he has compared to streetwalking) was as executive chef at the trendy Checkers hotel in Los Angeles. There, he says, “I came to understand that the words executive and corporate never belong next to the word chef.” The arrangement was short-lived.

Kunz, during the same period, was on the express track. Near Lausanne, Switzerland, he cooked for five years in the illustrious kitchen of Fredy Girardet. From there he moved on to the Regent Hotel in Hong Kong, where he picked up passable Chinese while mastering yet another cuisine. “When I left there,” he says, “I felt as comfortable with the Chinese palate as with the French.”

It was in New York, though, that he became an international star. After earning good notices at the Peninsula hotel, where he went in 1988, Kunz was approached by the management of the St. Regis hotel. Eager to draw the Concorde crowd, they offered him carte blanche to cook whatever he wanted, whatever the cost, as long as it attracted the most passionate and free-spending clientele.

Almost from the moment he took the job in 1991, word got out that Lespinasse was the place. It was modern and exciting, despite the froufrou décor, with waiters in uniforms that could have been lifted from a luxury dayliner on Lake Geneva. But even with universal acclaim and a lot of money (he was said to be the highest-paid chef in the city), Kunz increasingly felt like a frustrated employee. He wanted to strike out on his own. “I don’t care if they paid me a million dollars,” he says, “it wouldn’t have been enough.”

He is characteristically mum beyond that statement, but it seems that what rankled was the idea that his reputation was somehow compromised by being a hotel chef—which gave him an unfair advantage over unsubsidized chefs who had to make both the food and the rent. Kunz, who trained in a strict hierarchical system where the chef was absolute monarch, was equally stymied by the fact that at Lespinasse, because of union rules, he couldn’t even fire a dishwasher who flipped a chinga tu madre at him, much less discipline an insubordinate headwaiter.

“What I did at Lespinasse,” says Kunz, “I want to do at Café Gray, just not truffled up.”

While Kunz’s star was fast rising at Lespinasse, Keller was out in Los Angeles, a chef without a kitchen, living catch-as-catch-can. Then, as he tells the story, “one day in early 1991, I was driving up Route 29 in Napa and I stopped in to see my friend Jonathan Waxman, who had a place called Table 29. He told me there was a restaurant for sale I might want to look at. I went there, saw the French Laundry, and somehow knew it was the place I was looking for all my life, and not knowing it until I saw it. I remember thinking, Yeah, this is home.”

He returned to L.A., where he compiled a microscopically detailed 300-page business plan while living on his credit cards. He charged $5,000 to hire Bob Sutcliffe, a lawyer with connections in the food business, who would help him raise the money to buy the place. Keller was looking for 48 small investors to pony up a total of $600,000, which Keller matched in bank loans.

The French Laundry made money its second year, 1995—“that is, if you think a profit of $672 in our second year qualifies as making money,” Keller says. Since October 29, 1997, the day Ruth Reichl wrote in the New York Times that the French Laundry was “the most exciting place to eat in the United States,” the reservation book has been 100 percent filled.

Meanwhile, in New York, Kunz was about to depart from Lespinasse. At first, the phone rang incessantly with proposed deals. I was spending a lot of time with him then, collaborating on a cookbook, and though we might be sitting on a park bench in Cobble Hill eating Krispy Kremes, he’d always answer the cell phone with the formality of a concierge at a five-star hotel: “Hello, this is Gray Kunz speaking, may I help you?”

But the deals never jelled. In 2000, he was a whisker away from signing a lease with the reclusive landlord William Gottlieb when Gottlieb dropped dead, leaving about a hundred buildings in limbo, Kunz’s space among them. He had several other deals in the works a year later, when 9/11 happened and threw a pall over everything. Dispirited, he wondered if he could ever work in New York again.

What distinguishes Keller and the restaurant that he and his general manager, Laura Cunningham (his girlfriend of nearly a decade), have built? Certainly, part of the answer lies in Keller’s perfectionist character. Michael Ruhlman, his collaborator on the best-selling French Laundry Cookbook, credits the chef’s “exploration of basic techniques and taking them to crazy levels.” Like having the cooks peel fava beans before they blanch them, an exceedingly laborious task, but one Keller believes is necessary to fix the green color of the beans. Equally left-brain is Keller’s kitchen dictum that “no liquid goes from one place to another without going through a chinois at least once.”

Obsessive attention to detail is one hallmark of Keller’s approach. It dovetails with his catechism of “respect for the ingredients.” For example, he decided some years back that fish should be stored with their dorsal fins facing up, as they do when they swim. “No one taught me that you should store fish this way,” he says. “One day it just dawned on me—if you have a round fish, you would never store it on its side. You’re stressing out the bottom fillet because you’ve got all that pressure on top of it. If you store it the way it swims, there’s no pressure on the meat itself.”

His kitchen is remarkably small, just 20 feet by 40 feet. There are very few obstructions hanging down, so that Keller, from his position close to the door to the dining room, can see all the plates. Equally important is that he is just a step away from the dishwasher, so that he can inspect what comes back unfinished. The quiet he insists on means he can always be heard and can hear everything.

Occasionally, as in all kitchens, especially those at this level, someone fucks up, and the chef will let his displeasure be known. First-time visitors often remark on these displays of temper. After a while you realize that this is the way all kitchens are, especially in the heat of battle. Keller expresses himself sotto voce but, if you are on the receiving end of his displeasure, fiercely. One night I watched as the new fish guy was having a little trouble keeping up. Keller walked over to him and said something. The kid tried to explain himself when Keller interrupted: “I talk, you listen. That’s the way it works. Got it?”

Where other chefs may try to maximize the complexity of each dish, Keller views the meal as a kind of gustatory epic with more acts than the Mahabharata. In his detailed service manual he writes, “All menus at the French Laundry revolve around the law of diminishing returns, such as the more you have of something the less you enjoy it. Most chefs try to satisfy a customer’s hunger in a shorter time with one or two main dishes. The initial bite is great. The second bite is fabulous. But on the third bite, the flavors lessen and begin to die.”

“Many chefs” he continues, “try to counter this deadening effect by putting many different flavors on the plate in an attempt to keep interest alive. In doing this, the focal point is often lost and the flavors get muddled . . . In five or ten small courses we try to satisfy your appetite and spark your curiosity with each dish. We want our guests to say, ‘God, I wish I had one more bite of that.’ ”