While the attractions were obvious to Keller the entrepreneur, they were also clear to Keller the chef. The soaring space afforded Keller the chance to build a dream—so, little surprise the venture cost more than $12 million to build. The white-tiled kitchen—acknowledged by the staff as the most antiseptic any of them had ever seen—stretches out over 5,000 square feet, nearly three times the size of the French Laundry’s kitchen and almost as big as the dining room itself. In this context, Keller seems like a fine-dining equivalent of Willy Wonka, having designed himself a private culinary fantasyland. Keller commissioned a special sink just to cook lobsters, fed by a hose streaming water at precisely 185 degrees. There is a room just for chocolate, maintained at a perfect 62 degrees.

All this outsize effort stands in stark contrast to the minimalism of the Keller culinary approach, influenced by Japanese kaiseki dining—tiny portions served over the course of very long meals—and grounded in the law of diminishing returns: With a traditional meal, the first bite is likely to be more spectacular than the second, and so on. Not so at Per Se, where a tour through Per Se’s $150 tasting menu can stretch out over four hours and nine petite, if dazzlingly intricate, courses. None of them lasts long enough on the table to grow ordinary. Keller’s trademark “Oysters and Pearls”—pearl tapioca with Island Creek oysters and Iranian osetra caviar—segues into Moulard-duck foie gras au torchon. Each meal becomes a life cycle of its own, a journey with unexpected twists and turns, except that in this life cycle, there is no routine, there is no tedium. Each moment has been shaved down to its climactic essence, and each climax is then fused to another, then another.

Needless to say, the approach complicates the choreography in the kitchen. “Most restaurants, for the VIPs, they’ll send over a drink or a dessert. We do an entirely different menu,” Corey Lee explains. “They’ll get six canapés and ten courses. You’re talking about, potentially, 40 different dishes on one table.”

Keller maintains a crisp, military sense of order in the kitchen. The hierarchies are rigid. Keller is addressed only as “Chef.” During one recent dress rehearsal, Keller has handed the truncheon of authority over to his second-in-command, chef de cuisine Jonathan Benno, who is expediting orders with the fierce urgency of an artillery field commander.

“Fire two halibut!” Benno barks.

“Fire two halibut!” the chefs on the line briskly answer in kind.

“Some nights you go home and think, Why am I doing this?” says Keller. “But I can only beat myself up so much.”

Before long, Keller’s handover of authority will be of a more lasting nature. Over the coming months, Benno will serve as Keller’s eyes and ears for two weeks out of every four as “Chef” divides his time between Per Se and the French Laundry. Benno is one of eighteen staffers imported from Yountville, ensuring a certain level of security for Keller (the real-time video hookup between the kitchens on both coasts should help, too).

“We’re both obsessive—about cleanliness, organization. That’s the biggest similarity. I would say there’s probably a clinical term for it,” Benno says, while whipping up scrambled eggs in a nearly empty Per Se kitchen early one morning. Pensive and vaguely abbotlike in bearing, Benno launched his culinary career, improbably, at the Hard Rock Cafe in Honolulu before turning serious about his craft and entering the Culinary Institute of America. Upon graduation, Benno, now 34, moved to San Francisco and jumped at the chance to join in Keller’s big venture in Napa.

Now here he is. He’s unassuming, largely unknown, and pledged to command the most scrutinized kitchen in America. “I’d be lying,” Benno admits, “if I told you I didn’t have butterflies in my stomach.”

The late-afternoon sunlight comes in low over the treetops of Central Park, beaming through those huge windows and glancing off the polished brass floor near Per Se’s entrance. It’s Friday, April 30, and Keller’s taking a brief respite before launching into tonight’s dinner, one last dress rehearsal before the grand (re)opening tomorrow night. The day after that, it’s back to California, ready or not. “On Monday, we have orientation at French Laundry,” Keller says, a bit wearily. Suddenly, he faces the unimaginable distinction of opening not one but two hugely anticipated restaurants, each on opposite coasts, each within fifteen days of each other. “Some nights you go home and think, Why am I doing this? I was at the French Laundry three years ago, and everything was perfect. Why am I here now? The answer is, that’s the way I am, what I am. But it’s like Fight Club. I can only beat myself up so much. Let’s face it, it’s all my doing.”

And even at the worst moments, Keller says he hasn’t forgotten why he’s doing it. “The first direction I gave Adam Tihany was that I wanted a timeless restaurant, something that in 25 years is going to be just as beautiful as it is today, like The Four Seasons,” Keller says. “You look at the great restaurants around the world, it’s not really about the chef anymore. It’s about building a legacy.”

He brightens at the thought. For a moment, those millions of maddening details seem to recede. “Do we need to be so critical about all of it?” he says chipperly. “Maybe we just need to have fun with it. At the end of the day, it’s just food and wine. It’s entertainment. It’s not brain surgery. At a certain point, you have no control.”

Or so says the entrepreneur. The chef would probably beg to differ.

Keller's Summer Recipes
Thomas Keller tweaks American classics, from chips and dip to Creamsicles, for a luxe meal you can make at home.

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• Archive: “Features”
• Articles by Alex Williams
• Table of Contents: May 24, 2004 issue of New York | Subscribe!