We are celebrating Women in Ag & Culinary. Sally Schmitt was one of the greats.
“Before that French Laundry, there was Sally Schmitt’s French Laundry” , LA Times Daniel Miller, 2/21/20
The Schmitts opened the French Laundry in 1978 in a former Yountville, Calif., steam laundry originally built as a saloon, and ran it for 16 years.
“They opened this restaurant in a town that was kind of a backwater,” said Michael Bauer, who covered food and wine at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 2018. “She created quite a sensation ... it was pretty revolutionary.”
In the late 1970s, Napa Valley was shedding its identity as a rural outpost and embracing its potential as a high-end culinary destination, with the French Laundry front and center. The Schmitts, “along with Chez Panisse, probably shaped the whole Bay Area dining scene for decades” with unfussy food that, owing to their restaurant’s set-menu format, required diners to trust Sally’s French-inflected, California-influenced taste, Bauer said.
“I didn’t have a mission,” Sally said recently from her favorite armchair in her cozy living room when asked about the philosophy behind her cooking. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything to the world about simple, fresh, local food. It was just the way I cooked. I didn’t really have a statement to make. I just put food on the table.”
But it was a statement. Especially at the time.
Despite all of this, what happened after the restaurant changed hands in 1994 was on another level. Keller’s re-imagining of fine dining there was a revelation. Under Keller, the French Laundry, where the nine-course chef’s tasting menu costs $350, became a restaurant with global gravitational pull, a must-visit for food obsessives.
📸 Mariah Tauger / Los Angeles Times)
Read the rest of the article here ⬇️
https://www.latimes.com/food/story/2020-02-21/la-fo-french-laundry-memories
#wdom2022 #woodlandca #visityolo #experiencewoodland #dowoodland #farmtofork #letsgetbacktoit
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