Thomas Keller

About Thomas Keller

Thomas Keller (born October 14, 1955) is an American chef, restaurateur, and cookbook writer. He and his landmark restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, in the Napa Valley, have won multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation, notably the Best California Chef in 1996 and the Best Chef in America in 1997, and the restaurant is a perennial winner or top 4 finisher in the annual Restaurant Magazine list of the Top 50 Restaurants of the World. In 2005, he was awarded the highest, three star rating in the inaugural Michelin Guide for New York for his restaurant per se, and in 2006, he was awarded three stars in the inaugural Michelin Guide to the Bay Area for his restaurant The French Laundry, making him one of only two chefs in the world with two simultaneous three-star restaurants.

Born at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside, California to Edward, a Marine drill instructor, and Betty Keller, a restaurateur, Thomas was the youngest of five boys. Four years after his parents divorced, the family moved east and settled in Palm Beach, Florida. In his teenage summers, he worked at the Palm Beach Yacht Club, starting as a dishwasher and quickly moving up to cook. It was here he discovered his passion for cooking and perfection in a hollandaise sauce.

During summers when work was slow, he took cook's jobs in Rhode Island. One summer he was discovered by French-born Roland Henin and tasked to his Dunes Club to cook staff meals. Under Henin's study, Keller learned the fundamentals of classical French cooking. After the Dunes Club, Keller worked various cooking positions in Florida and soon became the cook at a small French restaurant called La Rive in the Hudson River valley in Catskill, New York. Thomas worked alone with the couple's grandmother as prep cook. Given free rein, he built a smokehouse to cure meats, developed relationships with local livestock purveyors, and learned to cook entrails and offal under his old mentor, Roland Henin, who would drop by on occasional weekends. After three years at La Rive, unable to buy it from the owners, he left and moved to New York and then Paris, apprenticing at various Michelin-starred restaurants.