The French Laundry’s bong course is a brilliant act of artistry
Midway through a weeknight tasting-menu dinner at the French Laundry, a server wheeled a slim side table up to mine and walked away, leaving me and my dining companion perplexed. Were they going to cut something up table side, like Peking duck? Would the sommelier come by to play three-card Monte with us? I thought I knew what to expect when I walked in: This moment of apprehension was almost refreshing. Fool that I was, even then I didn’t think the kitchen could surprise me all that much.To get more news about
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That’s when they brought out a glass bong, a foot-long round-base number with rivulets along its tube and a sea of blue and green swirls at its base. The kind you use to smoke drugs. Plumes of white smoke poured out of it as it stood high, with the kind of boldness that I’m terrible at faking when I walk into rooms like this one. That shouldn’t be here, I thought, feeling the curious gazes of the fancy folk who’d paid good money and donned blazers — as per the dress code — to earn their places in the dining room that night. They didn’t get a bong.
When Pete Wells reviewed Per Se, he compared the mushroom bouillon to dirty bong water,” the server said as he pulled the bowl and stem out of the instrument with the same flourish he’d surely use to uncork a bottle of wine. “So this is a play on that review.”
He winked at us as he poured porcini mushroom broth — indeed, the color of rancid bong water — into my bowl. I marveled as it cascaded over the vegetarian “pot-au-feu” of carrots, oxheart cabbage and a layer of leeks wrapped around black winter truffle confit, made to look like a beef bone. It was a brilliantly executed in-joke.It’s fascinating to think about how Keller, a famously careful and perfectionist chef, that classic swan gliding effortlessly through the water while its feet churn underneath, metabolized the stress from Wells’ review of Keller’s Per Se in Manhattan. It would be easier to just let go of the past: to put bad memories aside and assure yourself that history won’t repeat itself.
But for him to parade those memories in front of people — in front of a critic! — is a much braver tack. It comes off as a subtle tugging at his collar: a moment of chaotic energy to show that he’s learned from his mistakes.
