How to Cook Dinner for the World's Greatest Chef

How to Cook Dinner for the World's Greatest Chef


By: Ryan D'Agostino

With Thomas Keller's new cookbook, "Under Pressure," out this month, I invited him to my house. The only problem? He agreed.

A huge pot of potatoes languishes on the stove, untended. I don't know if that's bad — it seems like it would be, because they're already boiled, and now they're just macerating. I wonder if the water will break down the starch too much, although I don't know if that's bad or even possible, scientifically. The reason they're sitting in a hot puddle is that we, my brother, Mike, and I, don't have time to deal with them, because we haven't even started on the asparagus or the fish, and Thomas Keller, the greatest chef in the world, owner of restaurants including the French Laundry in Napa and Per Se in New York, which are always listed among the top five in the world, is supposed to be here in ten minutes. In Mike's apartment, with the windowless kitchen the size of a flight attendants' coffee station, for dinner. We're cooking for him. We're like a tribute band, and the real band is coming to see us perform.

Mike is at the sink in his boxers, sweating, hair flying, scrubbing bowls and pans like he's washing blood out of the carpet, and I'm thinking: You gotta be kidding me. Get in the damn shower.

I say this out loud.

And Mike says, "There's no way I'm letting Thomas Keller see my kitchen looking like this."

"But it's okay if he sees you looking like this."

"Well, maybe if you had been a little more organized..."

We do a little yelling. We're nervous. Men cook in one of two ways: Harvesting (throwing together anything in the kitchen that looks interesting), or Actually Planning (using recipes or making one of the few dishes we know cold). Keller has written a new cookbook, Ad Hoc at Home, that appears to combine both. And according to the publisher, it's very accessible. So I thought, Okay, Thomas Keller, if it's so accessible, I — an only slightly better-than-average home cook — will make dinner from it and serve it to you. And we all said, Ha, wouldn't that be funny if he came, what would I make, what if it was awful and all that, but of course he'll never come.

The thing is, he said yes, and so Mike and I stayed up until three last night, and we've been up since eight this morning, cooking. We planned a menu that was laughable in its ambition. We made lists, rough-chopped and diced, set timers, tried techniques that Keller made sound easy. (Page 56: "Hold a blowtorch about 1 inch from the roast and turn to lightly brown the fat on all sides.") We cooked foods men like: prime rib, clam chowder, pork belly, a whole fish, pickled vegetables, garlic mashed potatoes, brownies, ice cream. It would be a bounty. We felt like default ambassadors of the home-cook revolution, the chosen ones. We would amaze the great chef. But maybe we wouldn't! Maybe our amateur whacks at his precious food would depress him. Maybe this was an unnatural meeting, like if you went to confession and the man listening in the booth turned out to be the pope.

We were idiots!

He's going to be here in five minutes.

He's probably six foot four and pivots around the kitchen with a quick, fidgety grace. His hair is fingered straight back, and his head swivels atop a mantislike frame, eyes target-locked on the countertop and stove — he sees everything at once. We didn't know if he would just be a guest tonight, chatting with the other guests (we're eight in all), or jump into the kitchen. We hoped he'd jump into the kitchen, and he does. The scallops need to be cooked, and right away Keller is asking for a pan and oil and the scallops.

TK: Who is this singing?

Me: Ray LaMontagne. You like it?

TK: Yeah. Okay, let's see what happens with these puppies. [Loud sizzling as raw scallops are placed in pan of hot oil.] You can't be afraid. So many people, they drop it in from way back here [leans away from pan] and then the oil splatters everywhere, and they hurt themselves. If you get really close, it's not so bad. See that?

Keller bends his whole body in close over the pan. I've never seen anyone cook this way, interact with food this way, and it's a surprising thrill. I'm making paper airplanes with Neil Armstrong.

TK [flipping perfectly browned scallop]: Heyyy! Look at that. That is beautiful. You just need to be patient with this stuff. People think that when they're cooking, they have to be moving stuff around. Leave it alone. I mean, smell that. That's what I love about food: the transformation. These didn't smell before, right? Now they're everywhere, so sweet and beautiful. And it happens like that. [Snaps.] The transformation of food is so exciting.

Everyone has seen food cook, but I never thought of it this way. It was true: Suddenly the air was brackish and sugary, and it was as if he really couldn't believe how miraculous that was, even after all these years.

He asks me if I want to start putting the hot scallops on plates, so I look for tongs. I'm mumbling and drumming on my thigh with one hand, which I do when I'm nervous.

Me: Okay, yeah. Let's see, the tongs, the tongs ...

TK: Use your fingers, use your fingers, come on. Don't be a girl.

Keller speaks with cool authority, like an unusually laid-back football coach. I pick up the steaming scallops with the pads of my fingers, and right away I feel like a slightly better cook. As if by touching the food, I'm taking ownership of it, which I think is his point. The mollusks are plump and spongelike and scalding; I feel their tiny corrugations and crisped edges.

I'll never use tongs again.

Keller's arm is an atom smasher. He's stirring the mashed potatoes with a wooden spoon, and I can barely see his arm, it's whorling so fast. The potatoes, which I thought were already done, have become something otherpotatoly. They're starting to look like pudding.

"God, I love this," he says, breathing hard. "I could whip potatoes all day." He goes for five solid minutes, a long time at that intensity. Before he picked up the spoon, he opened the fridge and found a stray stick of butter on the top shelf and threw it in.

"Don't tell the girls," he said.

Keller jokes without laughing. He doesn't give nonessential advice. He asks a lot of questions, because he likes information. Information helps him not worry, adapt. Like, for example, I tell him I oversalted the corn. He shrugs. We don't serve it right away, but two hours later he says, "Where's that corn?" and uses it as a condiment on the fish, instead of salt.

We eat. Six courses. I watch Keller. He looks like he's concentrating, which I take to be something like reverence. During the meal he toasts both me and his restaurants. He tells stories, including one about the first time he killed a rabbit with his bare hands. When the playlist stops at one point, he calls to me, "Chef! Music." Everyone loves the food — each dish is the best version of that dish we've ever tasted. The bacon melts into the sweet, briny chowder like cream. ("If this chowder is any indication, it's a good cookbook," he says.) After the roast is carved, Keller passes around bits of crunchy, salty meat soaked in pan drippings, right off the knife. The brownies are the first I've ever baked and the best I've ever eaten — crunchy on top, then soft and moist.

He tells me no one has ever invited him for dinner and cooked from one of his books. He stays for four hours. You see why Keller loves this so much. It all matters to him — the smells, the music, the storytelling, the flavors. And you understand that measurements — while important for a cook like me — are training wheels. "If it calls for a quarter cup of chopped parsley, do you really need to measure?" he says. "Does it matter if it's an eighth of a cup?" After that, it becomes impossible to do something wrong. The way everything tastes will be the way it was supposed to taste.

He drops the best kind of advice and wisdom: the kind that sounds obvious but isn't. From his cookbook:

One of the great things about cooking is that no single task is particularly difficult.

If you could only have one pan in your kitchen, [a cast-iron skillet] is the one I'd give you.

From his mouth tonight:

The thing about mashed potatoes is, if they sit too long, we can add a little more cream. It'll bring them right back.

The guests can wait for the food, but the food can't wait for the guests.

Sorry, I'm always cleaning up. But that way when dinner's done, we can just go to sleep.

By the time the chef is in the elevator, we've opened a bottle of red wine he brought as a gift. We're already drunk on wine and on the night, but this seems the way to end it. My wife brings me the last spoonful of caramel ice cream from the kitchen. In the introduction to his book, Keller writes, "When we eat together, when we set out to do so deliberately, life is better, no matter what your circumstances." Cooking today, I followed every step meticulously. And then the man who had laid out those steps taught me to try to forget them, so that I could focus on the people eating the food. A breeze blows in as I drink the wine, and I realize that I never want to cook from a cookbook again, and yet I want to cook from this one for the rest of my life.