2016 May. Yountville, Napa Valley, California.

Thomas Keller’s The French Laundry in Yountville, Napa Valley is legendary and every foodie’s dream to dine and experience once a lifetime. Securing a reservation is almost impossible and there are websites teaching you how to up your chances. Basically you have to time exactly the hour/minute/second when they start taking reservation a month prior, and keep calling, regardless of the timezone you are in, then pray very hard that if the line ever gets connected, there is still a table opening. Clearly, I was the lazy bum riding on my dining companion’s hard work. 🙂

The experience was as perfect as it can get. Our lunch was exquisite, worthy of all the accolades and rave reviews. Fresh, flavourful, and delightful to the senses and tastebuds, with non of those pretentious molecular gastronomy gimmicks. World class indeed, extremely impressed! I am thinking the food is so wonderful, words alone would not do it any justice, so I will just let the photos do the work.

I quote this from the internet which summarised the experience succinctly – [“Consistently” “superior” standards continue to mark Thomas Keller’s fine-dining “nirvana” in Yountville, which “awakens the senses” with “soul-satisfying” French-American tasting menus paired with “amazing” wines and served with “formal” flair in a setting that “oozes class and sophistication”; the “otherworldly” “event” (“plan on three to four hours”) requires “scads of money” and scoring reservations can be “hair-raising”, but the payoff is an “astonishing meal” “you’ll remember the rest of your life.”].

Indeed. “This is not just food, this is priceless Art”. Oh, this line is from me, btw. 🙂