Clean clothes

Years in the planning, months in the organising... I finally ate a meal with my dear friends Tanya and Dan at Thomas Keller's French Laundry.


This place has an intimidating reputation. A very good reputation. Many of their ingredients are grown on site:


Staff can bee seen scurrying from the kitchen, secuteurs in hand to harvest from the surrounding gardens. Slight Faux pas... I didn't bring a jacket. So they lent me one. lol.

Insisted on it. How cute.

OK. After that I wasn't going to make a fool of myself snapping away at every plate served up to our table during the 4 hours it took to have lunch. So I will summarise; we had around about 9 courses along with several rounds of amuse bouches, two bottles of wine and finished up with ports and other sweet stickys.

It was wonderfully good. So good in fact that I lost track of what I ate... But I know I have never eaten better.

To be completely honest, I have eaten almost as good elsewhere, at a much more affordable rate. However, as I was pondering this very weighty matter sometime after the 7^th course, it occurred to me that that's hardly the point and certainly not worth considering whilst in situ. Then dessert won me over. It's not that it was really good, which it really was. It's that it never seemed to end. Wave after wave of smaller and more instense servings turned an epic and ultimately indefensibly indulgent meal into something more.

It was symphonic.