Meet Chef Thomas Keller | Williams-Sonoma

Hi, I'm Thomas Keller here in Yonfield, California, and I'm looking forward to chatting with you about our restaurants and some of our food products. I was a chef from Southern California, looking for my own place, and I found the French Laundry, and I fell in love with it. I bought it from a couple named Don and Sally Schmidt, who had started the restaurant in 1977. It was named because it was actually a French Laundry at the turn of the last century. There's a garden next to the restaurant, which I think is something that's very important, certainly today in our culture, and it's really about having the access of the products, the vegetables. But it's also about the interaction between the young cooks and the garden. What the result of that interaction is, is a heightened respect for food. And I think if our young chefs have that heightened respect for food, as they go continuing their career, it'll just compound, and they'll become better cooks, they'll become better stewards of the natural products that they're working with. I think it's every chef's responsibility to mentor and train the next generation. We have extraordinary products, we have an extraordinary facility, we have an extraordinary staff, and what we need to be able to do is finesse every last detail that we possibly can to make it that much better experience for our guests and for ourselves. And it's been a great, great experience. The genesis for the bakery was that we wanted to be able to bake bread for our restaurants. The bakery, as it relates to the retail shop, was an added amenity, if you will, for the community. We wanted to be able to offer to our friends and neighbors, people that came to visit us, an opportunity to have a really wonderful croissant or a great oatmeal cookie or a wonderful bouchon or things like this. And the actual memory of that, certainly as it relates to children, is something that's very important. To have a child come in and have their first taste of a chocolate chip cookie or a first bouchon or a really good croissant or even a good loaf of bread is something that is going to be with them throughout their life. And it's establishing those memories, those food memories, that are going to keep them interested in eating and eating well into the future. Ad Hoc was begun as a temporary restaurant, actually, but Ad Hoc became so popular that it was difficult to close. It really resonated with people, the family style, the casualness of it, the flavor profiles. I think that the products that we have worked so hard to create for William Sonoma are products that are indicative of this restaurant and a very good representation of this restaurant. So whether it's the fried chicken kit or the coleslaw dressing, these are things that we've developed hand-in-hand with William Sonoma to capture the flavors that we have here at Ad Hoc. I think William Sonoma and I have a common vision and certainly common goals and common values. And I think that one of those is quality. And I think we really share that search and that quest for high-quality products. We were always discussing what would be the best products to bring to the home cook. Fried chicken from Ad Hoc, for example, or the chocolate chip cookie from Bouchon, or even the shortbread cookie that we make at French Laundry that are made at, actually, Bouchon Bakery. Those are things that you can have, those things that you can buy at William Sonoma and go home and bake and have a little bit of yawn-fill. Cooking is really about bringing pleasure to people. We want to, as professionals, as people who are committed and dedicated to our craft, we want to do our jobs really, really well. But at the end of the day, it's about making somebody smile.