Michael Minnillo, the general manager of the French Laundry, the chef Thomas Keller’s elegant restaurant in Yountville, Calif., had just sabered open a bottle of Dom Pérignon, leaving the eyes of the teenagers wide. This was a celebratory meal for two of them, who had spent the semester at a nearby art school, a rare splurge to commemorate their studies and a chance to show family and friends what it is the old man does for a living, snooping around restaurants, considering the delicious.
A server glided past Minnillo to place some glistening wafer sandwiches on the white-clothed table. “These are Ritz crackers, essentially,” he said as Minnillo poured Champagne for the adults. “With caramelized shallots.” They shatter-melted into our mouths, salty against the intense allium sweetness of shallots enhanced by Cheddar and crème fraîche. Eyes went wider. No one in our party of five had been expecting what were essentially grandma canapés here at one of the most formal and inventive restaurants in the United States, and no one, least of all the teenagers, had been prepared for the experience of eating one. There was silence at the table as we ate, followed by laughter. My eldest looked at me and said, “I think this meal is going to be fun.”
And it was. We had little cups of crème de champignons that bolstered feelings of home — “Our version of Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup,” the server said — and tiny ice cream cones of fluke tartare and crème fraîche that did not. There was the restaurant’s famous dish of oysters and caviar in a tapioca sabayon, as well as nuggets of king-crab tempura; delicate roulades of Dover sole; poached eggs with celery-root purée and soubise served below shaved white truffles. We ate Parker House rolls with sweet butter and a choice of salts, and duck with collard greens and beautiful sweet carrots. There was charcoal-grilled Wagyu beef and bordelaise sauce; then gougères with more truffles and on to dessert: 18 courses of food in all, not counting those delicate little crackers that started the meal.
But it was the crackers that stuck with us longest, that we talked about, again and again, in the days following the meal. It is a condition of my employment that when a dish does that, I try to make it at home. And so on a recent evening, I caramelized shallots and mixed them with the cheese and crème fraîche, a splash of sherry vinegar, a dash of hot sauce, then spread them onto actual Ritz crackers and heated the resulting sandwiches in the oven before painting them with melted butter and preparing for transportation back to Napa County in our minds.
And they were pretty good! But making home-cooked food into restaurant food and then returning it to the home turns out to be more of an equation than a conjuring spell. After all, magic in the world of food is often situational. So while we’ll always remember those crackers at the French Laundry, what we’ll remember about making them at home is the dinner that followed: a simple sausage risotto that, in its way, offered the same transporting delight of our meal at the restaurant. It is a dish that you really ought to try yourself, on one of these dark winter nights when all anyone wants to do is stand around the stove, stirring and talking, waiting to eat.
The recipe was, after a fashion, my youngest daughter’s. A friend from school made her the dish a few weeks earlier, and she wanted me to make it for her myself, off her memory of the meal. And so I stood at her side, asking questions, taking direction, stirring onions and Arborio rice together with butter until they were translucent, then adding strong chicken stock to the mixture slowly, serially, with endless stirs of a wooden spoon, until the risotto achieved that melting tender consistency the Italians call all’onda, or wavy. We folded grated Parmesan into the pot and topped the whole thing with crisp, crumbled sweet sausage, a drift of parsley and a squeeze of lemon juice against the heft. The result was as incredible as anything a restaurant can provide. There was that silence again while we ate, before the old familiar laughter pealed.
Recipe: Risotto With Sausage and Parsley
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