Thomas Keller's purebred lamb saddle with mixed mushroom conserva.
(ABC News)
Keller learned about cooking not from an expensive culinary education, but from a mentor, Roland Hennan, who, in 1977, taught him that being a chef is about nurturing.
"That really made the connection to me," Keller said. "Emotionally to what I was doing and from that day on I took this as my career and became very, very serious about cooking …You know, food, food to me is a vehicle to express an emotional, an emotional connection to somebody."
Today, Keller, a fan of In-N-Out burgers, fried bananas, and jelly donuts, now heads up a much-touted group of French-American restaurants and bakeries. Over the past decade he has won consecutive Best Chef awards from the James Beard Foundation, and Per Se, his triumphal 2004 return to New York, received three stars for three years in a row from the New York City Michelin Guide.
The ritual and repetition involved in owning a restaurant drew-in Keller, who loves "to repeat the same things everyday – around the same time everyday – and cooking is really about repetition doing it over and over and over again that's how you really get good at it."
That same love of repetition helped him develop his palette as well. He believes that continual exposure, not only to different food but also to the same foods, makes the taste buds more sophisticated.
"We all have reference points to food," he said. "If we take something as simple as mashed potatoes -- we all know a really good mashed potato and we all know a really bad mashed potato because we've had it so many different times. So those reference points are very important to us. Your experience and your exposure to food over and over again helps you understand what is good and what is bad."
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