French Laundry

About this property

The French Laundry is a three-Michelin star French and Californian cuisine restaurant located in Yountville, California, in Napa Valley. Sally Schmitt opened The French Laundry in 1978 and designed her menus around local, seasonal ingredients; she was a visionary chef and pioneer of California cuisine. Since 1994, the chef and owner of The French Laundry is Thomas Keller. The restaurant building dates from 1900 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1978. The building was constructed as a saloon in 1896 by a Scottish stonesman for Pierre Guillaume. A 1906 law outlawed the sale and consumption of alcohol in the area around the Veterans Home of California Yountville, and the building was bought in 1920 by John Lande who used it as a French steam laundry, which is the origin of the restaurant's name. In 1978, Sally Schmitt and her husband Don, a former bank appraiser and then-mayor of Yountville, purchased the building and renovated it into a restaurant. They kept the name, the French Laundry, because locals still referred to the building as such. The French Laundry was one of the first restaurants to offer what would become known as California cuisine. The Schmitts ran the restaurant for 17 years before selling it to Thomas Keller in 1994. In 1999, Keller published The French Laundry Cookbook, which he considers his definitive book on cuisine. That year it won three International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) awards for Cookbook of the Year, Julia Child "First Cookbook" Award, and Design Award. In July 2014, the Napa Valley restaurant celebrated its 20th anniversary with a six-hour feast for friends, locals, and luminaries and temporarily closed for renovations before the end of the year. In December 2014, while being temporarily closed for renovations, The French Laundry wine cellar was robbed of an estimated $500,000 of wine. Most of the wine was subsequently recovered. On April 7, 2015, the restaurant reopened following demolition of a number of buildings on the site. During the remainder of the renovation project, the staff worked out of a temporary kitchen. During the COVID-19 pandemic, The French Laundry closed and re-opened several times, and faced restrictions such as limited seating. In 2026, Keller staunchly opposed the construction of a 120-unit apartment building several blocks from The French Laundry, intended for workers in Yountville who had been priced out of the expensive housing in town. Keller argued that workers neither wanted nor needed the housing. Every day, The French Laundry serves two different nine-course tasting menus: the Chef's Tasting Menu and the vegetarian Tasting of Vegetables. Each menu is US$425 per person (including gratuity) for the base meal, although not including additional supplements such as caviar and truffles. During the winter holiday season, Thanksgiving, Halloween, and other holidays, the restaurant may offer special dishes.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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