Los Angeles Times: Before that French Laundry, there was Sally Schmitt’s French Laundry
by Daniel Miller
PHILO, Calif. — Chef Sally Schmitt remembers the French Laundry.
She remembers the clam spaghetti and blanquette de veau she served on opening night.
She remembers her late husband, Don Schmitt, opening bottles of wine, tending to the blaze in the fireplace and chatting with guests, an amiable host.
They are memories of her French Laundry. Not that French Laundry — the one you are almost certainly thinking of, the three-Michelin-starred restaurant helmed by renowned chef Thomas Keller.
The Schmitts opened the French Laundry in 1978 in a former Yountville, Calif., steam laundry originally built as a saloon, and ran it for 16 years.
“They opened this restaurant in a town that was kind of a backwater,” said Michael Bauer, who covered food and wine at the San Francisco Chronicle from 1986 to 2018. “She created quite a sensation ... it was pretty revolutionary.”
In the late 1970s, Napa Valley was shedding its identity as a rural outpost and embracing its potential as a high-end culinary destination, with the French Laundry front and center. The Schmitts, “along with Chez Panisse, probably shaped the whole Bay Area dining scene for decades” with unfussy food that, owing to their restaurant’s set-menu format, required diners to trust Sally’s French-inflected, California-influenced taste, Bauer said.
“I didn’t have a mission,” Sally said recently from her favorite armchair in her cozy living room when asked about the philosophy behind her cooking. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything to the world about simple, fresh, local food. It was just the way I cooked. I didn’t really have a statement to make. I just put food on the table.”
But it was a statement. Especially at the time.