Sally Schmitt, Pioneer of California Cuisine and Trailblazing Woman Chef, has Died

Sally Schmitt, noted restaurateur, cooking teacher, and one of the earliest woman chefs in America died at her home in Philo, California on Saturday, March 5th, just five days after her 90th birthday. Hailed as a pioneer of California Cuisine, Sally was celebrated for her farm-to-table and locavore cuisine long before the terms were even coined.

Sally didn’t like to be in the limelight. During the years that she planned and cooked dinners at The French Laundry, the restaurant she and her husband Don founded in 1978, she refused to go into the dining room during service to receive compliments. But she made sure that the kitchen was open to anyone who wanted to come and talk with her. Many did, including the likes of Julia Child, Robert Mondavi, Richard Olney, Marion Cunningham, Joe Heitz, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, and Jeremiah Tower, who called her cooking “brilliant.”

Sally learned to cook early. Born February 28th, 1932, in Roseville, California, she grew up on a small Northern California homestead where one of her earliest memories was standing on a stool at her mother’s stove stirring the chocolate pudding. “The smell was intoxicating,” she remembered, “as was my awareness that I was responsible for it.” A good technical background came next with a degree in Home Economics from University of California, Berkeley. After her marriage to Don Schmitt in 1953, they moved to Fresno where Don worked in banking.

In 1967, with five children in tow, she and her husband Don moved to Yountville in the Napa Valley to manage the Vintage 1870 [now, the V Marketplace,] a historic winery converted to shops, galleries, and a café. Shortly after their arrival, with Don managing the tenants, Sally took over the running of the café. When she dared to suggest that the cook use romaine rather than iceberg lettuce, and shape the hamburger patties by hand instead of smashing them flat with a five-gallon can, he walked out and Sally’s cooking career began. She started with lunches, and soon lines were forming outside the door at noontime. Within three years, she had taken over an empty space at the Vintage and opened the Chutney Kitchen, a full-on restaurant with monthly Friday night dinners, each one a five-course, pre-fixe meal with accompanying Napa Valley wines, a new menu each month, planned and cooked from scratch by Sally using local, in-season ingredients. 

In 1974, she and Don bought a run-down old stone building, a former saloon converted to a laundry and then a boarding house, which they spent four years renovating before opening it as The French Laundry. They followed the pattern they had set with the Friday night dinners, serving one pre-fixe dinner a night. They never got around to putting up a sign outside, didn’t take credit cards, didn’t advertise, not even a yellow pages listing, and didn’t allow smoking in the restaurant, yet if you didn’t make a reservation months in advance, you didn’t get to eat Sally’s cooking.

In 1994 she and Don sold the restaurant to the young chef, Thomas Keller, to “retire” to an apple farm they had purchased in the Mendocino’s Anderson Valley. This turned into fifteen years of teaching her recipes and techniques to students who came from all across America as well as England and Ireland to study with her. 

When Don and Sally truly retired, they moved to a small cottage in the seaside town of Elk where Sally said she “had to learn to cook for two again.” Eight years later, they returned to the farm so they could be close to their family. She was immensely proud of her five children and their partners: Kathy (and Bill Hoffman), Johnny (and Marcus Magdaleno), Karen (and Tim Bates), Eric (and Melissa Schmitt), and Terry (and Debey Zito;) and she was equally proud of her ten grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. She said of her children, “None of them were college graduates, yet they are all leading successful, satisfying, artistically-oriented lives. And they all love to cook and eat well.” 

In 2017, Sally was preceded in death by her much beloved husband. Following the loss of Don in 2017, Sally went to work recording the stories and recipes she wanted to leave behind for her family and friends. Staying true to form, Sally made her departure once she finished what she wanted to do, but before she had to have the spotlight shine down on her. In it she wrote: “All in all, I really have done just what I loved to do, which has always been simply to cook good food for those I cared for. That’s what mattered. That’s all that mattered.” 

A private family celebration of Sally’s life is planned in the Spring. For those who want to contribute a remembrance in Sally’s name, she supported The Anderson Valley Health Center in Boonville.